Category: Amazon

Walmart and Jet

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Prof. Galloway is professing a huge writedown is coming but I’m not sure yet. Mark is a shrewd operator and clearly possesses the skills but the issue issue is can Walmart become something big in ecommerce or not.

Here is the latest on the recent layoffs and Mark’s memo to staff :: http://fortune.com/2017/01/26/walmart-layoffs-ecommerce/

I am also wondering how this will play out internationally. Flipkart is toast in the face of a lone battle against Amazon – might make sense for Walmart to buy it and use it to careen through Asia. I never got why Flipkart with all the cash and over payed execs stuck to India only knowing Amazon and Alibaba would go global.

Fun times. Big bucks.

Interesting times.

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

Alibaba buys Lazada.

Amazon supposedly tried to buy Redmart. For the record – I would have took that deal.

Now Lazada buys Redmart. I don’t know the deal specifics but clearly this was not a sale from a position of strength. Redmart needed cash and I think this was the best option – versus going out of business.

Now Amazon announces they are coming to Singapore. Personally I am stoked. It is hard to not want some sort of Prime Singapore situation. I buy stuff from Lazada from time to time but it is kind of a crappy experience. It works but it is not amazing. Give me fresh, books, video and Alexa all working locally and I think it will be awesome.

Globally no one is equipped to rival that. No one. Sure Alibaba has some of the pieces and they may weave together something similar from the remnants of Lazada, Redmart and all the other products/properties they own but I doubt it can rival Amazon. I also doubt I will have any interest in it.

Some may see this a harbinger of things to come – the global guys coming in but for me I see this as something deeper and far more exciting. SEA is now on the map big time. It’s an ecosystem big enough to care about and if you happen to be here, building for this scene. Cry tears of joy.

Carry on.

Think Simple

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I had wanted to read his first book, Insanely Simple, but just never ended up picking it up.

Happened to be at the book store today to restock for the kids, Yo Kai Vol 5 just in, and came across Ken Segall’s latest book – Think Simple.

So far so good. I am always game for thinking more simply and of course it is easy to want to make things simpler but the reality is the opposite. Hoping to glean a few ideas or to out of the book.

First step is working on a mission statement.

Laterz.

Disruption

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

Picked up on this article by Steve Blank over the weekend – such a good read.

I have worked at a few places in my life – startups, corporates, corporates in decline (Yahoo) and joint ventures masked as vehicles for corporates to try and stem declines (HOOQ). All of them share critical components but the corporates trying to deal with disruption can be very interesting. They don’t have it easy but they also continue to display the classic behaviors that got them to where they are in the first place. 

I notice in the local space that there is not a lot of investigative journalism into the big corporates around Singapore. I am guessing it is too touchy of a subject or maybe doesn’t drive page views. Hard to say.

Having just left HOOQ I would like to say a few things about it since I am asked many times why I went from startup land, Spuul, to pseudo startup land – HOOQ. 

Let me list a few reasons:

– I wanted the chance to get to know Singapore Inc. more closely.

– I wanted exposure to Sony and Warner.

– I was generally intrigued by the concept – 2 big studios work with local telco to try and do something cool in OTT.

– The plan had a solid model – the plan that is. The execution – not so much.

I went into the gig with my eyes wide open. I would learn, I would network and I would gain much needed experience on how to deal with a big corporate giant, actually three of them, trying to innovate. I would have a seat at the board meetings – huge learning opportunity. Boards can help a lot if done right.

Lastly, most importantly for me – I would try and see if I could buck the trend of a large corporate trying a new way to innovate but normally failing. The model had the right ingredients – a joint venture versus a subsidiary, good partners, a worthy business to go after and funds. Most startups don’t have these ingredients but then again most startups also don’t come with any baggage. Usually startups have a green field advantage and the right to make plans as they go whereas a joint venture is immediately plagued with too much funds, large parents to make happy and long range planning processes.

Frankly – it is too early to tell what will happen. Right now the market for OTT in emerging markets is early days. It is all about funding, posturing and moon shots. Obviously Netflix and Amazon will be the largest global players. As I keep saying to folks who constantly ask – who is the Amazon of India – Amazon. Just wait and see.

However folks tend to only thing big and forget that there are some healthy niche businesses out there – take Spuul for example. Doing well, but most folks only want to hear about big fund raising or other PR noteworthy milestones as examples of success.

For video we tend to think of Netflix or maybe YouTube. Right now the YouTube of emerging markets is YouTube. The Netflix for emerging markets – is also probably YouTube cause free and piracy are still the leader around the emerging markets. The idea of building out a robust, and profitable, paid OTT service for the emerging markets is still a work in progress.

HOOQ has a shot but iFlix appears to have the early lead. Will guys like Rakuten, Alibaba and HotStar emerge to try and go big? Don’t know yet. Will Netflix and Amazon slowly take over? Possibly. Will Google eventually get it right around the globe when it comes to premium content? I think not likely. Apple – well, they just seem to suck at emerging markets when it comes to payment models so I am not hopeful.

