- Online Reviews? Researchers Give Them a Low Rating: Reviews tell us what to read next, where to eat dinner and what to order there, where to go on vacation and what doctor to call. Soon, as Google demonstrated with the introduction of its voice-activated Google Home device in May, reviews will be read aloud to you as you lie on the couch, wondering what movie to see next. But if reviews are ubiquitous, there are also persistent controversies over how many of the reviews on the internet were bought by the subject rather than written as finely reasoned opinions from a neutral party, and whether that distorts all results.But if reviews are ubiquitous, there are also persistent controversies over how many of the reviews on the internet were bought by the subject rather than written as finely reasoned opinions from a neutral party, and whether that distorts all results. In May, Yelp issued 59 new Consumer Alerts, which are notices it puts on a business’s page that it has been caught trying to pay for better reviews. Among those cited were a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and an emergency room in Humble, Tex. Lifehacker.com recently took on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, arguing their way of compiling reviews was “fundamentally flawed.” FiveThirtyEight.com reported that “men are sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women.” (Why? Because they can.) Bart de Langhe, an assistant professor of marketing at Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, used to see numerical reviews online and accept them implicitly. Then, when his son was born three years ago, he needed to buy a car seat. Mr. de Langhe noticed that the seat rated lowest by Consumer Reports got a high rating on Amazon, and the one rated highest by Consumer Reports received a low rating on Amazon. The more popular seat on Amazon was also more expensive. Were reviewers, he wondered, paying more attention to things like price and brand than the objective, measurable ability of the seat to protect its occupant? With two other researchers, Philip Fernbach and Donald Lichtenstein, Mr. de Langhe began a study that compared online reviews for items like air-conditioners and car batteries with the evaluations in Consumer Reports. “Navigating by the Stars” was published in April in The Journal of Consumer Research. After analyzing 344,157 Amazon ratings of 1,272 products in 120 product categories, the researchers found “a substantial disconnect” between the objective quality information that online reviews actually convey and the extent to which consumers trust them. In other words, the consumer saw a number — 4.6 stars out of 5 — and took it much more seriously than it merited. Nearly half the time, Amazon reviewers and the Consumer Reports experts disagreed about which item in a random pair was better. Moreover, average user ratings did not predict resale value in the used-product marketplace, another traditional indicator of quality.
- Amazon to Invest Additional $3 Billion in India, CEO Bezos Says: Amazon.com Inc. will invest $3 billion more to build its business in India, bringing the company’s total pledged investment in the country since 2014 to $5 billion as it chases growth outside the U.S. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of the Seattle-based online retailer, announced the investment Tuesday at the U.S.-India Business Council’s Leadership Summit in Washington, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to executives from U.S. companies. “We have already created some 45,000 jobs in India and continue to see huge potential in the Indian economy,” Bezos said in a statement from the council. “Our Amazon.in team is surpassing even our most ambitious planned milestones.” Amazon gets most of its international revenue from the U.K., Germany and Japan. The company doesn’t break out sales from India, instead including it in a group with other international markets. Revenue from that group in 2015 reached $7.4 billion, or 6.9 percent of total sales. Amazon has targeted India as an area ripe for growth, and has been spending to challenge local e-commerce company Flipkart. Bezos said at a conference last week that Amazon is doing most of the last-mile deliveries and opening more distribution centers in India. Bezos also highlighted achievements in India in his annual letter to shareholders. They included the launch of Seller Flex, which uses Amazon sellers’ warehouses to store other products sold on Amazon, helping the company quickly expand its delivery capabilities. Amazon’s cloud computing division is also developing new infrastructure in India.
