Forget the Everything Store—Amazon’s an Everything Business | WIRED

Amazon is known as the “everything store.” But now more than ever, Amazon isn’t just about selling everything. It’s an everything business.

Source: Forget the Everything Store—Amazon’s an Everything Business | WIRED

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DREW KELLY FOR WIRED

IN HIS SEMINAL book detailing the history of the world’s largest online retailer, journalist Brad Stone dubbed Amazon the “everything store.” But now more than ever, Amazon isn’t just about selling everything. It’s an everything business.

During its annual conference for Amazon Web Services users last week, the company introduced a range of cloud computing business services that layer on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Not content to challenge entrenched enterprise players like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, Amazon signaled it would compete against newer data upstarts too, including data visualization companies Tableau and ChartCube.

Now more than ever, Amazon isn’t just about selling everything. It’s an everything business.

At the same time, Amazon was launching Handmade, an Etsy-like online marketplace for artisanal goods. Even as all of this was unfolding, Bloombergreported that Amazon is in the preliminary stages of launching an online live TV service to complement its popular Instant Video offerings, and it likely will run on its Fire TV hardware. And late last month, the company launched Flex, an Uber-like platform where on-demand workers could pick up shifts delivering packages.

The funny part is that these seemingly disparate businesses still represent but a fraction of the full range of the company’s ambitions. So just what the hell is Amazon up to?

The thing is, Amazon has always dabbled in many corners of the tech industry as it’s pursued its well-worn mantra of “growth before profits.” And that means the company is more than the world’s largest retailer. It’s also an Internet of Things company. A device maker. A payments company. The list goes on. Some bets, like its massive cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, have proven hugely successful. Others, like the Fire phone, have …. not.

 

FORRESTER

But throughout its history, Amazon has differed from its competitors in one distinct way. At key moments in its evolution, it has realized that innovations that have served it well internally likely would have a market externally as well. That realization has helped drive some of Amazon’s greatest successes.

“Along the way of building the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has discovered some areas where it’s had to build some very unique things,” says ChannelAdvisor executive chairman Scot Wingo, an analyst who tracks Amazon closely. “As it has done that, it’s made the unusual decision to open up these innovations to third parties, whereas in the old, offline-world, you guarded those assets as proprietary and strategic advantages.”

In offering those advantages to others, Amazon has created a virtuous circle of success for itself and its business customers. In becoming the everything business, Amazon has become everything to many businesses, as well.

All Hail the Cloud

That certainly is true of Amazon’s cloud services. Theeffort started in August, 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It gave users virtually unlimited computing power on the heels of a complementary offering called S3, which provides virtually unlimited data storage. Together these services formed the core of what’s known as Amazon Web Services.

As my colleague Cade Metz wrote in 2012, Amazon’s reasons for making its cloud public when it did is a bit of a mystery. (“The story of EC2 is like Rashomon,” he wrote.) But it wasn’t long before the company realized the potential of its vast cloud computing capabilities—and moved to monetize it.

Just six years after it launched, the company’s cloud computing infrastructure was estimated to run as much as 1 percent of the entire Internet. In April, the company broke out the financial details of AWS for the first time—revealing it was a massive $4.6 billion business.

 According to Amazon’slast earnings report, its cloud business soared 81.5 percent to $1.82 billion, accounting for 8 percent of the quarter’s revenue. It also contributed to asurprise Q2 profit. Last week, at its user conference, AWS’ senior vice president Andy Jassy said Amazon is expecting revenue from the cloud unit to be even higher than initially thought. He projected that over 1 million enterprise customers on the platform would generate $7.3 billion in revenue.

Competitors—especially Microsoft and Google—are catching up. And though $7.3 billion is a huge number, it’s but a fraction of the nearly $200 billion Forrester sees as up for grabs for cloud services by 2020.

But Amazon’s cloud is still formidable. “[Its cloud services] grew close to 100 percent or more since last year,” says Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester. “All they need is another double and they are closing in on $15 billion—I think they will get there easily in the next 2 years, and $20 billion is not far beyond that.”

The strength of Amazon’s cloud business also helps it in other, less immediately monetizable ways. It gives Amazon a big stake in mobile, for instance. Though its Fire phone was a bust, Hammond points out that mobile developers who build iOS and Android apps still frequently use AWS for the backend connectivity and storage for their app data. “In that area, Amazon is increasingly competitive as a mobile infrastructure service,” he says.

