Highlighting m-commerce growth, Amazon announced that it has sold more than $1 billion worth of products sold through mobile phones and devices such as the Kindle e-reader in the last 12 months. "The leading mobile commerce device today is the smartphone, but we're excited by the potential of the new category of wireless tablet computers," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement accompanying the company's release of second-quarter results. "Over time, tablet computers could become a meaningful additional driver for our business." For the quarter ending June 30, Amazon reported profit of $207 million, up from $142 million a year ago. Net sales increased 41% to $6.57 billion. Amazon earlier this week revealed that it is now selling more e-books than hardcover books. Over the last three months, the company has sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardbacks. And that rate jumped to 180 e-books or every 100 hardcovers in the last month. Amazon also said Kindle unit sales had tripled in the month since it cut the price on the e-reader from $259 to $189. Overall, it has sold three times the number of Kindle titles in the first half of 2010 than in the first six months of 2009. Apple's release of the iPad in April generated much speculation over whether the tablet device will end the Kindle's dominance in the nascent e-reader market. But since Amazon offers Kindle apps for the iPhone and iPad, it can still remain a major player in the e-books business regardless. That might explain Bezos' reference to tablet computers becoming a key part of driving its mobile business. A subtle nod to the iPad? Others see a continued future for the Kindle itself because of relative strengths against the iPad such as the ability to read in sunlight, longer battery life and being lighter. Amazon rival eBay said earlier this year it's aiming for $1.5 billion in mobile sales after racking up $600 million in 2009. In March it launched three new apps, including eBay Selling and eBay Classified. The online auction giant also launched a version of its primary eBay Mobile app for the iPad.
Univision Communications' digital division Univision Interactive Media has tapped video monetization technology company FreeWheel to manage its advertising business and monetize its digital video content. Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media, said the partnership was crucial to realizing the division's ambition in video plans. "We are working to significantly expand our video presence on the Web," he said. San Mateo, Calif.-based FreeWheel was founded in early 2008 by three DoubleClick alums and digital media veterans. The company offers content owners, carriers and distributors end-to-end video ad management technology, which simplifies the task of managing video ad sales, ad serving and ad sales rights across widely syndicated distribution channels. Other existing media clients include Turner, VEVO, CBS and MLB.com. By his own estimate, Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel, said Univision Interactive has the necessary content to become a major player in the video space. "Univision Interactive Media is in a fantastic position to grow its video offering," he said. Indeed, Univision Interactive already boasts a library of over 50,000 videos across its owned and operated properties, as well as across Web, mobile, and tablet devices. Today, more than two-thirds of Hispanic adults are online, with Internet penetration among Hispanics growing every year for the past five years. In the third quarter of this year, there were 9 million global visits to the home pages of Univision.com's social media properties, including Mi Página, forums, and chat. To date, FreeWheel has raised about $29 million. In April, the company closed another round of financing worth $16.8 million. New investor Steamboat Ventures -- a firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Company -- joined existing investors Turner Broadcasting System, Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital. Last year, FreeWheel signed more than 15 content providers, added 15 ad networks and distribution partners, and grew to 70 employees in San Mateo, New York and Beijing. In one instance, it established a partnership with Attributor Corp., a provider of content monitoring and monetization platforms. The alliance created a mechanism by which content owners and distributors could identify and monetize their user-generated video content. Attributor delivers content identification and an automated policy infrastructure that scales Web-wide for content owners. FreeWheel selects high-yielding packages of ads from the sales forces and ad networks that it knows are allowed to sell into a given piece of Attributor-identified content.
Female-focused media and ad network Glam Media on Friday announced the acquisition of ad-technology startup AdPortal -- a spinoff of sports-focused ad network Sportgenic. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Startup in hand, Glam also debuted an automated publisher-side platform for packaging digital advertising products across multiple channels. GlamAdapt for Publishers, so-called, is designed to help publishers sell more premium inventory through the creation, marketing, and measuring of sales packages. Samir Arora, chairman and CEO of Glam Media, described GlamAdapt as "a one-stop solution to Web-enable all digital inventory for existing and emerging demand sales channels." Per the deal, AdPortal founder and CEO Robert Tas will be joining Glam Media as vice president of the GlamAdapt Platform. "Our goal with AdPortal has always been to empower publishers to make the most use of their premium inventory, while making it easy for advertisers to get their message in front of the people they want to target," said Tas -- a former SVP of media and technology at 24/7 and one of the founders of Tacoda. AdPortal's San Francisco-based employees will join the Glam Media ad products team in Silicon Valley. Late last year, Glam said its flagship U.S. women's division had achieved profitability. In February, Glam raised about $50 million in a Series E round of funding. Aeris Capital led the round along with existing investors Hubert Burda Media's Burda Digital Holding and Mizuho Capital. The new funds were earmarked to build what Glam is calling a Digital Media Technology Center, along with global expansion and strategic acquisitions. Rumors of a forthcoming IPO were stoked when Glam hired Bruce Jaffe as CFO in May. Before leaving to run his own consultancy in 2008, Jaffe ran the corporate development group at Microsoft.
