2012 100 - Networld Media Group

More documents

Recommendations

Info

1 AMAZON For those who remember Amazon as a really cool online bookstore, the view from <strong>2012</strong> shows just how far the retailer — and the world — has come. What once seemed a promising fad is now an accepted way of life. Amazon’s revenues more than doubled in the past four years, from $14 million in 2007 to $34 million in 2010, and show little sign of slowing down. In the past year, Amazon introduced no fewer than four potentially gamechanging products: Amazon Cloud, AmazonLocal, Kindle Fire and the Price Check smartphone app. Amazon Web Services set the pace for the year in March with an aggressive rollout of cloud products that included Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, Amazon Cloud Player and Amazon Cloud Drive. Users can store music and other digital content in the cloud and play cloud-hosted music tracks via players for the Web and on Android. Although AWS represents just a sliver of Amazon’s total business, UBS Investment Research analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald predict it could capture as much as $2.5 billion by 2014. In June, AmazonLocal launched, and the daily deals service with region-specific deals delivered by LivingSocial quickly became the sixth most-visited website in the U.S., according to comScore. It racked up 97.1 million unique U.S.based visitors in July alone. Amazon rolled out its new line of Kindle readers, and the Kindle Fire tablet in September. The latter was pointedly positioned as a direct rebuke to the iPad 2 and its hefty price tag, as if to suggest that Steve Jobs’ parting gift was essentially a $199 device dressed up in a sleek design and seductive logo. The 7-inch Fire received near-universal acclaim as a fun and versatile, easy-touse tablet that links seamlessly with Amazon’s impressive collection of digital music, video, magazine, and book services. In December, Amazon once again got under the skin of brick-and-mortar merchants by offering discounts to users who took its Price Check app into stores to comparison shop. The deal was that in-store shoppers could earn a 5-percent discount (up to $5) by scanning the barcode of an in-store product and then buying it from Amazon. The howls of protest were hardly confined to abused shopkeepers. Senator Olym- 4
pia Snowe called the incentive “an attack on Main Street businesses that employ workers in our communities,” and called on Amazon to cancel the program. “Small businesses are fighting every day to compete with giant retailers, such as Amazon,” she said in a statement, “and incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far.” Pundits, commentators, latenight comics and principled consumers warned of a future in which the entire physical world would serve as Amazon’s showroom. 2 APPLE Amazon’s third-quarter profits for 2011 were down an alarming 73 percent — yet reported revenues went up 44 percent to $10.9 billion, powered in part by the new generation of Kindle book readers and preorders for Kindle Fire. So where did the money go? Amazon invested it for the future and apparently intends to keep doing so. For one thing, Amazon invested nearly $1.6 billion — double what it spent the year previous — toward “fixed assets, including internal use software and website development,” and another $769 Despite Amazon’s steady march of progress throughout 2011, Apple, true to form, managed to out-dazzle the world’s biggest online retailer every step of the way. The company continued to lure consumers and business users away from desktop computers to the more manageable environment of iOS devices such as the iPad, hastening the day when general-purpose computers are the province of software engineers and tech enthusiasts. The year began with an effort to broaden the iPhone market beyond a single carrier by terminating Apple’s exclusive partnership with AT&T and announcing that the iPhone 4 would be available through Verizon. January also saw the launch of the Mac App Store, Apple’s effort to remake its Mac OS ecosystem in the image of iOS, and thus collect a 30 percent cut of Mac app revenue in the process. In February Apple became the first computer maker to introduce Intel’s Light Peak data transfer technology under the name Thunderbolt. The iPad 2 came out in March even as competitors were struggling to deliver an answer to the original. In October Apple announced a breakthrough set of free cloud services that keep stored data up to date across all devices, including PCs. million to “technology and content,” up 74 percent. Founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has increasingly used Amazon’s cash to expand the business into the digital domain and invest in backend infrastructure to support all the digital media he expects users to consume on their new Kindle Fires. Toward that end, Bezos struck deals with Twentieth Century Fox and PBS to stream movies and TV shows from their vast libraries. (This is in addition to deals previously inked with CBS, Sony, Warner Bros. and others.) The company sold 72 million iPhones (nearly double the total for 2010), 32 million iPads, 17 million Macs and 42.6 million iPods, generating $108 billion in revenue in 2011 — up 66 percent from fiscal 2010. However, Apple’s many marketing, business, and technology achievements through the year were overshadowed by the death of Steve Jobs on Oct. 5, the day after Apple introduced the iPhone 4S. Under the guidance of corporate America’s most high-profile practicing Buddhist, Apple made function not merely inseparable from form, but indistinguishable from it. In Jobs’ hands, the two truly became one. 5
Page 1 and 2: TOP 2012 100
Page 3: WELCOME to the 2012 edition of the
Page 7 and 8: Retail sales are expected to grow a
Page 9 and 10: trend toward shoppers using brickan
Page 11 and 12: Prosper Mobile Insights has found t
Page 13 and 14: 13 RETAIL CRM The future of retail
Page 15 and 16: 19 TRADER JOE’S Privately owned T
Page 17 and 18: 25 TIFFANY 26 STARBUCKS According t
Page 19 and 20: 28 DISNEY 29 DIGITAL SIGNAGE Follow
Page 21 and 22: 33 GROUPON/LIVINGSOCIAL/ETC. The ex
Page 23 and 24: 39 POP-UP SHOPS Although pop-ups ha
Page 25 and 26: 42 TARGET After spending two years
Page 27 and 28: 48 PUBLIX DICK’S SPORTING GOODS P
Page 29 and 30: 54 BEST BUY EBAY Best Buy is taking
Page 31 and 32: 57 RETAIL CROWDSOURCING Crowdsourci
Page 33 and 34: 63 IN-STORE AUDIO While advertising
Page 35 and 36: 70 T MOBILE 71 TWITTER T-Mobile’s
Page 37 and 38: 74 ETHNIC RETAIL The café inside W
Page 39 and 40: 80 FAMILY DOLLAR While other retail
Page 41 and 42: 86 87 RETAIL AT AIRPORTS With malls
Page 43 and 44: 90 ELECTRONIC SHELF LABELS Given th
Page 45 and 46: 96 AUTOZONE Auto parts chain AutoZo
Page 48: DRIVE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND BUILD

2012 100 - Networld Media Group

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?