E-commerce

Etsy's crafty balance: Fans vs. trademark holders

BROOKLYN, N.Y.--It's a languid, late-summer Wednesday afternoon at the offices of online handmade-goods marketplace Etsy, and Chief Technology Officer Chad Dickerson is sitting at a table in a conference room decorated to look like a cartoonish version of the interior of a Mercury-era space capsule.

Surrounded by fake panic-button consoles, plush jet packs, and quilts depicting outer-space views of moons and planets, Dickerson is peering at his laptop screen to report a particularly important number that he's just been asked to look up: "We've got 263 search results for 'Justin Bieber.'"

That's 263 listings at this precise moment in time by Etsy sellers hawking homemade shoelaces, tapestries, pendants, and pillows (to name a few) featuring the visage of the sugary pop singer. Bieber is hardly alone on Etsy; poke through its listings, and you'll find necklaces in the shape of the "Golden Snitch" winged orb from the "Harry Potter" series, cuff links painted to look like the head of "Star Wars" robot R2-D2, and bottle cap pendants featuring the bronzed face of "Jersey Shore" star "DJ Pauly D."

Fan creations are a funny thing. For well more than a decade, the Web has provided an unprecedented gathering space for loyal and zealous followers of literary, cinematic, and televised franchises who might not otherwise ever interact, allowing many phenomena that were once cult hits to achieve mainstream, mass-market success and often phenomenal profitability. Sometimes, as with the sale of unofficial DJ Pauly D pendants and Star Wars cuff links, the fans stand a chance of profiting, too. And the trademark and copyright holders aren't always happy about it.… Read more

Travel companies band together against Google

Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Sabre Holdings, and several other online travel companies have created the FairSearch.org coalition to try to block Google's acquisition of ITA Software.

In a blog post announcing its launch, FairSearch said that Google "presents a threat to competition and transparency in online travel search, and could lead to higher travel prices and less choice for consumers."

Back in July, Google announced that it intended to acquire ITA for $700 million. The search giant said at the time that ITA, which collects flight, seating, and pricing data from airlines and provides them to online … Read more

PayPal growth helps eBay beat the Street again

Continued strong performance from its PayPal online commerce system led auction and retail giant eBay to surpass Wall Street's expectations once again in third-quarter earnings. Analysts had predicted $2.18 billion in revenue on earnings of 37 cents per share; eBay posted $2.25 billion on earnings of 40 cents per share. Net income was up 14 percent.

PayPal has been adding more than a million accounts per month, now with over 90 million active users worldwide. It's been eBay's strongest weapon for quite some time now, fueling better-than-expected performance in the company's past few quarterly reports. … Read more

Google posts strong Q3 financial results

Google continues to pile up the money, beating analyst estimates today for revenue and earnings for its third quarter.

Third-quarter revenue, excluding the traffic acquisition costs Google pays to its partners, was $5.48 billion, exceeding estimates from analysts polled by Yahoo Finance of $5.25 billion for the quarter. Overall revenue of $7.29 billion increased by 23 percent, compared to last year's third quarter, on the back of a 16 percent jump in paid clicks across Google's network of Web sites.

"We're very pleased with our Q3 results, and it's clear that the … Read more

NPD puts some gaming sales data behind pay wall

It appears that the market researchers at The NPD Group are changing the way they distribute gaming sales data such that it is more profitable.

Starting this week, with its September release, NPD's free monthly gaming reports will no longer include the following:

Hardware unit sales Software unit sales Individual versions of a title in its bestselling-games list

Instead, the reports will list the top-selling games of the month by title, with all versions of the game included in a single listing. The new reports will also include a statement saying the retail information it collected for the month … Read more

Are iOS apps more popular than 'American Idol'?

Games running on Apple's iOS are starting to match prime-time television shows in overall consumption, a new study from Flurry Analytics claims.

According to the research company, 19 million people currently spend an average of 22 minutes each day playing iOS games, or accessing social networks on their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. That total number of users easily eclipses viewership of Sunday Night Football games, "Undercover Boss," and other top shows. It's also just 4 million viewers shy of top show "American Idol."

That said, Flurry's numbers could be quite low, compared … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg, comic book action hero?

If you needed any further proof that the story of Facebook's origins has captivated the world, get this: A Vancouver-based comic book company called Bluewater Productions announced on Monday that later this year, it'll be releasing a title called "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook."

The team behind it says it is attempting to strike a balance between portraying Zuckerberg as a benevolent philanthropist and critical player in the hot education reform movement, and a ruthless young business genius in the league of the film "The Social Network," which premiered Friday in New York to rave reviews.… Read more

mSpot revises price plan

mSpot, a cloud-based service that stores your music and lets you stream it to your Android phone, announced new pricing and features today.

The company will continue to offer music fans 2GB of free storage. But instead selling various paid tiers that topped out at 100GB for $13.99 a month, the company now has just one paid plan: up to 40GB of storage for $3.99 a month.

This makes mSpot more competitive on a price-to-storage basis with its main rival, MP3tunes However, MP3tunes offers far greater capacity, with multiple plans topping out at 200GB for $12.95 per … Read more

Rhapsody move revs up independence march

Subscription music pioneer Rhapsody was spun out from joint owners RealNetworks and Viacom in April, and it immediately declared its independence by dropping the price of its mobile service from $15 to $10 per month. Since then, the service has introduced offline playback to its iPhone application--critical, if you want to be able to get the most out of your subscription while on AT&T's notoriously flaky 3G network--and successfully launched an Android version, which will be getting offline playback shortly.

Tomorrow, the company is set to announce that it's moving its streaming service from several data … Read more

The end of software ownership--and why to smile

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

Consumer advocates are up in arms over a recent ruling by a federal court of appeals in Seattle. The decision, Vernor v. Autodesk (PDF), held that the terms of an end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, can change the sale of commercial software into a mere license, in this case a license that prohibits users from reselling their copy of the software.

The case involved an eBay seller named Timothy Vernor. Vernor bought several outdated copies of Autodesk's AutoCAD program from a business that had originally purchased the … Read more