Amazon’s Twitch purchase heralds a new age of creative consumption August 28, 2014 It's enough to make an accountant develop a nervous one. This week Amazon snapped up Twitch, a video platform and community for computer gamers, paying the princely sum of $970m (£585m) in cash. That’s a lot of money for something many people have never heard of – more than three times the amount Amazon spent [...]
Amazon share price falls as authors plot US Department of Justice approach over Hachette dispute September 24, 2014 Amazon's share price fell in early trading today, after it emerged that a group of more than 1,000 authors were poised to take the standoff with publisher Hachette to the US Department of Justice. Shares at the internet giant were down 0.7 per cent in mid-morning trading in New York. Writers including Malcolm [...]
How successful people spend their holiday August 18, 2015 Neglect planning at your peril That's my lesson for taking a vacation: vacation will kill you,” surmises Tesla founder Elon Musk in a recent biography, having contracted a severe bout of malaria following a holiday in Africa in 2000. Indeed, the most successful business leaders don’t necessarily have the most successful holidays; last year, [...]
Dixons Carphone hikes dividends as it smashes forecasts July 16, 2015 It seems Dixons Carphone is reaping the benefits of being the UK's last electronics retailer standing, after full-year profits smashed expectations. The figures Formed by a merger of electronics giant Dixons and mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse last year, the company has gone from strength to strength since its creation. Results for the 13 months [...]
eSports is Amazon’s big bet on the future – Bottom Line August 25, 2014 While eSports may look and sound like child’s play, it is in fact big business. Last year the industry attracted 71.5m online viewers worldwide, with Twitch being the destination of choice for over 75 per cent of viewers, and total prize money across eSport competitions reached $25m. While those viewer numbers are a drop in [...]
Aldi Shmaldi: Conviviality Retail’s Bargain Booze is playing German discounter at its own game June 16, 2015 Last week it was teachers, this week it's rival retailers. Aldi has suddenly become the brand to beat. Conviviality Retail – which runs Bargain Booze – has this week launched a head-to-head campaign with budget grocer Aldi, pitting its prices for big-label brands such as Carlsberg Export and Smirnoff against the supermarket's own label [...]
Amazon Fire smartphone now available in Europe with O2 tie-up in the UK September 8, 2014 Amazon Fire phone, the internet retailer’s first smartphone, will go on sale in the UK on 30 September after launching in the US in June. Amazon has partnered with O2 to offer the phone exclusively on the network. It will also launch in Germany exclusively on Deutsche Telekom network. The handset is available to pre-order from [...]
The UK must digitally disrupt to grow the economy and create jobs, or be disrupted July 23, 2015 Not many things are guaranteed in life, but the power of technology to disrupt our lives is one that is. Whether we look at the creation of the first personal computer in the 60s, the arrival of the World Wide Web in the 80s, or the smartphone connected world we now occupy; digital technology has [...]
Amazon hires Visa credit card’s Nick Talwar to expand lending business August 31, 2014 Amazon has hired Visa North America credit card boss Nick Talwar to expand Amazon Lending. When the e-commerce giant first set up the lending business three years ago, very little was said about it. There were no press releases or public announcements, and knowledge of it was limited to private invitations sent to a [...]
Michael Moritz: Billionaire venture capitalist on leadership and his new book with Sir Alex Ferguson September 27, 2015 If you meet Michael Moritz, you’re speaking to a venture capitalist whose investments include Google, PayPal, Yahoo and LinkedIn. He was the man Steve Jobs described as Apple’s “historian”, and went on to write the first history of the company, The Little Kingdom. His firm, Sequoia Capital, forms close relationships with young founders, whose companies [...]