Third-Party Power

Along with its digital infrastructure, one of Amazon’s less visible triumphs is its physical infrastructure, the fulfillment centers that power much of the company’s third-party marketplace. Says Wingo, “I would argue that if they split out their third-party marketplace, it would be another blockbuster.”

You may not realize that much of what is sold on Amazon is not sold by Amazon but by retailers who use Amazon as a storefront. Often, through a program called Fulfillment by Amazon, these merchants store their inventory in Amazon warehouses and rely on Amazon to ship their goods, often via Amazon Prime.

‘I would argue that if Amazon split out its third-party marketplace, it would be another blockbuster.’SCOT WINGO, CHANNELADVISOR EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN

It’s another service that’s generating billions. Third-pary sales grew around 25 percent, year over year, in the third quarter of this year, according to ChannelAdvisor’s data, against an overall e-commerce backdrop of 15 percent growth. According to the company’s last earnings report, third-party merchants accounted for 45 percent of all items sold on Amazon during Q2, up from 41 percent last year. Though Amazon doesn’t report the dollar value of those sales, ChannelAdvisor estimated that third-party sellers accounted for 58 percent of the $48.3 billion in merchandise sold on Amazon sites during the quarter.

ChannelAdvisor also estimates that Amazon’s business is closing in on $10 billion per year in revenue from commissions on third-party sales—and that it’s making a profit on those sales. Meanwhile, the other big public marketplace, eBay, Wingo says, is growing low single digits. “Amazon is gobbling up market share,” says Wingo, adding that what Amazon is raking in is the equivalent of five to ten JCPenney e-commerce businesses.

So, yes, the 21-year-old company would seem to have its hand in everything, from producing Emmy-winning original content to enterprise computing to selling sneakers. Not every endeavor is successful. But like the best tech companies, Amazon knows how to iterate. If one thing doesn’t work, it tries another. And as the Fire Phone showed, it certainly doesn’t wait until its next product is perfect. But it turns out Amazon does have one pretty good gauge of what will become a big seller. If it works for Amazon, it’s going to work for somebody else, too. When you try everything, chances are, you’re going to get something right.

Shazam compagnon idéal de la pub via la réalité augmentée et les objets connectés

Shazam a de grandes ambitions, et elles dépassent largement le simple domaine de la reconnaissance musicale. Le service cherche à devenir en effet le compagnon « idéal » de certaines publicités et se rapprocher davantage des commerçants, en proposant par exemple des expériences de réalité augmentée.

De la musique à la publicité

Tout le monde ou presque connait Shazam, une petite application pratique permettant de reconnaitre facilement quelle musique est en train d’être écoutée. Si vous êtes par exemple dans un magasin et qu’une chanson sort des haut-parleurs, Shazam vous en donnera le titre, l’artiste, l’album dont elle est extraite et ainsi de suite. Le résultat est toujours accompagné de liens vers iTunes et autres boutiques, ainsi que quelques services de streaming comme Spotify et Rdio. Et le succès serait au rendez-vous puisque Shazam compterait pour 10 % de la musique achetée selon l’entreprise. Toutefois, en l’absence de détails sur la manière dont le chiffre a été calculé, on le prendra avec les pincettes de rigueur.

Mais elle ne compte justement pas s’arrêter là. Elle tient à faire de son service une porte vers des contenus supplémentaires en fonction d’un contexte particulier, essentiellement pour compléter la publicité. Certaines sociétés se sont déjà associées à Shazam et il suffit par exemple de dégainer l’application pendant que la publicité passe à la télévision pour obtenir des informations, à la manière finalement d’un QR-code audio. Il s’agirait donc d’un renforcement de cette activité puisque des essais ont déjà été faits dans ce domaine, notamment la publicité pour La Halle avec Jenifer.

The Next Web a pu interroger Rich Riley, PDG de Shazam, à ce sujet.  Les projets de l’entreprise sont nombreux pour cette année mais concernent avant tout le renforcement du service autour de la publicité. Les développeurs travaillent par exemple sur un « Shazam visuel » permettant de relier l’application à une expérience de vente dans des boutiques physiques, pour obtenir des coupons de réductions ou autres.

Fournir un contenu en fonction du contexte

Même la réalité augmentée est au programme. Au CES de Las Vegas, le PDG a ainsi fait la démonstration d’une publicité pour une Jaguar dans un magazine papier. En scannant la page, Shazam reconnait le contenu et propose automatiquement une expérience 3D à 360°. Il suffit alors de déplacer son téléphone pour observer l’habitacle du véhicule, comme si l’on se trouvait à la place du pilote.