The economy may have come back from the brink, but demand for digital coupons appears to be picking up steam, according to new data released by Coupons.com. The company said savings from coupons printed out or loaded to a loyalty card from its online properties doubled to more than $1 billion from $529 million a year ago. The value of savings in June alone hit $110 million, the highest total to date for any single month via Coupons.com. That increase has come despite traffic to the site actually dropping in the last year from 18.2 million monthly visitors to 14.5 million. "We expect more brands and more consumers to increasingly adopt digital coupons, and we foresee substantial growth across the entire digital domain -- with particular growth within social media and mobile environments," said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com Inc., in a statement. Coupons.com pointed to other recent research indicating a continuing upswing for digital coupons including a finding from NCH Marketing Services that the Internet was the fastest-growing distribution vehicle for coupons during the first half of 2010. Furthermore, it pointed to data from Google Insights this month showing that searches for "printable coupons" increased 67% over a year ago. Separately, the number of digital print-at-home coupons is up 4% in the first half of 2010 compared to a year earlier -- despite coupon distribution overall being down 12%, according to coupon-processing company Inmar, which focuses on the consumer packaged goods category. Internet coupons still account for only 0.4% of all coupons distributed -- with free-standing inserts, or Sunday circulars, accounting for 88%. The Internet now accounts for 2% of coupon redemptions, says Inmar, but redemption of printable coupons is down 50% in the first six months of 2010. Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for Inmar, attributes the drop-off in part to the 308% increase in the year-earlier period. "You're coming off some pretty high numbers from a year ago," he said. He also noted that customers of Coupons.com and competing sites have shifted to saving discounts onto loyalty cards instead of printing out coupons. Both methods are included in the $1 billion total in redemption value that Coupons.com is reporting for the first six months of the year. The Web company's findings also underscore the surprising affluence of digital coupon users. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Coupons.com earlier this year found that people who print digital coupons have an estimated average household income of $96,000, 14% than the U.S average. Part of the reason could be that lower-income households don't have computers to retrieve and print coupons from. When it comes to product categories, women's apparel and shoes was the top coupon segment, followed by home and garden, men's apparel and shoes, toys and hobbies and computers and software. Geographically, users in Midwestern and Southern states were the most active digital coupon clippers, with Georgia leading on both the Web browser and via Coupons.com's mobile apps. The company says that the vast majority of coupons are printed (or saved to a loyalty card) on the PC-based Web compared to mobile apps.
It was with breathless excitement that most of the national media reported on Tuesday that Amazon, for the first time, is selling more electronic books to Kindle e-readers than dead tree versions sent through snail mail to people like, well, like me. This "tipping point" as the retailer inevitably called it is, according to CEO Jeff Bezos, "astonishing, when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years and Kindle books for 33 months." Although the press release was really a thinly disguised way to promote that iPad sales have not hurt Amazon's Kindle (nor has the drop in price), it struck a sad note for me as a book saver and proud librarian. I have been fortunate enough in my career to live at this stage in my life in a house with a family room that doubles as a library (so does the dining room, since it too is lined with bookshelves, and the guest room). There are thirty or so books in various piles in the bedroom separated in categories "to be read", "to resume reading," "to be moved to the family room library," and "to eternally gather dust because I can't remember why in hell I ever bought that one in the first place." This in no way makes me some kind of voracious reader or pointy-headed intellectual. I actually am a pretty slow reader. I like to tell my kids that I read slowly because my lips "get tired," but such elevated humor is lost on them, and in return I just get the slowly shaking head as they inch away from me in the direction of the closest electronic device. I had a Kindle for a short while but managed to read only one book before my wife, who had given it to me in the first place, borrowed it -- like your kids "borrow" $10. She has built a nice little electronic library, but if she wants one of the kids to read a book she liked, she has to give up the e book for the duration. When I want to recommend a book to one of my infrequently curious offspring, I grandly run my finger also the spines, pulling down title after title until their arms hurt from the load. I quickly judge others by the character of their bookshelves and often spend cocktail-party-chat-time examining the host's choice of books. Are they window dressing like saved college texts or faded inherited-from-parents volumes? Are they coffee table books cracked only the hour they were unwrapped for Father's Day? Is there way too much Sidney Sheldon and way too little James A. Michener? Where are Leon Uris and Thomas Keneally? What's up with all that Tom Clancy? OMG -- who would buy Jacqueline Susann in hardback? WHAT? no Jim Crace, Walker Percy or even, for god's sake, Dan Jenkins? If there are not extensive runs of history and biography or books about serial killers the owner loses major points. Too many celebrity books -- as "authors" or subjects -- also move you down the rankings. Self-help titles might send me snooping in the master bedroom medicine cabinet. Seeing books that are in my own library significantly raises the homeowner's esteem. Being a book buyer also solves the "socks or tie" dilemma relatives face on Xmas or my birthday. Credits to Amazon or a crisp new hardback are always welcome -- even, dare I say it, appreciated. I don't trust people who don't read books. I mean real ones where we can all see the title and what page you are on, instead of some electronic tablet that shares no secrets. "What are you reading?" is just not the same conversation starter as, "I LOVED that book!" I feel like I have more in common with two guys that read the same books that I do than folks I have otherwise known all of my life. It is like we are in a secret club. All we need are decoder rings. And four-star general caps. Real books can be a pain in the ass, especially if you have to travel and your current can't-put-it-down is +1000 pages. Only a coin toss can help you decide whether to pack the underwear -- or the book. Books are like cars -- the moment they leave the lot their commercial value diminishes. But never their ideas and stories. They are timeless. Perhaps electronic books will remain more affordable than dead tree books, and will find new audiences especially for great texts that now can be found mostly in the stacks of crumbling old libraries. But doing an electronic search to find your library it simply not the same as taking a title off the shelf and flipping through musty-smelling pages that seem a step or two closer to the author's typewriter or longhand notes. Thomas Jefferson wrote: "I cannot live without books." I think he meant the wisdom, concepts and ideas they convey. Me, I mean the books themselves.
