Matching a recent move by Wal-Mart, Amazon.com has unveiled a new promotion on Research in Motion BlackBerry phones, giving buyers of certain models who sign up for new 2-year plans free $100 “e-gift cards.”
A self-described iPhone freak, designer Norma Kamali spends each morning reading the day’s headlines on her gadget’s current-events application. To unwind, she plays Scrabble on a game app. When her miniature dachshund Zeke acts up, Ms. Kamali looks up her iPhone’s encyclopedia on canine ailments.
The already intensively competitive wireless sector today finds itself with a tough new player: Wal-Mart. The retailing giant has teamed up with American Movil to sell low-cost service under the Straight Talk brand. The company is offering unlimited voice and text minutes for $45 a month, or 1,000 minutes and 1,000 text messages for $30 a month.
Wal-Mart was the victim of a serious security breach in 2005 and 2006 in which hackers targeted the development team in charge of the chain’s point-of-sale system and siphoned source code and other sensitive data to a computer in Eastern Europe, Wired.com has learned.
A recent shift in merchandising strategy by the world’s largest retailer spells more trouble for DVD sales and the entertainment industry that depends on them for profits.
As part of a larger effort to clean up its aisles and appeal to higher-end shoppers, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is doing away with display cases to promote the latest hot movie titles.
Call it innovation on steroids. Or innovation at warp speed. Or just the innovation of rapid innovation. But the essential point remains: Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds–and prices–that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond.
When Wal-Mart announced in 2008 that it was pulling down the DRM servers behind its (nearly unused) online music store, the Internet suffered a collective aneurysm of outrage, eventually forcing the retail giant to run the servers for another year.
Ebay has a problem: It’s viewed as a quirky second-hand bazaar.
There’s an old debate in the Valley about whether Google is really a media company or a technology company. In a sense, it is a silly debate, which is mostly a matter of semantics. A better question is this: Now that Google has become one of the world’s largest media companies, at least as measured by advertising dollars, what does it do next?
Best Buy shares are getting a boost this morning from a bullish note by Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew Fassler, who added the stock to his firm’s Conviction List. Fassler had upgraded the stock to a Buy rating in early January. He has a price target on the stock of $33.
Fassler expects the company to benefit from the demise of rival Circuit City.
ComScore last night published its statistics of U.S. visits to shopping Web sites from home and work, and found that Apple and Amazon had the biggest jump in unique visitors for the period from Nov. 1 to Dec. 23. (Dec. 23 is selected by comScore as the last day shoppers could buy online with hopes of getting deliveries in time for Christmas.)
It would appear that Wal-Mart’s lawyers need to come up with excuses to keep billing Wal-Mart every year around this time. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart employees admit that sites posting “Black Friday Ads” help drive more business, Wal-Mart’s hired guns keep threatening sites for posting the ads, falsely claiming a copyright on the content (hint: you can’t copyright prices).
Flagler Productions, a video production company in Kansas that spent years as Wal-Mart’s corporate archivist, is now selling access to thousands of hours of candid footage of Wal-Mart execs talking about the business’s dirty secrets. Wal-Mart fired Flagler, and gave them a lowball offer of $500,000 (7,33€) for the archive. Instead, Flagler is now selling access to the archive to researchers (mostly union organizers and plaintiff-side lawyers suing Wal-Mart) for $250/hour.
Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than 10 bucks. And the nation’s largest retailer–which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of goods last year–usually gets its way. Suppliers who don’t accede to Wal-Mart’s “everyday low price” mantra often find their products bounced from the chain’s stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.
Yet another example of bricks-and-mortar scale not translating to online sales power and of grand plans deflating. Reuters reports that Wal-Mart, one of the largest sellers of DVDs, shut down its same-day-as-DVD video download service, citing Hewlett Packard’s decision to discontinue the service that powered it. The plug was pulled Dec. 21, far more quietly than the movie/TV download service began in February. No download details but you have to think if the service was successful, Wal-Mart would have found a new vendor to keep it going.
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