Amazon has reportedly acquired shopping technology startup Gopago. TechCrunch positions the would-be deal as a mobile play. “Italian newspapers are reporting that the e-commerce giant has acquired Gopago, a startup that offers consumers an iOS or Android mobile app to pre-pay for goods before picking them up at a store, and retailers a point-of-sale system to process those orders and more.” No word on acquisition price, if any, as yet. 

Instagram Direct is less than a week old, but Josh Constine is already betting on the messaging service to fail. “Convincing a userbase to break their ingrained behavior pattern and use an app for something completely different is a tough sell,” Constine writes in TechCrunch. “And it’s a lot tougher if that ‘something different’ is actually ‘something you can do elsewhere,’” he notes, referring to the many messaging services on the market, including the one already offered by Instagram parent Facebook. 

Satya Nadella is the head of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division, and, by some accounts, a contender for CEO when Steve Ballmer steps down. How does Nadella see the world? It’s all clouds and enterprise clients. Indeed, the expects the entire $2 trillion dollar IT market to move to the cloud. “The way we look at it is how do we become part of the fabric which is helping with this digitization of everything,” Nadella tells Quartz. “We have a pretty massive commercial business: 58% of our overall business is commercial.” 

It’s too early for an obituary, but Billboard.com believes the digital download’s best days are behind it. “The digital download hit middle age in 2013,” it reports. “The reason for the drop-off is a Web of interrelated stories that show new technologies affecting consumer behavior.” In particular, “Streaming services are changing the trajectory of digital sales.”  

Despite reports to the contrary, The New York Times is being told that AOL is planning to “dismantle Patch or perhaps sell it off to various partners.” In no uncertain terms, “the hunt to own the lucrative local advertising market, [AOL CEO and Patch founder Tim] Armstrong’s white whale, is over,” NYTimes declares. As Armstrong told the paper of record late Friday: “We’ve had to adjust based on the investor commitments that we have made.” 

It should come as a surprise to no one that consumers who own Kindles spend more on Amazon than those who don’t. “But the size of the disparity is pretty astounding,” AllThingsD reports, citing new survey data from research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. “Based on its research and analysis, CIRP estimates that Kindle owners spend $1,233 per year on Amazon, compared to $790 per year for Amazon shoppers who don’t own one of the company’s e-readers or tablets.” The findings should quiet critics of Amazon’s low margin tablet business. 

The next time Ashton Kutcher or Justin Bieber ask if they can throw their support behind your latest venture, Alex Wilhelm suggests thinking twice. Yes, rich and influential as they may be, the TechCrunch reporter doesn’t think celebrity investors translate to long-term success. “I now pretty much just expect the company involved with the celebrity to die,” Wilhelm writes. “Having celebrity cash, or having a celebrity executive can bring a certain glow to a company, and certainly greater press attention, but the impacts appear to be fleeting.” 

Contrary to some initial industry reactions, a change to Gmail this week will not impact marketers’ ability to measure open rates within Google’s email product. So The Swith’s Andrea Peterson insists. Rather, changes to the way Google is implementing its image caching system could lead to "more accurate" measurement of unique open rates. That’s “because under the previous system the subscribers who opened emails without displaying images were effectively invisible to marketers,” Peterson writes. 

Doing a little damage control, Twitter has pulled back on changes to its “block” feature. “The mass protest on Twitter was the first for Twitter as a public company,” the Los Angeles Times writes in reference to some upset users. The disgruntled users “said the changes to the block feature would encourage online abuse and harassment on the service,” the LATimes reports. “Many women, in particular, said they would no longer feel safe on Twitter, where they say they receive rape and other threats.” 

Yahoo Mail has become a dark cloud hovering over Marissa Mayer’s early tenure as head of the company. Many users were not happy with the service’s redesign back in October. Now, as AllThingsD reports, “The initial Yahoo Mail issues have turned into a full-scale disaster, with various outages that seem to be taking place across the network, impacting countless individuals and the many small businesses that rely on the service.”