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Nielsen Strikes Deal With Alibaba to Shed More Light on Chinese Shopping Habits
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Nielsen, the media and commerce measurement company, has inked a deal with China's Alibaba Group to give manufacturers and brands a better understanding of online shopping habits inside the world's largest nation.
The deal will allow Nielsen to access information about the demographics and habits of Chinese shoppers on Alibaba e-commerce sites such as Taobao and Tmall. By combining that information with shopping data Nielsen already gathers from Chinese brick-and-mortar stores, the company believes it is creating a more holistic view of sales numbers, shopper demographics and shopping trends across both online and offline commerce in China.
"Manufacturers really have to understand consumers not just in the e-commerce channel and not just offline, but really need to understand how people shop across both formats," said John Burbank, president of strategic initiatives at Nielsen.
A multinational or Chinese manufacturer, for example, could use information on the pathway that shoppers take through Web pages on Alibaba sites to help them optimize their own sales attempts.
What's in it for Alibaba? In theory, providing sellers with more information on Chinese shoppers and how they shop could boost sales.
Nielsen already provides clients with some data on the online shopping habits of Chinese consumers, but the integration with Alibaba's data will allow it to get much more granular in its reporting, Burbank said.
The deal, which was in the works for more than a year, is just the first of what will be several ways that the two companies work together, he added.
Companies Can Save Big by Simplifying Their IT
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One of the universal complaints at a company of any size is that working with the IT systems always seems unnecessarily complex. The message has gotten through to the big IT equipment and service vendors, who have responded in the last year or two by adding the word “simplification” to their sales pitches.
And while that feels like a great idea that most people can get behind, doing something about it is another matter. Now there’s some data from the research firm IDC suggesting that companies can cut costs significantly by streamlining their IT systems.
In a study released earlier this week, IDC looked at IT simplification efforts at nine large organizations and found they saved an average of more than $3,600 per user. And while that may not sound like much, the average size of each organization’s user base — they included the defense contractor General Dynamics, the airline Aeromexico, the U.S. Army and one unnamed “major U.S. retailer” — was 23,000. That works out to about $83 million each.
You can likely imagine the reasons that IT gets complex. Companies grow and buy other companies, but never combine their IT resources. Some companies decentralize their IT, allowing one division to do things differently from another. Old applications linger because they’re judged “too important to touch” and never get upgraded. You can also probably add a few more things to this list.
So what did these nine companies do? For one thing, they cut back on the number of servers running in their data centers. Virtualization — the practice of subdividing one computer to act like many while using the same hardware — helped. So did eliminating software applications that overlapped with others. Oracle, which sponsored the study, gets mentioned for its engineered systems, which combine a server with a machine tuned to run its database software.
One big change was shifting some applications to cloud software companies. Before the simplification efforts, the companies in the study group ran 88 percent of their applications on-premise, but reduced that to 43 percent afterward. That move alone improved productivity by 43 percent because of less downtime and trimmed staffing costs by nearly a third, IDC said.
One thing the study leaves out is that achieving this savings requires the up-front investment to buy and install new systems and software.
There’s a lot more to it in IDC’s 12 pages, but I took a screen grab of the most important chart, outlining the breakdown of all the savings IDC identified.
Keep in mind the figures are averaged across all nine companies, though the report coyly notes that one of them saw “significantly higher” benefits per user. Apparently whoever coined the phrase “keep it simple, stupid” was on to something.
Yahoo Buys Israeli Video Startup RayV
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Yahoo has acquired RayV, an Israeli video company.
RayV announced the deal, but not the terms, on its site today; Yahoo hasn’t announced the acquisition. Update: Yahoo has its own post, from cloud services head P.P.S. Narayan.
RayV is an eight-year-old company that sells technology that’s supposed to make it easier to distribute video, by easing bandwidth demands. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo was in talks to buy the company.
Narayan says the deal “demonstrates [Yahoo's] dedication to accelerating our video strategy and boosting our underlying technology infrastructure in the space,” and says that “most” of RayV’s employees will end up working at Yahoo’s R&D center in Tel Aviv.
SpaceX Advances in Its Quest to Win Military Satellite Deals
SPACEX
Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies has completed a key step in the certification process required to finalize any deal to launch U.S. military satellites.
The Hawthorne, Calif., company said on Friday that the Air Force has concluded that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle has completed the three successful flights necessary for certification.
SpaceX says it’s already allowed to compete for the government’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program missions. But it can’t actually seal a contract until it’s fully certified. The company said Friday it expects that to happen later this year.
CEO Elon Musk has argued forcefully that the government needs to allow greater competition for such launches. In late April, the private space flight company lodged an official complaint with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, protesting a single-source contract awarded to United Launch Alliance.
The joint rocket venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing is currently the only organization certified to bid for the Department of Defense satellite missions.
Swift Blog
More signs that Apple is loosening up: they’ve started a blog for Swift and they’ve made the Xcode 6 beta a free download for anyone — no paid developer account required.
What Should YC’s Sam Altman Do With These Bizarre Conway, Paul Graham Oil Paintings?
trying to figure out what to do with these paintings pic.twitter.com/fQRQLvJYZG — Sam Altman (@sama) July 11, 2014 The Conway painting was apparently a gift from Steve Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs and a YC applicant sent in the one of Paul Graham, according to Altman. I would say auction them off for charity. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington once coveted the Conway… Read More
Lyft Will Not Launch In New York Today, Company Says It Will Work With Taxi Commission
New Yorkers hoping to catch a ride with Lyft today are out of luck. The company said via email and on its blog that it’s putting off its NYC launch. Lyft had announced launch plans for Brooklyn and Queens earlier this week, and it said yesterday that it would move forward with those plans despite the fact that the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said the service did not… Read More 
LastPass Finds Security Holes In Its Online Password Manager, Doesn’t Think Anyone Exploited Them
When you’re in charge of keeping many hundreds of thousands of passwords under lock and key, trust is everything. Maintaining that trust means fessing up when things go wrong — even if it’s something you don’t think affected your users. Read More 
Landscape Mobile Launches Sight, Raises Seed Round To Visually Archive Articles
The good folks at the new Beijing and San Francisco-based startup Landscape Mobile have launched Sight today, an app that makes it easier to organize articles on mobile devices. Copying and pasting on mobile devices is a huge pain in the caboose, and Sight solves that problem by allowing users to take a screen shot of whatever they’re reading through the Sight app (available on iOS… Read More 
Instagram Direct Isn’t Dead, The Messaging Feature Has 45 Million Users
Seven months after launching Instagram Direct, 45 million of Instagram’s 200 million users are actively sending or opening Direct messages, the company tells me. This 23% monthly usage rate indicates Direct is far from stillborn. While I haven’t seen or heard of many friends using the ephemeral private sharing channel, it may be quietly gaining steam with those who use Instagram… Read More 
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