Amazon’s MP3 Store On Hiring Spree, May Be Planning Major Relaunch

When it comes to buying music online, there’s iTunes, which is ahead by a mile, and then there’s everyone else. According to a recent report published by Billboard , iTunes accounts for 26.7% of US music sales, making it the top ranked music vendor in the United States, including physical retailers like Walmart and Best Buy. Amazon accounts for a respectable 7.1% of the market, but its digital download service — which competes directly with iTunes — only represents a meager 1.3% share (the rest is from physical CD sales). But we’re hearing Amazon is looking to turn things around. We’re hearing from one source that Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked, we’ve heard. Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new). Amazon’s MP3 store has been available in a public beta since September 2007, and made waves in 2008 by becoming the first online music vendor to sell songs without DRM (iTunes eventually followed). It comes pre-installed on Android phones as a native application (which works quite well), but its desktop website has a pretty poor user experience compared to iTunes.  Look for Amazon to try to get its store integrated in as many places as possible later this year and early next year — given its past association with Android, it’s even possible that Amazon may be involved with the Google iTunes Competitor that was previewed at Google I/O. CrunchBase Information Amazon Information provided by CrunchBase

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Amazon’s MP3 Store On Hiring Spree, May Be Planning Major Relaunch

NTP Sues Apple, Google, Microsoft And Others Over Wireless Email Patents

NTP, which claims to have founded the technology of which wireless emails are based, has filed lawsuits against Apple, Google, HTC Corp, LG Electronics, Microsoft Corporation, and Motorola, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for allegedly infringing NTP’s eight patents related to the delivery of electronic mail over wireless communications systems. As you may have noticed, each of the companies who are being sued manufacture or develop wireless handheld devices or software used to deliver email on mobile devices. NTP has a reputation for being a patent troll. NTP is known for its patent litigation and eventual settlement with Research in Motion over similar wireless email patents. RIM agreed to pay NTP $612 million to settle all pending claims in 2005. Founded in 1992 by the late inventor Thomas J. Campana Jr. and Donald E. Stout, NTP has a a portfolio of 50 US patents that mainly relate to the areas of wireless email and RF Antenna design. While the company has apparently licensed its mobile email patents to Visto, Nokia, Good Technology and RIM, NTP has also filed filed patent infringement lawsuits against AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, which seem to still be pending. The lawsuit draws comparisons to Wi-LAN’s suit against every major mobile device manufacturer over blue tooth technology. Of course, NTP’s lawsuit will just be added to the growing stack of patent suits that companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft face from patent trolls. Photo credit/Flickr/ Bloomsberries

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NTP Sues Apple, Google, Microsoft And Others Over Wireless Email Patents

Whiteboard Friday – 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style)

Posted by Danny Dover

Twitter Explains What @EarlyBird Is: It’s All About Distributing Advertiser Deals

ReadWriteWeb had a solid scoop last week when it uncovered Twitter was set to go live with an account called @EarlyBird . Well, it has just gone live, with a tweet pointing to this page where the company explains what it’s all about. Looks like Twitter is about to start offering users exclusive, time-bound deals, events and sneak peeks, for which it has partnered with a number of (yet unnamed) advertising partners. Those advertisers will distribute offers via the @EarlyBird account, and they get to determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and pricing. And you? You get to opt in to them. If you want to get access to said exclusive deals, you need to of course follow the @EarlyBird account, although you may also see offers if someone you follow retweets a tweet from that account. Yes, that means exclusive deals are bound to get viral pretty quickly, which will be interesting to observe given that many of the offers distributed via the account will be time-sensitive of nature (otherwise it wouldn’t be called Early Bird, of course). Twitter outlines that it has deals with select advertisers in place, but welcomes suggestions of a product/event sent by @reply to @earlybird. Nevertheless, since Twitter clearly looks at this like a significant potential revenue stream, they are keen on emphasizing that it will be selective about the type of deals they highlight. Also worth noting: the company suggests that deals will come mostly at the beginning of the day (it’s safe to assume that they mean the start of the day throughout the United States, at least at first). As for internationally available offers: Will these deals be targeted toward Twitter’s many users outside the United States? At first, many of the advertising partners will be large, international brands or focused on the U.S. market. As @earlybird grows beyond this first early phase, so will the deals in different places. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that at the end of the list of questions presented on the introductory page, Twitter makes it clear that while it is kicking things off with US-wide offers, the company will explore location-based and even thematic (e.g. fashion or music) deals in the future. This could get pretty big, pretty quickly, in my opinion. Now let’s see how many followers the @EarlyBird account gains in the next few days. At the time of publication, it had 833 followers. For Twitter, this is far from the first or only attempt at generating revenue. It currently rents out access to its data ‘firehose’ to notable Web giants such as Yahoo , Google and Microsoft and is actively experimenting with Promoted Tweets and Trending topics . For the record, Twitter has raised a staggering $160 million in funding to date, and we believe the valuation of the company to run up to $1 billion . Do you think it’s worth that much? CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