- Sovereign wealth funds throw funding lifeline to tech ventures: A succession of funding deals by deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds have thrown a life preserver to some of the world’s biggest private tech firms whose high valuations have come under scrutiny in the past year. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States along with state-backed investors in Singapore and China have ploughed money into hot tech investments such as ride-sharing company Uber and Chinese Internet giant Alibaba and its private affiliates. With overall funding for start-ups slowing down by a third to $25.5 billion in the last two quarters, according to data from CB Insights, high-profile ventures are turning to government funds or institutional money to create "private IPOs" rather than to venture capitalists or chancing public listings. These capital injections have helped to keep valuations high as other tech ventures such as those of cloud storage service Dropbox or Indian takeaway food ordering app Zomato have been marked down by some earlier backers. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund said last week it invested $3.5 billion in Uber, Silicon Valley's most highly valued private company. At $62.5 billion, the car-sharing firm is worth more than the stock market capitalizations of automakers BMW or GM and close to VW, Daimler and Ford. Also last week, Singapore's two big government investors bought $1 billion of Alibaba Group shares, while in April, China Investment Corp, took part in a $4.5 billion round in Alibaba's financial services affiliate ANT Financial with other investors, marking the largest ever funding round in a fintech firm. Saudi Arabia's $3.5 billion stake in Uber was the largest ever single private investment in a tech company while the Kuwait Investment Authority took the lead this year in a $165 million private equity funding for struggling U.S. wearable devices maker Jawbone, one of seven tech and healthcare ventures it has made in the last two years. Qatar Investment Authority invested in Uber and Indian ecommerce firm Flipkart in 2014. Norway’s $865-billion fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth investor, is a major backer of publicly traded tech stocks such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O), but it can only invest in an unlisted company in the final run up to a public offering. Restrictions on private investments mean it passed on an offer from Facebook (FB.O) to invest several years ago.
- The unsexiest trillion-dollar startup: Steve Jobs went ballistic when public shipping manifests leaked the existence of the iPhone 3G. That’s about the only time something exciting happened in the freight forwarding business. The circulatory system of the global economy is a trillion-dollar industry, yet no one really talks about it, or builds tech for it. That’s what makes freight such a massive disruption opportunity for a startup likeFlexport. Transparency begets data, which begets efficiency. Smarter shipping shrinks the physical world the way faster internet shrinks the digital one. New businesses emerge. High bandwidth connections paved the way for Netflix. Now Flexport could make meatspace merchants as nimble as Amazon. With $26.9 million in funding, Flexport grew the volume of goods it ships by 16X this year. Y Combinator president Paul Graham says “Flexport is one of that small handful of startups that are going to change the world.” Freight might finally be getting the weight of attention it deserves. Stick with me. Anything weighing over 150 kilos can’t be sent like a parcel through the postal service. It qualifies as freight, and can require several separately owned vehicles to deliver it across land, sea, or air from its source like a factory to a destination like a retail store. To get the best deal on each leg of the journey and handle the hand-offs through customs, freight forwarding services serve as an organizational logistics layer. They have direct relationships with carriers like truck owners and massive shipping container boats. But like I said, it’s an unsexy business, so until recently, freight forwarding was still being done with a jumble of Excel, email, fax, and paper manifests shipped around the world. That made it extremely tough to spot overspending or snags in supply chains. That is, until Flexport indexed all the available carriers into a searchable database in its free software for organizing and tracking shipments. In 2016 it’s moved freight to or from 64 countries for over 700 clients like Ring and Le Tote, with a $1.5 billion annual run-rate of merchandise value shipped. There’s 2.4 million toys and 412,000 pieces of glassware currently in transit on the Flexport platform. Its investors include First Round, Founders Fund, Felicis, GV (Google Ventures), Box Group, Bloomberg Beta, and Ashton Kutcher. That’s quite an ascent considering Petersen admits “I didn’t learn what the term ‘freight forwarder’ meant until a year into starting the business.”