On notera que ce type d’interaction existe déjà, comme Ikea l’a montré avec son catalogue depuis août 2013. La différence ici est que Shazam cherche à fédérer autour de sa plateforme les sociétés qui pourraient être intéressées par ce type d’expérience, en offrant un accès via l’une des applications mobiles les plus utilisées.

Shazam a également des ambitions dans le domaine des objets connectés et des « wearables ». Idéalement, l’application serait assez petite et économe en ressources pour pouvoir être utilisée sur des montres et autres, afin par exemple de pouvoir accéder à des contenus par simple pilotage vocal. Une fonctionnalité que l’on retrouve déjà avec Siri, Google Now et Cortana et il faudra voir comment Shazam compte se démarquer. De même, l’entreprise travaille sur des balises, nommées Shazam-In-Store, capables de fournir du contenu Shazam en fonction de l’endroit où l’utilisateur se tient dans un magasin.

Tout cela suppose évidemment des transferts de données et un stockage d’informations concernant l’utilisateur, même si elles ne sont pas nominales. À la lumière de toutes les attaques sur les deux dernières années, on peut donc se poser la question de savoir comment Shazam compte gérer la sécurité de l’ensemble. Rich Riley n’a cependant pas été prolixe sur le sujet, indiquant simplement que des mesures de protection avaient été prises, et que les données n’avaient pas vocation à transiter vers d’autres entreprises.

TIDAL – Introducing the world’s first music service with High Fidelity sound quality, High Definition music videos and Curated Editorial, by music journalists.

HD music subscription service Tidal launched on Sonos Friday: Tidal is now available to Sonos owners in the U.S. and Canada, and the company announced that it plans to launch in the U.K. soon.

Tidal’s catalog offers access to more than 25 million tracks from all major labels, as well as 75,000 music videos, which Tidal subscribers can access on the web as well as through the company’s iOS and Android apps. Tidal is offering its HD streams in the open source FLAC audio format, as well as Apple’s own ALAC format, as 44.1kHz / 16 bit recordings with a bitrate of 1411 kbps. Those extra bits will also cost a bit more: With a monthly fee of $19.99, Tidal is twice as expensive as your regular Spotify subscription.
With Spotify being the undisputed streaming music market leader, HD music increasingly is becoming a differentiating feature for anyone trying to carve out a lucrative niche — and the kind of people who spend money on something like Sonos speakers seem like a really good target audience.

That’s why Deezer already launched its HD streaming tier exclusively on Sonos earlier this year. Just like Tidal, Deezer is charging consumers extra for high bitrates, albeit a bit less. Deezer Elite, as the tier is called, is costing $14.99 per month.

With CES coming up in January, one should expect more such HD audio announcements, both from services as well as connected speaker manufacturers. These services will directly compete with companies like Pono, which is trying to get consumers to buy its own hardware, as well as individual downloads.

Dropbox moves beyond simple file management with social photo sharing, albums, and document previews | The Verge

Dropbox moves beyond simple file management with social photo sharing, albums, and document previews | The Verge.

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Dropbox has today unveiled two new products that attempt to reimagine what the cloud storage service is. The first relates to working with documents. Instead of simply being able to download files, it’s offering a quick preview function on the webiste. Clicking on a PDF or office file gives you a pop-up window previewing the file. It should be rolling out to all users over “the coming months.” It doesn’t yet support Excel files, but it covers PDF, Doc, Docx, and Powerpoint. Both features are not yet available on Dropbox’s mobile apps, but should be eventually.

The second is more interesting, and it relates to photos. Dropbox already offers automatic camera uploads for iOS and Android, but the company is trying to make it easier to view and share the photos. The service takes photos that are stored in disparate folders across your Dropbox and puts them all in a single view on its site. The unified view organizes all of your photos by time, and you’ll be able to post them directly to Facebook, Twitter, and email from Dropbox’s site. You can create “virtual” albums to share, so they will persist even if you move the photos within your Dropbox file system. Essentially, it doesn’t matter where your files are stored in your filesystem — your albums are abstracted from that and stick around.