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Twitter Explains What @EarlyBird Is: It’s All About Distributing Advertiser Deals

Using Google’s Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report To Identify Low Hanging Fruit

Posted by Tom_C Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet. I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools: Step 1 – Gathering The Fruit The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just “web” queries and in this case I’ve selected “United States” since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be: Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel: Step 2 – Identify The Low Hanging Fruit Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:

Auto sales defy positive statistical trends | Analysis & Opinion |

Auto sales should be accelerating in the United States — at least according to a slew of rosy statistics. But June’s numbers show annual sales stuck in the low 11 million range — better than last year, but way off the typical rate of …

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Auto sales defy positive statistical trends | Analysis & Opinion |

Bada Bing: Sex.com And Two Related Trademarks Up For Sale At Sedo

Sex.com , considered to be one of the world’s most valuable domain names for obvious reasons, is up for sale at domain broker Sedo along with two related USPTO trademark registrations. Sedo has entered an exclusive agreement with Sex.com owner Escom to privately broker the sale of the domain name. Sex.com was sold to Escom in January 2006 for a reported $14 million price, widely cited as the highest priced domain sale in history. As of February 18th, 2010, the domain name has been ordered to be sold at a foreclosure auction. As of March 18th, 2010, in a last minute twist to the story, the foreclosure auction looked likely to be cancelled as creditors of Escom filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against the company in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. This action was taken by creditors to prevent a possible loss of value by selling the name as a foreclosure auction. The Central California Bankruptcy Court earlier this month issued an order approving a settlement between the managers of Escom, which basically meant that the company could move forward with trying to sell the domain name via Sedo. If you’re interested in getting your hands on it, you can email Sedo at consult@sedo.com. CrunchBase Information Sedo Information provided by CrunchBase

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Bada Bing: Sex.com And Two Related Trademarks Up For Sale At Sedo

Amazon Introduces 70% Royalty Option For Kindle Digital Text Platform

Right off the heels of announcing an expansion of its Kindle Digital Text Platform to authors and publishers around the world, Amazon announced back in January that it would introduce a new 70 percent royalty option in the program that will allow them to to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. Well, it’s the middle of the year, and it has now landed . For the record: the new royalty option comes will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option but rather complement it. As could be expected, option is currently only available for books sold to United States customers. The new royalty option basically means that for each book sold from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Android phones, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, net of delivery costs. Those costs are based on file size (pricing is set at $0.15/MB), and Amazon claims today’s median DTP file size to be 368KB, which means delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. To qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements: – The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99. – The list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest list price for the physical book. – The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights. – The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store. – Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. In addition to the 70 percent royalty option, Amazon also announced improvements in DTP such as a more intuitive “Bookshelf” feature and a simplified two-step process for publishing. CrunchBase Information Amazon Amazon Kindle 2 Information provided by CrunchBase

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How RIM Can Bring the Sexy Back to BlackBerry: A Five-Point Marketing Plan