- Mother-Son Team Demo Translate For Code: Meet Roslyn Scott and Dalton Scott, a mother and son team who just demoed a neat idea for making code more accessible, here at the Disrupt London 2015 hackathon. Their hack, called the Human Code Project, uses several IBM Watson APIs, including its Natural Language Classifier, to power a search interface for translating JavaScript code terms into plain English. It’s designed much like a language translation interface, so someone who’s trying to understand what a piece of code is doing can search for a particular Javascript word or phrase within that code to see a definition of what a term such as ‘onclick’ might mean in that particular context. The interface returns a percentage breakdown of how confident the system is in its definition for that term. During the hackathon they uploaded a training document to Watson, and created two classifier sets — one for definitions of code terms and one for phrases, explains Roslyn.
- Some Twitter Users Call Foul as It Switches Moments and Notifications Buttons: Twitter moved Moments for Web and Android viewers yesterday to where the Notifications button once was, causing considerable consternation among faithful users. In a nutshell, many in the Twitterati—thanks to muscle memory—are reflexively tapping the Moments button by accident when they want to check their notifications. Numerous tweets accuse the company of tricking users. San Francisco-based Twitter has declined comment. But the move raises the question—as a few of the tweets above hint at—about whether or not the social media company is happy with the metrics that Moments has been getting so far. The end of the fourth quarter is near, and newly re-appointed CEO Jack Dorsey would certainly like to tell Wall Street investors during the next earnings call that Moments is drawing a big crowd. Twitter has made Moments a centerpiece development since Dorsey came back to the helm. Additionally, Digiday reported this week that Twitter's ads for Moments, called Promoted Moments, have an asking price of $1 million. So it stands to reason that Twitter needs Moments to scale in order to make such a purchase worth it for brands.
- Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers as Its Transportation Ambitions Grow: Amazon goes to great lengths to get packages into customers’ hands as quickly as possible — even if it means employing drones. Those efforts will now include putting thousands of Amazon-branded trucks on the road. The ever-ambitious online retailer planned to announce on Friday morning that it had purchased “thousands” of trailers — the part of a tractor-trailer that stores the cargo — to make sure it had the shipping capacity to move products on time as its North American business continues its rapid growth. The trailers won’t be used to deliver packages to customer doors. Instead, they’ll be utilized to transport items from one Amazon warehouse, known as a fulfillment center, to another, as well as between fulfillment centers and sort centers, where Amazon organizes orders by zip code to be delivered to local post offices. A spokeswoman stressed that Amazon would continue to rely on existing trucking partners, which own and drive the tractor portion of the vehicles that will tow the Amazon trailers. The announcement comes as Amazon’s North American retail business is growing at its fastest clip in several years. Revenue for this unit grew 35 percent in the third quarter, fueled by product assortment expansion in categories such as apparel and the growth of Amazon’s hugely popular Prime membership program. The trucking announcement marks the latest initiative aimed at taking more control over how quickly the company can get goods into the hands of its customers. While Amazon continues to utilize trucking partners to move goods within its warehouse network, and UPS and FedEx for package delivery to customer doors, it is increasingly unveiling initiatives to take over more of these functions. Former employees say the goal is to someday be able to circumvent UPS or FedEx entirely, in large part so that snafus like the one that caused late deliveries during the 2013 holidays don’t happen again. One guess on why Amazon only wants to own the trailer at this point: If it owned the tractor, it would have to register as a commercial trucking company and incur the insurance costs and liability risks that come with that. By sticking with just the trailer body, Amazon potentially saves money and avoids other potential headaches. That said, some reports suggest Amazon may eventually go all the way and own the trucks, too.
- Samsung to finally pay Apple $548 million in patent dispute: Samsung fought until the bitter end to avoid paying Apple, but the company now says it will finally hand over the more than $548 million it owes for infringing the patents and designs of its biggest smartphone rival. In papers filed in federal court in San Jose, California on Thursday, Samsung Electronics said it will make the payment by Dec. 14 if Apple sends an invoice on Friday. Asked if it had done so, Apple declined to comment on Friday. The payment comes after a U.S. appeals court last May reduced a $930 million judgment against Samsung by $382 million, stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple patents and copying the look of the iPhone. Another trial over remaining damages relating to some of Samsung's infringing products in the case is set to go ahead next spring. Even though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. had authorized damages to Apple in May, Samsung again appealed the final figure to the same court, and was rebuffed twice more. Now agreeing to pay, Samsung told the San Jose court that it expects to be reimbursed if it eventually succeeds in a forthcoming appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over its liability for copying the patented designs of the surface, bezel and user interface of the iPhone, which accounted for $399 million of the total award.