Hardly a day goes by without something in the news about e-Readers. Last week, Amazon put a stake in the ground announcing that over the last three months, it sold 1.8 Kindle books for every hardcover it sold. The Wall Street Journal reported, in spite of the release of the iPad, Kindle sales accelerated in the second quarter and have tripled since its June price drop. Last week also marked the release of the Android e-reader app from Barnes & Noble, the big news being that it's branded as Nook instead of B&N; the announcement of two Sharp e-readers expected to launch in Japan later this year; and The New York Times-worthy news that the Wylie Agency would exclusively sell e-book editions of literary treasures including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint to Amazon. But as I sit in front of my Kindle reading Justin Halpern's hilarious, Twitter-feed inspired book "Sh*t My Dad Says," I can't help but think this all feels so quaint. I feel like I'm back in the third grade marveling at my amazingly cool Casio calculator watch. e-Books may become 50% of all book sales in five years, but I'd say it's just as likely that in five years, e-readers become as much a relic of 2010 hip as the Rubik's Cube is to 1980s style. The Kindle and Nook, and the collection of also-rans, from the Kobo e-reader to Sony's Touch and Pocket devices, have taken the age-old approach to new technology. They do just one cool thing, in this case present a digital environment for book reading, and that's it. Flip takes the same approach for video-it's just a video player, but a great one at that. Nintendo DS is similarly a great device for handheld gaming, but that's basically all it does. Single-use devices do wonders for technology adoption. They're easy to use, easy to understand, and easy for consumers to embrace. Then they're destroyed by mass-marketed devices that turn the entire product into a trivial feature of a broader, multi-use platform. And so it went with the demise of the calculator, Palm Pilot, fax machine and just about every other single-use piece of hardware. The iPad launch was the beginning of the end for e-readers. Steve Jobs recently bragged that the device captured 22% of the e-reader market since launch even though it's still generally dismissed as a device that's not friendly to reading. The iPad is heavy; the screen isn't great for reading; and it's expensive. But the iPad is going to get lighter. It's going to improve its screen resolution especially as iPhone's retinal display technology spreads to the device. And as more competition enters the tablet market, its price is going to drop. This fall, the iPad will be joined with a plethora of mass market Windows, Android and maybe even Chrome OS tablets, some of which will surely fall below a $200 price tag. Once this happens, consumers will be faced with a choice: e-reader or multi-use tablet that's just about as good for reading as a standalone device. The result? Kindle and Nook, meet the recycling bin. What can e-reader manufacturers do to maintain market share? Their options are limited. They can drop price. Many people think sub-$99 e-readers will be on the market this fall. But low prices eventually mark the demise of the business as all profits go away-even profits that are subsidized by future book sales. And no matter how low e-reader prices go, multi-use tablet prices won't be far behind. e-Readers can try to stay ahead of the curve and innovate to consistently be the best reading experience on the market. But we're talking about reading. Substantial evolution beyond what e-readers can do today will be tough. To survive e-readers will expand capabilities to become multi-use devices themselves and compete head-on with tablets. But that will a tough, uphill battle. My guess is that Jeff Bezos knows the Kindle is a fight he's going to lose. But he probably doesn't care. To him, the Kindle is a tool that locks consumers in to the Amazon ecosystem, so they're forced to buy more and more digital books from Amazon. In this scenario, the Kindle device could go away, but Kindle apps will live on forever as the bookstore of the future available on any screen. In this context, e-readers are just a marketing device to build bookselling market share. But Kindle won't be without heavy-duty competition-Google Editions and Apple are about to deploy their own strategies for e-book market dominance. So as we say goodbye to e-readers, we can also take a moment to mourn the loss of other loved but likely doomed dedicated technologies: digital cameras, digital video recorders, digital audio recorders, handheld gaming devices, automotive GPS systems, televisions, portable DVD players, and even the iPod. All you'll need is a screen for your hand, a screen for your lap, and a screen for your wall.