The race is on. I will continue to armchair quarterback it and share more insights as I go.

Let the bloodbath begin!

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Banged this out yesterday – http://www.nokpis.com/2016/04/18/the-actual-state-of-ott-in-emerging-markets/

The idea being that the expansion of OTT across the planet will be a full scale war and that it won’t simply be handed over to Netflix on a silver platter.

Now we have Netflix with the okay quarter but with a shady forecast: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/18/netflix-posts-a-mixed-q1-but-adds-6-74m-new-subscribers/

Don’t get me wrong here. Netflix is huge and growing but the cost of building out tech and a library for the globe won’t be cheap. They are also losing paid subscribers who can no longer VPN to get the good content. I am in Singapore and the size of the library sucks here. I can’t even get the latest season of many of the Netflix shows. Thankfully I still use my mom’s account so not like I am sweating the subscription.

However on top of dealing with all the regional players, Netflix has to now contend with Amazon.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/04/amazon-starts-offering-prime-video-as-a-8-99-monthly-subscription/

I always assumed Amazon would do this at some point but didn’t expect it this soon. To be frank I had Prime for a bit so I could play with the video service but didn’t keep it due to not having enough content. With the service now being split out I may try it again but I have always found their tech and apps to suck in comparison to HBO and Netflix. Amazon always does just enough to get by versus build the best app ever. It shows with their video apps but maybe this breakout will force them to compete more. Time will tell.

One thing we do know is video is growing like mad – even in Asia. http://variety.com/2016/digital/asia/online-video-further-growth-in-asia-report-1201755475/

I think the market will split off into a few groups and that there will never be one dominant player for the globe or for the Asian regions.

But who the hell knows.

Whither Android…

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t seen much mainstream coverage of this move. We all know Google battled hard to do a non Oracle Java but seems that didn’t work out. Legally I always thought Google was wrong but of course I am not a fan of Oracle and the way they steward Java.

Read this about the latest on Oracle and Android.

If you thought overall Android performance sucks now, I think it does, it sure won’t get any better with issues like this : Google has of course its own Android UI framework. Swing will now sit on every Android phone, using up resources.

I don’t know if this is the final word on the subject or if Google has other ideas but I sure do appreciate Apple’s native stack designed from the ground up for mobile.

I won’t argue the point that Android is huge but this isn’t a good sign of where it is heading.

If anyone has some good opposing links or counters please chime in using the comments.

I was hoping Tim Bray had covered it but not yet.

flockdata

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Met one of the founders this week, Jeremy, for some coffee. Jeremy used to work at AWS Singapore and also did a local startup after that. Then he moved back to the USA to start flockdata with a partner from New Zealand.

http://www.flockdata.com/

There is so much going on in the data world. For guys like me I swear it takes a lot of work just to keep tabs on big data. My world now is keeping tabs on languages, advertising products (customer acquisition and revenue), web tech, mobile tech, streaming tech, analytics and now data. 

There are always lots of ways to skin something – you can roll your own, use the off the shelf stuff from AWS, grab lots of open source stuff or spend lots of cash on commercial products. I guess it all depends on money and time to market.

flcokdata has an interesting model and I plan on checking into it more.

Amazon Instant Video

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

Given the sale yesterday in Amazon Prime, I figured I would get it so that I had access to their movies and their music service. Of course the free delivery thing won’t help me much but figured for 70 odd bucks a year I have lots of new video and audio content. I assume that both product are not as good as Netflix or Spotify and so far that is turning out to be true. Of course Amazon cares more about the overall model than the individual products which means basically that Netflix and Spotify crush it if you just compare the products, which generally is always the case when there is a pure play company versus a conglomerate approach.

What surprises me though is how bad the video app. Given all of their resources one would assume they could make a better app.

As to the VPN issue the app won’t play anything unless I VPN. It also won’t do anything on data – I must be on wifi which I thought odd.

Once you VPN in you must stay VPN’d or it stops working. This is where I have always known that Netflix does really try to GEO block anything cause with Netflix I can disconnect the VPN once the video starts streaming. With Amazon if I disconnect the VPN I get an error immediately. Contrast this with the music app where it appears no VPN is needed at all.

However the video app itself is so buggy. I only use it with Airplay so I can watch on my TV, Amazon is not on the Apple TV FYI, but it consistently would just stop working. If I got notification on my phone the Airplay would stop. Many times the TV would keep running the video without sound and the app would keep playing the video with sound but at different locations. For sure Airplay is not the bug free experience it used to be but on the Spuul app and on Netflix I never see these issues. Once the app goes awry I found I can’t get anything Airplay related working till I bounce the app. Normally if severe Airplay issue you have to bounce the Apple TV.

Content wise there is some interesting stuff. Movies on it that are not on Netflix, TV shows that are also not on Netlfix and of course all the Amazon content which I have yet to look at yet.

