Will Amazon Or Apple Buy Netflix?

According to MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, online spending grew 18% over the year in March, outpacing the growth rate of traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Online retailers Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) also saw significant growth in their revenues. Amazon’s stock touched a record high, and recent quarter results surpassed market expectations, recording double-digit revenue and earnings growth. But the company

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Is Reading On Steve’s Mind?

On Monday, Apple (NASAQ:AAPL) reported a strong fourth quarter driven by strong Mac and iPhone sales that topped estimates. In my most recent post on Apple, I wondered out loud about what is on Steve Jobs’s mind and if he would come with an innovative product that would encourage people to read more. There are

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Murdoch’s Next Steps?

Continuing our analysis of media companies’ results, today we discuss Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NASDAQ:NWS) and a potential acquisition for it, Monster (NYSE:MWW). For News Corp, revenue for the quarter fell 16% to $7.4 billion and was marginally short of analysts’ expectations of $7.71 billion. EPS of $1.04, however, was higher than the previous year’s $0.91.

Will Amazon Kindle Vertical Integration?

I wrote a controversial Forbes column, How Amazon Could Change Publishing, in the spring. In this column, I submitted that Amazon could disintermediate traditional publishers and agents, and free up money that they could share with authors. My hypothesis was based on the fact that since Amazon has a technology-based merchandising system capable of figuring

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Deal Radar 2008: Entrepreneur Journeys

There was a time when technology venture capitalists would not touch a “content” deal. They only funded pure play technology companies. Gradually, as the Internet industry evolved, the notion of “paid content” brought about a fundamental change, leading to many content deals getting funded. Back in the summer of 2005, as I wrote about the

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Amazon Toying with Vertical Integration

Amazon.com (AMZN) has been pursuing growth at all costs. Their recently announced Q1 2008 results are witness to that drive. They reported the quarter’s revenue at $4.13 billion, meeting analyst expectations and reporting a 37% increase over the previous year. Their earnings for the quarter at $0.34 were marginally higher than the market’s expectation of

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Amazon Pursues Growth At All Costs

In 2007, Amazon’s stock price appreciated by over 125%. How does it look in 2008? Amazon preserves leadership in its core retail business, while layering on a variety of “services”. Amazon posted Q407 results in line with the Street’s estimates. Revenues grew 42% y-o-y to $5.67 billion from $3.99 billion in the quarter a year

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Deal Radar 2008: Amie Street and the Twenty First Century Renaissance

AmieStreet.com is an online music destination that allows (a) musicians to release, (b) music fans to discover, and (c) listeners decide the price they would like to pay for new and independent music over the Internet. The site has excellent music. In August 2007, Amie Street raised an undisclosed amount of Series A round of

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