Also: Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For is now available exclusively on the iPad. (Download it here.)
The online retailer says that it has developed its MP3 store to operate seamlessly on Apple’s Safari mobile browser, offering personalised recommendations, bestseller lists and Amazon ratings.
When a user makes a purchase, it is automatically transferred to their Amazon Cloud Player account (which holds 5GB of free storage) and can be played back using the Cloud Player mobile apps, which are available on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android smartphone or tablet, Roku, Sonos system, or any web browser.
Google’s Larry Page on why moon shots matter [WIRED]
Wired: Now you have a separate division called Google X, dedicated to moon-shot projects like self-driving cars. Why did you decide you needed to set up an entire department for this?
Page: I think we need to be doing breakthrough, non-incremental things across our whole business. But right now Google X does things that can be done more independently.
You know, we always have these debates: We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren’t we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that’s working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying. I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people’s lives better. At Google we’re attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space. And all the tech companies combined are only at like 1 percent. That means there’s 99 percent virgin territory. Investors always worry, “Oh, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But those are now the things they’re most excited about—YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.
Why SurveyMonkey is holding off on an IPO [FORTUNE]
“I took my first company public and worked at Yahoo (YHOO) for seven years, and I saw plenty of decisions made because of what it would do to the stock price that week,” he says. One of Silicon Valley’s best networked (and well liked) executives, Goldberg also witnessed up close last year’s most tumultuous IPO, the still-underwater debut of Facebook (FB), where his wife, Sheryl Sandberg, is chief operating officer. “There are lots of good reasons for going public,” says Goldberg, ticking off growth capital, brand recognition and credibility with business customers as chief examples. “We just don’t have any of them.”
Facebook Graph Search’s dirty promise and the con of the Facebook “Like” [STEVE’S BLOG]
The truth however is that the link between query intent and your social interactions for interests and places is much weaker than FB wants you to believe.
In computer architecture they call an out of date piece of data “dirty”. Accessing dirty data is bad, wasting time and causing more harm than good. And in this context, much of the structured data that makes up Graph Search is just that:totally irrelevant and dirty.
It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale. Never mind does the data not really represent user intent… but the user did not even ‘like’ what she was liking.
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