- All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy - Online Odd Job Site Fiverr In Focus Over Fake Reviews : The holiday online shopping season has begun, and that means reading lots of online product reviews. Some of these reviews are helpful, others are not. And many are fakes — raves or pans from people who have never actually used the product. Where do fake reviews come from? In this column, a close-up look at one notable source. Q. Starting in early November, and over the course of a week, the Facebook business page for the company where I work, Long’s Jewelers, was hit with 200 one-star reviews. Many of the reviews arrived in a matter of minutes, and all were left without comment. They were bogus reviews that were composed by a freelance spammer, who we believe was paid by one of our competitors. Our average customer rating on our Facebook page fell from 4.8 stars to 2.3 stars. We contacted Facebook, which at first refused to help. I wrote a post on a marketing website, asking for the community’s aid, and then released a statement asking for the public’s assistance. My pleas went viral enough to compel Facebook to re-examine the issue, and it has since taken down nearly all of the purchased reviews. Through a bit of sleuthing, I found that the reviews came through a website called Fiverr, where people offer to perform odd jobs for $5 and up. Leaving negative reviews is apparently one of those jobs. Fiverr banished the person who wrote these particular sham reviews, but hundreds of other people are still on the site, offering a similar service. Fiverr, which started in 2010, is based in Israel and hosts thousands of people performing tasks in hundreds of categories. The sellers use pseudonyms, for some reason, and most gigs, as they are called, are perfectly legitimate, even delightful. “I will create a 16-line song about anything,” reads a gig by Tylerbarks. “I will write message in beach sand at sunrise,” reads another by Batykefer1. But the Haggler rummaged around Fiverr and quickly found dozens of people offering to post positive reviews to Facebook, different Google sites, the Apple App Store, iTunes and elsewhere. None said anything about trumped-up negative reviews, but fabricated raves are nearly as bad — or perhaps just as misleading, though perhaps not quite as malicious.
- Google Ventures Owns Part of Several Unicorns, but the Biggest (and Trickiest) Is Uber: The venture firm has $2.4 billion under management and has invested in 300 companies, a number of which have secured billion dollar valuations (a.k.a. unicorn status). According to new figures released on Sunday, the VC shop added 39 new startups in 2015, including significant bets in commerce (Jet.com), biotech (Editas) and agricultural software (Farmer’s Business Network), a new terrain. Most investments during the year, nearly a third, went into life sciences and health companies, followed by consumer and enterprise startups. It is hard to anticipate that any of these investments will be bigger than Uber — in dollars sunk in or payout. In 2013, Kara Swisher reported that Google Ventures spent $250 million for 1.8 million Series C-1 preferred shares in the ride-hailing app startup. At a then $3.5 billion valuation, that put its stake just north of 7 percent. (Google Ventures declined to comment on this or the size of any other investment stakes.) Uber is now reportedly en route to a valuation of $62.5 billion. Its many subsequent rounds since 2013 have likely diluted Google Ventures’ share, although a source familiar with the deal terms says not by much. Even at the low end of analyst estimation, around 2 percent ownership, the Google Ventures share would, at Uber’s current valuation, hit fivefold return. And who knows how Uber will climb before an IPO. Increasingly, however, it’s a sticky situation. As Uber balloons, many of its ambitions — in mobile app integrations, mapping and self-driving cars — are aimed squarely at Google. The startup is partly driven, several sources said, by a concern the search giant could one day clobber it. Google should be worried if it can’t.
