Why The Amazon Tablet Will Be Killer (AMZN, AAPL)

The Amazon tablet is coming in the Fall, and all evidence points to its being a killer device. 

Tech gadget review site Retrevo polled their users and found out that what they want in a tablet is what Amazon can give them: namely, lower prices and a trusted brand. 

Their survey says what prospective tablet customers want most is lower prices:

What's more, customers trust the Amazon brand to make a great tablet more than most customer electronics brand (also: look at how badly RIM is doing):

And while most people prefer an iPad, there's also a lot of people who are open to buying some other tablet:

Amazon is best positioned to make a really good tablet at cheap prices for the following reasons:

• Scale. Amazon is huge and can team up with an OEM to drive down prices for an Amazon tablet.

Distribution. Amazon owns the world's biggest shopping mall. Retailers' cut are a huge part of the price of tablets, and Apple and Amazon are the only ones who have their own huge retail operation. What's more, Amazon already has deals in place with retailers to sell its Kindle e-reader, so it stands to reason it could also sell tablets through them.

Media. Amazon has its app store, its Kindle e-book platform, its MP3 shop and an increasingly good video store.

Product experience/design. The Kindle is a great device, and Jeff Bezos is a product visionary. No one expects an Amazon tablet to be better than an iPad, but there's no reason why they can't make a tablet that's very good at a very good value. 

Don't Miss: Here's Everything We Know About The Amazon Tablet So Far →

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See Also:

• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Now Has Over $75B In Cash, But Don't Expect A Dividend
• Now Apple Is Talking About Buying Hulu
• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Boosting Staff At Retail Stores For Back-To-School, iPhone 5 And Holiday Season

Why The Amazon Tablet Will Be Killer (AMZN, AAPL)

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How Google Is Secretly Building Its Facebook Killer (GOOG)

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, and just about everything you and your friends "like" – to read, to buy, to look at – on the Internet.

This scares the pants off Google.

To Valley and tech types, Facebook's collection of data is known as the "social graph."

The reason it worries Google is that increasingly, Facebook is using that data to show users things to read, buy, and do on the Internet before those users get the chance to Google search for those things.

The social graph turns the Internet into Facebook's platform, not Google's.

Again – that worries Google silly. As it should.

So, what is Google doing about it? Many things, including launching new social products, like +1, in hopes of gathering "social graph" information through its own products. Larry Page also recently told all Google employees that their bonuses will depend on Google succeeding in social.

But Google also seems to be pulling another, more clever trick.

It seems to be scanning the contents of its users Gmail inboxes for email notifications from outside social networks, and then asking users if they want to "improve your Google experience by connecting your accounts from other services."

Check out the screengrab below. Note where, at the bottom, it says "Use my Google contact information to suggest accounts from other sites."

An industry source who competes with Google says, "They are doing this to assemble another copy of the graph by scraping other sources rather than making their own."

"Why make your own when you can steal someone else's?"

Why not, indeed? This seems like a clever move, and, given that checkbox, not particularly "evil" – which we know is something Google is sensitvive about.

Anyway, here's the screengrab:

Related: 10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn

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See Also:

• Ballmer Would Not Let Skype Shop Around For A Better Deal
• This Is Why Google Thinks Its Music Service Is Legal
• Andy Rubin Explains Exactly How "Open" Android Is

How Google Is Secretly Building Its Facebook Killer (GOOG)

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Facebook Launches Its Groupon Killer

Facebook is launching its widely anticipated group buying service called Deals today, the Times says.

It was long believed that Facebook would do something like this, and it puts it in direct competition with Groupon and LivingSocial. Deals is launching in five test cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco.

Here's what's special about Facebook Deals:

• While you'll be able to receive offers by email, they will mostly show up in your Facebook news feed. Most group buying services rely on email first to send deals, but Facebook won't.
  
  
  
  
• You'll be buying the deals with Facebook Credits. This is pretty huge, as it's the first time Facebook's payments system will be used to buy physical goods and services and not just virtual goods. A lot of people are wondering if/when Facebook will go directly after PayPal and offer an online payments service; if it's planning that, this is a good first step toward doing that.
  
  
  
  
• Facebook is partnering with other services like OpenTable. It will also rely on its own sales force to sell deals but it also partners with other companies that also have relationships with merchants, which is smart.

There are many questions here.

The first one is can Deals work? Group buying services rely on curation, with humans picking attractive deals, and huge salesforces and, more generally, a sales-driven culture. This is a far cry from the engineering-driven culture at Facebook (and Google, which is also working on its own group buying service), where they like that stuff to be done by computers as much as possible.

The second one is what will the impact be on the group buying market?

Groupon and LivingSocial are spending a ton on Facebook advertising to gain subscribers. Will they cut that off in retaliation or will they feel forced to still spend on Facebook ads? That in itself will be a test of the attractiveness of Facebook ads.

Second of all, Facebook is probably the biggest company in terms of userbase that's getting into group buying. Plenty of people think Groupon can't possibly end up being that huge because group buying is a business with such low barriers to entry. Groupon bulls, including us, respond that, actually, building a huge sales and service infrastructure is very hard and that it's a significant barrier to entry, similar to how anyone can start selling stuff online, but becoming Amazon is very hard.

Will Facebook prove the bulls wrong? If so that might have a huge impact on Groupon and LivingSocial not just from lost marketshare but also from establishing that group buying is really a "feature" that most media sites can replicate and not a "company." That might make the difference between Groupon being worth $5 billion and $50 billion. Conversely, if Facebook gives it its best shot and fails, that will be huge for Groupon as it will show that it has, indeed, built a huge, defensible asset.

Don't Miss: What Groupon Must Do Now →

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See Also:

• HOW TO BEAT GROUPON: An Exclusive Q&A With The Man Who's Doing It
• Citing Instant Messages, Winklevosses Tell Court Facebook Hid Evidence
• Obama At Facebook: A Reminder That Silicon Valley Really Is Different

Facebook Launches Its Groupon Killer

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Google's Groupon Killer May Not Actually Work Like Groupon At All* (GOOG)

UPDATE: One commenter is (and several at TechCrunch are) suggesting this isn't actually a sneak peek at Google Offers, as TechCrunch had claimed, but an old coupon feature for Google Places.

We've reached out to Google and will update if we hear back. For now, it's not safe to assume that this is actually Google Offers.

Earlier: Google Offers, the company's local-coupon play following its unsuccessful attempt to buy Groupon, is starting to show up in Google search results, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld discovers. 

It's possible that Google will make significant changes before launching publicly, but it looks (so far) like Google isn't actually trying to replicate the Groupon model.

That is, it looks like Google is NOT selling vouchers directly to consumers and splitting the revenue with merchants, or using a "deal a day" model, or any "group-buying" mechanics. These are all the things Groupon has used to become the fastest growing Internet company ever.

Instead, it looks like Google is merely building a massive coupon dump, and hoping that people will find them on their own, either using maps, or perhaps some other search tools.

That's not to say that Google Offers won't necessarily find an audience -- if Google can stick its coupon deals in its maps and search results, it may draw merchant and consumer interest away from Groupon.

But this almost seems like it's more competitive with Facebook Places coupons than Groupon. Perhaps there's more that hasn't launched yet.

Click here to take a tour of Groupon's wacky Chicago headquarters >

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Google's Groupon Killer May Not Actually Work Like Groupon At All* (GOOG)

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