DROPBOX MOVES FROM FILE MANAGEMENT TO CONTENT SHARING

Chris Beckmann, product manager for Dropbox, says it sees a shift from thinking of things as “files” to thinking about them as simply “users’ content.” Dropbox says that it will like do more of this kind of abstraction for content in the future, and at least for the time being its a feature that only exists on its website. Moving into the social space is an obvious move for the company, as is doing what it can to become more than just a place to dump files. As the company looks to compete with iCloud and SkyDrive, it will need to win on features and mindshare and not just the raw size of its userbase — asSteve Ballmer himself pointed out, even Dropbox’s impressive-seeming 100 million users isn’t a guarantee of future usage. With other players like Box.net and Sugar Sync also in this space, simple file storage and sync looks like it’s going to become a commodity service. Dropbox needs to continue to find ways to add value to users and app developers in order to stay relevant. With todays’ announcements, the company is showing that it’s thinking about the right things — now it just needs to move quickly to turn those thoughts into real products.

The photo feature is actually already available on its its Android app — having beenlaunched in beta last month. iOS support will be coming soon, Dropbox says. The rollout for all users should happen within “the next month or so.” Last month, Dropbox acquired photo sharing service Snapjoy and also added a hinting that it had broader ambitions in the photos space — though today’s new features don’t seem to integrate any Snapjoy tech. Its other acquisition lat month, Audiogalaxy, has yet to turn into a music product for Dropbox.

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Roundup of Big Data Forecasts and Market Estimates, 2012 – Forbes

Roundup of Big Data Forecasts and Market Estimates, 2012 – Forbes.

From the best-known companies in enterprise software to start-ups, everyone is jumping on the big data bandwagon.

The potential of big data to bring insights and intelligence into enterprises is a strong motivator, where managers are constantly looking for the competitive edge to win in their chosen  markets.  With so much potential to provide enterprises with enhanced analytics, insights and intelligence, it is understandable why this area has such high expectations – and hype – associated with it.

Given the potential big data has to reorder an enterprise and make it more competitive and profitable, it’s understandable why there are so many forecasts and market analyses being done today.  The following is a roundup of the latest big data forecasts and market estimates recently published:

• As of last month, Gartner had received 12,000 searches over the last twelve months for the term “big data” with the pace increasing.

• In Hype Cycle for Big Data, 2012, Gartner states that Column-Store DBMS, Cloud Computing, In-Memory Database Management Systems will be the three most transformational technologies in the next five years.  Gartner goes on to predict that Complex Event Processing, Content Analytics, Context-Enriched Services, Hybrid Cloud Computing, Information Capabilities Framework and Telematics round out the technologies the research firm considers transformational.  The Hype Cycle for Big Data is shown below:

• Predictive modeling is gaining momentum with property and casualty (P&C) companies who are using them to support claims analysis, CRM, risk management, pricing and actuarial workflows, quoting, and underwriting. Web-based quoting systems and pricing optimization strategies are benefiting from investments in predictive modeling as well.   The Priority Matrix for Big Data, 2012 is shown below:

•  Social content is the fastest growing category of new content in the enterprise and will eventually attain 20% market penetration.   Gartner defines social content as unstructured data created, edited and published on corporate blogs, communication and collaboration platforms, in addition to external platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and a myriad of others.

• Gartner reports that 45% as sales management teams identify sales analytics as a priority to help them understand sales performance, market conditions and opportunities.

• Over 80% of Web Analytics solutions are delivered via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  Gartner goes on to estimate that over 90% of the total available market for Web Analytics are already using some form of tools and thatGoogle reported 10 million registrations for Google Analytics alone.  Google also reports 200,000 active users of their free Analytics application.  Gartner also states that the majority of the customers for these systems use two or more Web analytics applications, and less than 50% use the advanced functions including data warehousing, advanced reporting and higher-end customer segmentation features.

• In the report Market Trends: Big Data Opportunities in Vertical Industries, the following heat map by industry shows that from a volume of data perspective, Banking and Securities, Communications, Media and Services, Government, and Manufacturing and Natural Resources have the greatest potential opportunity for Big Data.

• Last week Gartner hosted Big Data Opportunities in Vertical Industries (August 7^th) and provided an excellent overview of the research behind  Market Trends: Big Data Opportunities in Vertical Industries.  The following graphic was included in the webinar showing big data investments by industry.

•  The Wikibon Blog has created an excellent compilation of big data statistics and market forecasts.  Their post,  A Comprehensive list of Big Data Statistics, can be found here.  They’ve also created an infographic titled Taming Big Data.   You can find The Big List of Big Data Infographics here.