Editor’s note : In the following guest post, PR consultant Vijay Chattha of VSC/AppLaunchPR gives some unsolicited marketing advice to Research in Motion. Another profitable quarter and another hit to RIM’s stock price . People are buying Blackberries, but investors are not buying RIM. Why? Short answer. No buzz. Despite continuing to reign supreme as America’s smartphone of choice, RIM’s Blackberry devices are not creating enough excitement in the market. Sure, RIM saw 20 percent profit growth in the first quarter of 2010, but they’ve also watched their market share dwindle as rivals Apple and Android grow. If there was ever a time for a change, it’s now. BlackBerry, which is still ranked ahead of the iPhone and Android in worldwide popularity, can’t keep telling the market its working on an iPhone-killer that remains in the distant horizon. It needs a business makeover. As a branding and PR executive, I’ve taken some of the planning process around our work with mobile startups and applied it to RIM with five ways the Canadian company can boost their hopes and bring sexy back to Blackberry. (They can thank me later). 1. Leverage Obama The number one celebrity in the world is a crackberry addict, yet RIM’s dropped the ball on capitalizing on this once-in-a-lifetime product endorsement. Maybe the company is hesitant to become too seemingly political, but this is a man who’s selling US Weekly covers on par with Brangelina. Experts estimate his endorsement of BlackBerry would be worth roughly $50 million , I believe that’s grossly low. Obama is worth at least $250 million in annual comparative advertising value, or the price it would cost to buy that much print, online and TV time. But what is RIM marketing doing to capitalize on this opportunity? If the President of the United States trusts the security of the RIM operating system, shouldn’t you? Now that’s a tagline! RIM needs to move fast. Obama’s popularity is waning like a Hollywood marriage, so seize the moment. How? Make a ‘Barackberry’ version. Bullet-proof, global data roaming and super secure, just like Barack’s berry. It could become the ‘must-have’ tech toy from D.C. to Dubai. RIM should charge $10,000 so that all the hedge fund types buy in as well. Barackberrys should be given out at uber-influencer events such as TED, Davos and young exec confabs like the Summit Series . 2. Launch your Silicon Valley-based presence. Go big or go back to Canada. RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario is not part of the smartphone race conversation between Android and iPhone because a great deal of the conversation happens in Silicon Valley. To get into the conversation, RIM needs to get into Silicon Valley. RIM needs to step up its game and launch a massive Silicon Valley presence—and not just its existing outpost in Redwood City. A big presence in Mountain View or a swish office in San Francisco is the answer. There should be free food and Molson Beer flowing round the clock. Announce it at the Blackberry’s DevCon , which is taking place in San Francisco this September. 3. Buy Hollywood From Silicon Valley to Silicone Valley, RIM needs both ends of the Golden State. Apple understands the value of product placement and, for over a decade, has garnered more product placement than nearly any other tech brand. Featured in TV shows like The Office and Entourage , Apple products are dominating pop culture. Apple products were featured in 40 percent of the top box office hits of 2009. In fact Steve Jobs himself is the American most kids admire, even more than Oprah . But unlike our kids’ admiration, Hollywood can be bought quickly. After all, even Carrie Bradshaw sold her iconic Apple computer for an HP in the latest Sex and the City movie. RIM needs to step up and put a Blackberry in the hand of damn near every “connected influencer” character out there. Own a movie. A good one to start with would have been Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps . Come on. Every banker has a Blackberry. What better device to use to bring down the global economy than a BB Bold? Gordon Gecko has Blackberry written all over him. And he needs an upgrade from the brick he used in the original movie. While you’re on Sunset Avenue, revamp your TV ads which feature the Beatles and U2. Ask yourself what you are selling? Mobile phones or Flomax ? While BlackBerry is spending millions for the rights to “All You Need is Love,” Apple is being pitched by labels and bands, many of whom want nothing in return but the free promotion of having their music featured in TV ads. After Feist’s ‘1-2-3-4’ appeared in an Apple iPod nano commercial, sales of her song spiked 586 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Instead of breaking the bank, BlackBerry could be breaking new bands. 4. Scrap your apps. BlackBerry App World is a failure. Billing, developer marketing, and technical support are weak. A poll of AppLaunchPR developers rate the App World last in terms of developer relations and ease of use of all major smartphone app platforms. Beyond technical issues, RIM needs to change its developer payouts. Recent projections show Apple’s profit from apps may only equal 1 percent of total profits. It’s only promoting apps to sell hardware. Period. If that’s the case, then why should BlackBerry even worry about making money from apps? Apps should be a loss leader. Blackberry apps should give 100 percent of the revenue to developers and even go one better. Instead of U2, focus more TV ads around your hot apps and their developers. Make them the rockstars. Oh yeah, and where’s RIM’s own mobile ad network? Now that’s really the hottest accessory for 2010. Google has one, so does Apple. RIM announced a strategy to work with multiple networks and no one listened. Perhaps something more strategic is necessary to help developers market and distribute their apps. 5. Focus on an iTunes-killer, not an iPhone-killer One of Apple’s most valued assets is that the company holds more credit cards on file than any other company besides Amazon. ITunes is the true barrier to entry in the smartphone race. First, purchase a music subscription service like Spotify or Rdio. Blackberry users want music but can’t find anything within the device. RIM should seize this opportunity. Music and apps are only two customer billing entry points. RIM may want to consider strategic M&A to broaden its credit card database. RIM reminds me of a line from the movie Swingers : “You’re money and you don’t even know it.” RIM is well positioned from a cash and market share perspective to make BlackBerry a global, mobile, must-have addiction, but the company needs to make bold moves now or risk becoming Nokia. CrunchBase Information Research In Motion Vijay Chattha Information provided by CrunchBase