All in all a decent value for the money and I assume even more so if I could use the free shipping but it’s silly to me they put out such buggy apps. Silly.

Streaming pile of doo

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

Funny – I just read this :: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6215246

Notice that most of the list is not really about making anything better for users.

Back to the post…

As I am in the states I have been messing around with all the streaming services available in the states. Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Netflix across a variety of devices like TVs, Roku, Apple TV, Sony Blu Ray, Xbox, iPhone, iPad, and who knows what else. Its amazing all the innovation but yet everything is generally a pain in the ass to use and all suffer from edge cases. Nothing is really awesome and nothing works well across all use cases. 

As a precursor to all of this I know the general issue is that the content owners just don’t allow for innovation. It plain and simple how clear that is. So unfortunately I think the whole industry is held back by the owners of the content. This is why piracy is so rampant and in some sense the best user experience because product people can do amazing things with files, networks, and user experiences. Legal services cannot do anything they want and are mostly held back. Such is life. I don’t think this will change anytime soon.

It’s clear to me that even guys like Jason who is building https://www.vessel.com know this which is why they are focusing on user generated content since if they get it right they can do anything they want in reality. Of course there will be markets economics driving some decisions and they have to compete with YouTube while attracting content makers but still the playing field is much less restrictive than real content or shall we say trapped content. I have no idea how vessel will do but I think it will shake the market up some. YouTube is huge but the search experience, the curation and some of the viewing experiences are really broken. They are so big though they don’t care. Vessel has the time, money and experience to make a go of it.

In my own experience of using services while I am in the states I find that the best device to use is still Apple TV but it really could use an update. The remote sucks, the home screen is too cluttered and it needs more apps but the overall experience is better. On a technical note even if I am using Netflix I would rather use it via Apple TV cause it partially deals with one of my Netflix pet peeves which is streaming only and sucks on bad connections. Yes – America is full of shitty connections. However the way the Apple TV works, and it is the only Apple device that does this, the movie is essentially downloading as you watch it which means it does not pixelate or buffer much providing the viewing position is behind the download. If you use the Netflix app, Netflix on the web or Netflix via a smart TV app the streaming only issues will crop up. I need to dig into Roku more but I think it still streams versus downloading. All in all I prefer Apple TV and Netflix.

Problem is though Netflix is pretty shitty content wise. Sure you get the big Netflix hits and a few others but almost all new TV shows are not on it and the movie selection is dim. Which means that as the family gathers around the TV and we want to watch something new – we have being using the Apple TV to purchase movies on iTunes. The selection really is the best for movies and TV shows. Yes it costs money but if 15 of us are sitting in the room and we want to watch a new release, paying 4-10 bucks is still cheaper than going to the movies. So it is actually an affordable deal. Not everything is yet released on it but there is way more new content on iTunes than anywhere else. With Netflix I have to know what I want to watch cause there is no awesome way to sort movies by rating or by other characteristics, it is mostly just genres and then lists in the order that Netflix wants you to see it. I also find that I either want to use the Netflix app on iTunes or I connect my phone to the TV to use the iOS app. The Samsung Netflix apps are shit, the Roku one is okay and the Sony BluRay one is okay. None are amazing. In summation Netflix is the best for streaming, subscription and amount of content all wrapped up into one.

Just a quick side note – Sony makes the worst software ever. No wonder they lose money and are easily hacked.

The big issue I have is Netflix is streaming only. Which sucks if you are on a bad connection, are mobile or want to prep stuff for your kids. There is no way to download anything or cache anything so once you hit the road Netflix is useless. For this I turn to either YouTube or iTunes. YouTube cause I can stream easily on mobile and find lots of kids stuff but of course this is using mobile data. I can’t offline or download YouTube yet. For iTunes I can buy and download stuff and keep it on my device. This is awesome for road trips. It sucks that Apple does this but they can’t seem to figure out streaming. Again this is where any one service cant fit all models well. Netlfix won’t download and iTunes won’t stream. This stuff is not rocket science and it sucks they both can’t figure out how to combine these functions but my guess is that the content guys are part of the problem. I know from my own experience with Spuul that content people can dictate tech or product features. Sad but true.

All this means that there is no perfect service or device – well apart from just pirating whatever you want to watch. I like the Apple ecosystem more than others but it is also ripe for disruption if Apple does not ship a new Apple TV and figure out the cloud. Netflix is obviously the big service for streaming but the inability to control bandwidth, download and sort is such a big miss for me. It will be interesting to see how Netflix conquers new markets with these limitations. Google is in the mix but I honestly don’t use it apart from YouTube – Chromecast is cool and all but Apple TV works better for me. Mostly cause I am into iOS. 

I am sure there a better solutions ahead but the content guys hold the keys I think. So the product guys can innovate all they want but the end result is content is king. The content guys are in the tech dark ages. This is why I am convinced that Vessel is focusing on user generated content first – this way the product can shine.

Merry streaming!