• The Hadoop-MapReduce market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) 58% reaching $2.2 billion in 2018. Source:Hadoop-MapReduce Market Forecast 2013-2018

• Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity is available for download from the McKinsey Global Institute for free.  This is 156 page document authored by McKinsey researchers is excellent.  While it was published last year (June, 2011), if you’re following big data, download a copy as much of the research is still relevant.  McKinsey includes extensive analysis of how big data can deliver value in a manufacturing value chains for example, which is shown below:

• How is big data faring in the enterprise? Is an excellent blog post written by best-selling author and thought leader Dion Hinchcliffe .  Be sure to follow Dion on Twitter and by subscribing to his blog, he delivers excellent content that is insightful and interesting.

Related articles

• Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing Shows Enterprises Finding Value in Big Data, Virtualization (forbes.com)
• Gartner Puts Numbers To Their Forecast For Cloud Computing (cfoknowledge.wordpress.com)
• Gartner Hype Cycle 2012 – Emerging Technologies (setandbma.wordpress.com)
• 16 August 2012: Forbes (tapthe90.com)
• What Do CIOs Need to Know About Big Data? (cochituatemedia.com)
• Who Is Paying For Big Data Projects? (informationweek.com)

Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012: Sales Turns to the Cloud for Quick Relief – Forbes

Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012: Sales Turns to the Cloud for Quick Relief – Forbes.

Sales VPs for years have been test-driving SaaS-based CRM systems, piloting them with sales teams to see if using them leads to higher sales and greater customer retention.  Marketing VPs and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) also continue to pilot SaaS-based web analytics and marketing automation applications.

What’s been missing from these pilots is the ability to bring CRM, marketing automation, sales management and web analytics systems into existing enterprise IT architectures just as fast.  This is changing quickly.  CRM vendors have been quick to respond to the challenge, offering Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), integration adapters, connectors and from larger vendors, integrated bus architectures.

What the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012 Means

CRM’s real value is in unifying an entire enterprise based on its ability to sell, serve and retain customers better than before. Gartner shows this is a high priority for its CRM clients by underscoring which technology and application areas of the hype cycle are responding to his market dynamic, and which aren’t.

This Hype Cycle also reflects the urgency I hear from Sales VPs who want to get in control of the complex compensation, quota, territory management, job appraisal and sales coaching responsibilities they have.  While each of these areas is essential, many companies, even those in enterprise software, have ignored these areas, allowing them to stay manually based. Gartner calls this area Sales Performance Management (SPM) and shows it has the highest benefit of all SaaS-based sales management applications in the next two years. Gartner’s analysis captures the time shortage that Sales VPs I know are facing; they have to get to high quota levels while also managing a diverse set of leadership responsibilities as well. The Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012 (G00234919) is shown below:

• Gartner estimates 35% of all CRM implementations today use SaaS, growing to over 50% by 2020 according to their projections. In 2011, more than $5 billion was invested in sales applications.

• Cloud adoption varies significantly across CRM software categories with Web analytics achieving 95% adoption, Sales Force Automation achieving just over 50%, and Configure Price Quote (CPQ) achieving 40%.  Cloud-based Sales Performance Management has the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of any CRM category according to inquiry and client calls.

• Sales, Customer Service, Social CRM and Marketing are the four fastest-growing areas of enterprise Sales applications on SaaS.  Campaign Management is increasingly quickly, up from 19% using SaaS in 2010 to 29% in 2011.

• Gartner sees significant growth in Configure Price Quote (CPQ), projecting a market of $300M in 2012, up from $240M in 2011.  Gartner is due out with a MarketScope on CPQ shortly, where the 15 major vendors it tracks in this area will be ranked.  40% of existing implementations are on SaaS, and that proportion is increasing relative to licensed versions.  Of the 15 vendors in this market, 12 have announced SaaS-based versions of their applications.

• There are 3.8M Sales Force Automation SaaS users globally today.

• By 2017, 25% of companies adopting CRM will have extended their customer service contact centers to include social media includingFacebook, Twitter and other emerging online communities.  As of 2012, Gartner is seeking only 1% of companies integrate social media into their companies’ departments and work flows to ensure a consistent customer experience.

• Price Optimization will experience transformational growth in two to five years. Gartner sees this area as one of the most promising across all CRM Sales as can be seen in the Priority Matrix for CRM Sales 2012 below from the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2012.  The research firm has defined this market as including price analysis, price optimization and price execution.  Gartner estimates this market was $180M to $190M in 2010.  Vendor competing in this market include Accenture, Deloitte, Pros, Vendavo, Vistaar Technologies and Zilliant.

