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Almost half way through the week, time flies. A little cool today, didn't even make it to the mid 50s, but still fine, nowhere near winter weather.
A quick picture of Laia heading out with her mommy to Garden of Eden to buy a kombucha tea.
Busy day at work today, we run our October 2013 Super Saturday event. Lots of bright candidates from top East Coast schools, coding tests, interviews, presentations and great food.
In other news, FC Barcelona beat Real Madrid today in El Clasico. Neymar and Alexis scored, yay!
It's starting to get a little cooler, the weather had been almost too kind with us thus far. Our building flip on the heat a couple of days ago, and sure enough, it's 47 outside right now. I mean, that's not really "cold" but it's not pleasant either, you need a jacket. It was most noticeable, for the first time this season, this morning on the way to work. Hope it still bounces back and we get a couple more weeks of warmth 
Amazon is the giant online retailer. A monster that put CompUSA, Circuit City, Borders, and soon probably Best Buy out of business.
It carries a huge selection, offers free shipping, and most of the time it has best prices. With its tech smarts and logistics prowess it will drive some $75 billion in sales this year. Looks tough for any other single retailer to stop them. Even mighty Walmart has started to get scared, they launched @walmartlabs to compete on the tech side - long overdue - and started 2 offices in Silicon Valley.
The one thing Amazon cannot seem to do is deliver profits for investors. With their Q3 earnings call only a few days ahead, it is not expected it will be any different this time around. And so, the debate rages on: will it deliver profits, ever. Some will say that is by design, Amazon operates at break even with razor thin margins on all the products it sells, and that it's investing in the future. Others say it's a slippery slope and with their "discount" business model running at scale it will be very difficult to course correct and start generating profits. The only way to do it will be by raising prices, and consumers will notice, and cry foul.
Carefully observing Amazon as a consumer, I see chips in the armor, a few signs that Amazon is starting to feel the pressure to deliver profit. Here are 3 you may have picked up on as well:
1) It recently announced that it will raise the threshold for Free Shipping from $25 to $35. That is non-insignificant
2) Their Amazon Warehouse marketplace has become far less attractive for bargain hunters, and generally issues very stingy discounts on used merchandise anymore. Not surprising, it's the first place where one would expect they would start to tighten the screws.
3) They have changed their "next day shipping" fee for Prime customers. It used to cost $3.99 to get any time delivered next day. All of a sudden, with no warning or explanation, Amazon changed that to a variable fee based on the weight and dimensions of the item
And I am sure, more changes will come. The one megatrend retailers have started to catch on to is building coalitions in the form of their own marketplaces to compete with Amazon. What no single merchant can accomplish, maybe many banding together can. These marketplaces are of uneven quality and success, from the relatively weak Rakuten-owned Buy.com, to Sears or Walmarts' own, or gated ones like CorporatePerks which have the advantage of being able to deliver higher quality customers and in exchange can generally drive better pricing - yes, "better than Amazon" in some cases - from merchants.
Interesting times ahead as ecommerce continues to unfold and mature. We are only at the beginning.
Disclaimer: my company, Next Jump, has built a shopping marketplace for employees - CorporatePerks - that indirectly competes with Amazon.
I had an interesting chat with an AT&T customer representative today. When I got my bill for this month, I was outraged by their $36 "upgrade fee", a fee they charge you when you upgrade you iPhone from any model to the newer model, in my case the 5s.
I told them I am a long time customer with an account in good standing, that I was annoyed by the fee, and I politely requested it be waived. The nice CS rep said it's standard policy, but upon my insistence spoke to a manager, and got approval to issue me a credit for the amount. I did threaten to jump to Verizon during the chat, which probably helped.
In any event, success! No $36 fee for me to upgrade to the 5s. In general, it seems like a ridiculous thing for AT&T to force upon its customers, particularly on the heels of record quarterly profits. Crazy.
If it happened to you, I am betting you can do the same by calling them or opening a chat window from their site like I did.
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