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How RIM Can Bring the Sexy Back to BlackBerry: A Five-Point Marketing Plan

Twitter Growth: Happening All Over The Globe (Graphs)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may no longer be worried about Twitter and its impressive growth rate – and he shouldn’t be – but that won’t keep the micro-sharing service from continuing to boast impressive growth numbers all around the world . Online analytics firm comScore noted Twitter’s overall continued growth , even based on incomplete data (third-party client users aren’t included in its numbers), and now Pingdom is doing its share by pointing out where exactly Twitter’s staggering international expansion is happening right now . The short version: just about everywhere. Pingdom took a look at Google Trends for Websites traffic data for Twitter.com to see where the service is experiencing the fastest growth in terms of monthly usage. Again, that means its findings are far more fit for deducing overall trends than they are able to accurately detail Twitter’s user numbers, since a lot of people use desktop and mobile clients for tweeting. For your information, Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the beginning of this month said they are currently at 190 million users , who are collectively posting some 65 million tweets per day . And last April, Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, said over 60% of registered Twitter accounts were already coming from outside U.S. borders . Anyway, these are the regions Pingdom says Twitter’s traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards the most: Latin America The fastest growth, according to Pingdom, is in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. Notably, the real turning point seems to have been around January 2010 for all those countries. We’re not sure why – it would have been more logical to see those jumps occur in November 2009, when Twitter was made available in Spanish . As Pingdom points out, those five countries represent a potential audience of about 150 million Internet users, based on stats provided by Internet World Stats . Asia A second region where Twitter seems to be experiencing quite a boost is in Asia, especially in Eastern Asia, accounting for three out of the four top countries: India, Japan (where Twitter actively bolsters its presence with an office and custom ad deals), South Korea and Taiwan. Countries like Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia also seem to be on the rise. Pingdom pegs the total number of Internet users in the four top countries at some 230 million (about the same as the United States). Europe and Russia In Europe, too, Twitter seems to be attracting an increasing amount of visitors to its website, particularly in Italy, Spain and Russia. These three countries have a combined 104 million Internet users, claims Pingdom. In conclusion: Twitter’s continued growth is undeniable, and we’ve long known this is a global phenomenon unhindered by borders or even languages. As Twitter expands its global footprint through partnerships with mobile carriers and translating its service into more languages, the service is poised for even more growth in the years to come, aided also by increasing smartphone sales and the roll-out of potent Internet and mobile data network infrastructure. Million dollar question: will Twitter’s own infrastructure be able to sustain this growth in the long run? We’ve all seen what happened with the World Cup stampede, and it wasn’t pretty. Pingdom tried to pinpoint which countries stand to drive Twitter’s growth the most by looking at the sharpest traffic curves, but if anything the data researched shows that Twitter is gaining ground pretty much everywhere. How long until Twitter reaches its Big Hairy Audacious Goal of becoming the pulse of the planet with 1 billion users? CrunchBase Information Twitter Pingdom Information provided by CrunchBase

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Twitter Growth: Happening All Over The Globe (Graphs)