• Social CRM (SCRM) for Sales is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, with 90% of spending for these applications being generated from B2C companies.  Gartner expects B2B companies to lead the growth of these applications through 2015, increasing spending from 5% of total SCRM sales in 2011 to 30% by 2015.

• SaaS-based CRM sales within enterprises are expected to reach $4.48B in 2012, growing to $6.3B in 2015.  The following table from the report Forecast: Software as a Service, Worldwide 2010-2015, 2H11 Update provides a frame of reference for SaaS-based CRM growth overall.

• Salesforce leads all CRM vendors in market share growth, advancing 2.8% from 2010 to 2011 according to Gartner’s’ global market share analysis shown below. Salesforce attained 26.9% revenue growth from 2010 to 2011 ($1.3B to $1.6B) and 36.7% growth from 2011 to 2012 ($1.6B to $2.27B).  The future momentum of Salesforce is in unifying the enterprise, redefining corporate IT in the context of the customer. Their recent acquisitions show analytics, marketing automation and development platforms are key priorities.  The following table is from the report Market Share Snapshot: CRM Software, 2011 (G00233998).

Bottom line:  Making CRM strategies successful has to start with a common vision and urgency for results.  Both are happening quicker in CRM than ever before, driven by a much clearer understanding of what enterprises need to more effectively attain their goals.

Related articles

• Cloud, Mobile, Social and Analytics Dominate 2012 CRM Sales Hype Cycle (blogs.gartner.com)
• youmightfindyourself:Gartner’s Hype Cycles 2011Technology… (kennykellogg.com)
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle (bfitness83.wordpress.com)
• How Early Adopters Are Killing The Hype of Cloud Multitenancy (forbes.com)
• The hype cycle of Vendor Briefing Requests (analystrelations.org)
• Five Things to Remember When Implementing a Cloud CRM Solution (bjconquest.com)
• Adoption of Online CRM, Web CRM and Small Business CRM Soars in One Year Overtaking Traditional In-house Systems for the First Time Ever (prnewswire.com)
• Reconsidering Gartner’s Cycle of Hype (sethgodin.typepad.com)
• Un-hyping the Gartner Hype Cycle (dealarchitect.typepad.com)

Evernote officiellement valorisée 1 milliard de dollars – LExpansion.com

Evernote officiellement valorisée 1 milliard de dollars – LExpansion.com.

Le pense-bête universel et multi-plateformes a officialisé une levée de fonds de 70 millions de dollars.

evernote.com

Evernote, l’application de prise de notes (textes, photos, captures d’écran…), de pense-bête et de stockage de données à distance, a officialisé sa dernière levée de fonds, valorisant la société 1 milliard de dollars. Le tour de table se monte à 70 millions de dollars. Il a été mené par Meritech Capital et CBC Capital, avec la participation de T. Rowe Price, Harbor Pacific, Allen & Company et plusieurs autres investisseurs.

La levée de fonds doit servir à conquérir de nouvelles zones géographiques et réaliser des acquisitions stratégiques.

Le nombre d’utilisateurs Evernote a triplé au cours des 12 derniers mois pour atteindre aujourd’hui 30 millions de personnes.

“Notre objectif est de faire d’Evernote une société centenaire qui apporte de la valeur à ses utilisateurs tout au long de leur vie”, explique Phil Libin, PDG d’Evernote. Le patron estime que si sa société était cotée, elle pourrait atteindre une valorisation de 10, voire 100 milliards de dollars.

Cloud Communications And The Future of Marketing In The Post-PC World | TechCrunch

Cloud Communications And The Future of Marketing In The Post-PC World | TechCrunch

DAN KAPLAN

posted 10 hours ago

Editor’s note: Dan Kaplan does Product Marketing for Twilio, which is hosting aconference on cloud communications in October. Follow him on Twitter @dankaplan.

If you are a marketer who has spent the last 10 years mastering the art of capturing and converting customers on the desktop web, the rapid rise of smartphones and the iPad might make you nervous.

You’ve built businesses on paid search, written essays about optimizing lead forms and studied the ever-changing subtleties of SEO. Using cookies that follow us around the web, you’ve turned display advertising into a performance medium. But just as you were beginning to wrap your heads around the whole social thing, along come the iPhone, Android and the iPad and with them a whole new reality: the post-PC world.

