Amazon To Absorb Holiday Shipping Costs
Online retailers cannot risk raising shipping prices. The sluggish economy combined with high fuel prices are hurting Americans financially but Amazon.com and other online retailers are unlikely to increase shipping costs out of fear of losing customers.Contracts with shippers may protect Amazon and some others as companies look for ways to cut costs. Companies such as Amazon and Overstock depend on low or free shipping to attract business.
UK To Get First WordCamp Event
This is an event I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while – WordCamp UK 2008, the first WordCamp in the UK, takes places in Birmingham during this weekend July 19-20.
Is Google Digging Itself?
Rumors had floated for weeks Google was negotiating to buy Digg.com for purposes of enhancing Google News. But it looks like Google is already integrating Digg-like features in a surprisingly open round of testing in the search results. With Google’s slate of engineers, one wonders why they would buy a site if they could replicate the same idea. Imagine results created by users voting them up or down, results users can comment on and rate the comments of others.
Web Sites Names Most Walkable Cities In U.S.
Walk Score, a site that ranks the walkability of 2,508 neighborhoods in the 40 largest cities in the U.S., has released its rankings of the top most walkable cities.Walk Score says the most walkable city in America is San Francisco, scoring an 86 out of a possible 100. Other cities topping the list include New York City with a score of 83 and Boston with a score of 79.
Second Quarter Results Sink eBay’s Stock
eBay’s second-quarter earning report was respectable, all in all, with increases occurring in most measurable categories. Many of those increases didn’t meet investors’ expectations, though, and the company seems to have adopted a cautious outlook for the future.
Google Gets $1.10 For Every New Dollar Spent
For every new dollar spent on search marketing, Google grabs $1.10. Probably the last time you heard a number like that, it was from a basketball coach at half-time encouraging you to give the mythical one hundred and ten percent. How does that happen in real numbers? Looks like Google takes a little from Yahoo and Microsoft.
YouTube Now On TiVo
Starting today TiVo will offer its subscribers access to YouTube videos on their television sets through their broadband TiVo boxes.TiVo’s deal with YouTube is the company’s first for streaming online content. TiVo does have partnerships with 60 online sites that offer content. Users will not be able to store YouTube videos, but they will be able to view them and bookmark them to watch later.
Price check: Google/Yahoo deal means 22 percent increase
Keyword bids will become more expensive with Google’s search advertising deal with Yahoo, one search management firm contended.
Amazon Launches New Online Video Store
Online retailing giant Amazon.com is launching a new online service that will feature TV shows and movies called Amazon Video on Demand.Initially Amazon Video on Demand will only be available to a limited number of invited customers starting today and becoming more widely accessible to other users later in the summer.
No Indexing Guarantee From Google Flash Crawls
Just because Google says they pry out the text content from Flash files and make them searchable may mean less than webmasters think.