In this issue of Recap in Tech – FCC Net Neutrality Plan Causes Discord, Amazon Falls Short of Quarterly Earnings, Facebook Launching Ad-Tech Analytics, and Apple Pay to Drive Discussions at Money 20/20.
FCC Net Neutrality Plan Causes Discord
The FCC is attempting to make everyone happy with a determination about how to regulate broadband regulatory control. Supporters of Net Neutrality feel that certain content providers cannot gain speed deals that would allow their content to work quicker than others. No matter what the decision is broadband providers will most certainly fight back. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has stated that the goal is to create an internet where there are rules and guidelines which will prevent providers from doing things like slowing down or even blocking certain content for customers.
Amazon Falls Short of Quarterly Earnings
There is some concern among Amazon.com investors that the recent downward trend the online retailer’s stock has seen will continue. Even though the superstore and technology company has announced some innovations this calendar year, their stock continues to move down. Amazon’s big solution seems to be to open a retail location in New York City. The model is similar to an Apple retail store, but the location will also serve as a warehouse for smaller, local deliveries as well as a potential tourist destination. The location is planned for across the street from the Empire State Building. Amazon is also planning a series of thousands of lightning deals to coincide with the Black Friday retail sales.
Facebook Launching Ad-Tech Analytics
In a world where statistics and metrics equal money well spent, online analytic tools are becoming more popular than ever. Google Analytics sets the bar and is typically the standard for any website statistics studies, but it now appears that social networking site, Facebook, is entering the analytics field, too. On an earnings call held earlier this week, investors were stunned to hear of Facebook’s plans to spend as much as $3-5 billion dollars more on operations in 2015. They are funding an expansion of its product line including a new ad tech platform. Facebook is on-track to earn $3 billion in net profits this year and next year. From my experience, the two tools I use regularly for statistics management are Google Analytics and Facebook’s stats tool (for tracking page hits). I believe Facebook could hit a homerun with this type of offering because they have done such a good job with stats on their own site thus far.
Apple Pay to Drive Discussions at Money 20/20
Money20/20 kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas and it’s highly anticipated that Apple’s mobile payment system, Apple Pay, will be the talk of the conference. The tech-industry conference will have representatives from technology companies, retailers, banks and payment networks in attendance at the four-day conference. The conference will have a lot of focus surrounding mobile payment platforms and since Apple Pay’s release on October 20, the public’s awareness of the payment option type will bring mobile payments out into the open. There is a high amount of anticipation surrounding the amount of competitors that will begin coming to market. MCX, Softcard and credit-card networks Visa and MasterCard are scheduled to talk about their mobile payment strategies at this conference. Apple will actually not be presenting during the week.