The post-PC world is radically different from the world in which most marketers honed their skills. Here, horizontal keyword search is losing ground to vertical-specific apps like Yelp and Hipmunk and a stream of recommendations from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and maybe Path. Along its frontiers, touch- and voice-driven interfaces write most of the laws. This landscape is unfriendly to lead forms. It rejects traditional tactics like SEM and SEO. In the post-PC world, the marketing methods of the last decade will be on their way out the window. Marketers and businesses that can’t adapt will be on their way out the door.

But there is good news for those ready, willing and able to evolve: Post-PC consumers – like generations of consumers before us – will still want ways to entertain our senses, engage our imaginations and stimulate our minds.

The future of marketing in the post-PC world is not about showing up high in search results. It is about reputation and spontaneous discovery. It is about weaving yourself into the feed. This is an evolution of what is known these days as inbound marketing. It involves creating awesome content that makes you relevant and then leveraging your overall awesomeness to establish a relationship with your target customers and maintain it over the years.

When you do it right, your customers want to find you. They need to find you. Your existence delights them because you are exactly what they were looking for – whether they knew what they were looking for or not.

But post-PC consumers are not patient. When we want to engage with your business, we expect you to respond in an instant, on the communications channels we prefer to use. Responding to our emails in a few hours or days just ain’t gonna cut it: depending on our demographics, we are either overloaded with email or hardly use email at all.

But we do consume almost every text message (SMS) that we receive. When we’re in info-gathering, entertainment or transaction mode, we tap on links that seem enticing and follow push notifications into our favorite mobile apps. And if your business offers a frictionless way to contact you, many of us will even call.

This is where cloud communications comes in.

Cloud communications democratizes telecom, making it easy for anyone with access to programming chops to create applications that historically required tons of expensive telecom hardware, big contracts with telecom carriers and a slew of esoteric telecom skills. Cloud communications abstracts these challenges away, making things like interactive voice response, automated outbound dialing, two-way SMS, text-to-speech and even mobile VoIP as simple to implement as a few lines of code.

In practice, this means embedding SMS tools into your CRM, email software or whatever else you want to use. It means using call tracking to gather metrics on phone calls or sending voice and text messages to notify sales reps about new leads in real-time. It means creating “tap-to-call” capabilities that instantly connect smartphone or iPad users via VoIP to your sales or support agents with a tap on a link in a mobile app or an ad. And for these agents, it means taking calls straight from an iPad – not locked down in some office or call center, but anywhere that wireless internet can go.

If what you’re selling is weaksauce and your content is boring, you will find the post-PC era to be a cold, cold world. But if you can produce products that incite our passions and generate content that resonates through an ever-more-insane degree of noise, you’ll have a shot at becoming part of our feeds. If you do these things while creating new ways to engage us when and where we want to be engaged, the future will be yours.

So what are you waiting for? The latest iPad is selling like crazy and it’s time to think different.

The post-PC world is almost here.

The Truth About Cloud Economics – Drue Reeves and Daryl Plummer – Harvard Business Review

The Truth About Cloud Economics – Drue Reeves and Daryl Plummer – Harvard Business Review.

Drue Reeves and Daryl Plummer | Comments (12)

The financial reasons for the huge growth of cloud services seem crystal clear: cloud computing simply allows us to pay for what we need only when we need it, right?

But the truth is, companies adopting cloud computing often miss the risk and depth of change needed to embrace a cloud economics model as they embrace cloud services. It turns out that the financial model for cloud computing has far more nuances for both a company and its cloud services provider than many people understand up front.

So what is the financial model for cloud computing? Let’s start by saying it’s a combination of how people make money in the cloud and the risks associated with adopting new payment styles. Many people assume it’s all about moving to a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) model and while this is certainly a big piece of it, it also involves operating versus capital expenses, subscriptions to services, and customers paying for outcomes (not technology). The good news is that these models are already familiar to most businesses.

Companies routinely spend money on items vital to the business. They also trade operating expenses for subscriptions and services necessary for business operations, but not directly related to the business. This includes those that would otherwise be too expensive to own and operate (think electricity). They expense nonessential items to someone else who specializes in offering these items as a service.

Cloud computing is no different. Why should a toy or cosmetics company own and operate multiple data centers? It’s much easier and economically sound to pay for a service for a short time period and then stop paying for it when you’re finished with it, rather than wasting money on something another company can do better, faster and cheaper. But this can present issues for both the consumer of the cloud service as well as the provider.

For companies, cloud computing’s new economic model stands in stark contrast to the traditional economic model of IT where we buy technology from a vendor as a capital investment and continue to invest in maintaining and servicing it over time. Traditionally, much of the money allocated to technology has been locked away in capital expense allocations used for buying physical goods. However, cloud services are just that, a service, and require reallocating money to operating expense budgets. This can be a big change when your company must still pay to maintain existing infrastructure. It may even mean that new lines of expenditure must be created if cloud services don’t replace existing services. (And you don’t need us to tell you how hard it is to create new lines of expenditure.)

The reward for this potentially painful transition to operating expense is that the business gains flexibility and the ability to buy the services they need when they need them. But if you’re a CFO, you’ll have to decide whether you like consistent or variable expenditures. Operating expenses can be difficult to predict and control because service subscriptions can come from anywhere at any time. Ask yourself if you have a predictable cloud requisition/governance strategy that makes future service acquisitions easy.

For cloud services providers, the PAYG model’s flexibility lets customers scale their services up or down based on their needs. If the consumer can easily add or subtract resources and pay for cloud services in small increments, the provider has no guarantee of future business. Therefore, to reduce this risk, the provider must dictate service terms and conditions in its favor. But here’s the problem: if the consumer assumes most of the risk, then he will never host a critical application with a cloud service provider. That would limit cloud computing’s market growth to the set of noncritical applications or to small-to-midsize businesses that would rather use cloud services than build a $500 million data center in the U.S.

On the other hand, if cloud providers assume all the risk, then in most cloud environments (with multiple consumers), the amount of liability within a provider’s service could be greater than the value of the company (which we all know is no way to run a business). And if the service provider cannot afford the insurance premiums necessary to cover the liability without raising prices to the level that the service becomes too expensive to consume…well, you get the picture.

So, to combat this kind of risk, cloud providers will enter into what are called “enterprise agreements,” where the two parties can define the parameters of the relationship based on mutual risk sharing. Essentially, this ensures that each party has a vested interest in the financial success of the other party. There’s risk, but there’s also reward for better service.

In the end, providers that deliver better service and better guarantees will ask for — and get — more money. Consumers, on the other hand, will get the flexibility of “pay-as-you-go.” As long as they can figure out a way to pay for it.

The Cloud Brings Advertisers into Music Market – eMarketer

The Cloud Brings Advertisers into Music Market – eMarketer.

APRIL 12, 2012 

New opportunities arise to sponsor content and artists as streaming services gain users and listening hours

A battery of disruptions have roiled the US recording industry and shrunk it in half in just over a decade. The industry’s past experiments with digital media seemed promising at first but have not generated enough revenue to stem losses from sagging sales of compact discs. Against this backdrop, can a new generation of cloud-based streaming models revive the industry?

“The short answer is maybe,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Cloud-Based Music Streaming: Emerging Opportunities for Brands.” “Key trends are pointing in the right direction, including positive technology adoption forecasts, a profusion of social sharing activity connected to music, video channels that are generating revenue and expanded marketing opportunities around music content.”

In a sign of how important online streaming and subscription music services have become to the recording industry, trade publicationBillboard recently updated its weekly Hot 100 song chart to include data from Spotify, Slacker, Rhapsody, Cricket/Muve, Rdio and MOG. The revamped methodology went live in March 2012, after several months of testing that showed a rising curve for audio streams, from 320.5 million in the first week of 2012 to 494 million during the week of March 4, 2012. By comparison, digital track sales during that period decreased from 46.4 million to 27.1 million, according to Nielsen.

Another indicator of the popularity of cloud-based streaming was a 50.5% increase in online music listening hours in 2011. According to a February 2012 report from AccuStream Research, US consumers spent 1.3 billion hours listening to music through internet radio and other streaming services in 2011, up from 865 million hours in 2010.

The media spend associated with US internet radio and on-demand streaming services amounted to $293.7 million in 2011, according to AccuStream Research. This compares with $171.7 million spent on subscriptions to those services. AccuStream forecast that the total market would grow by 78% in 2012.

Ad monetization is expected to grow at a healthy clip on the mobile side as well. eMarketer expects US mobile music advertising revenues to hit $591.5 million in 2015, more than doubling 2012’s total of $264.5 million. According to eMarketer estimates, the advertising component of mobile revenue is much higher with music than with gaming or video, largely because of the popularity of Pandora and Spotify on mobile devices.