Commerce Weekly: Yahoo's new CEO has data focus

Yahoo gets a data-savvy CEO, a big week for apps, and Robert Scoble goes shopping with eBay.

As the payments world roused itself from its holiday hiatus, here are some of the items that caught my eye.

Former PayPal chief brings data focus to Yahoo CEO position

YahooScott Thompson’s move from leading eBay’s PayPal division to becoming CEO of Yahoo received ample coverage in this light news week. The most interesting aspect to me was this former chief technology officer’s focus on the importance of data to Yahoo’s success. While past CEOs have focused on advertising, the company’s role in the media landscape and alliances with U.S. and Chinese companies, Thompson showed his tech-centered origins in an interview with Ad Age:

At PayPal, we were able to create an unbelievably compelling business because we used data to understand risk and fraud better than anyone on earth. And that was the secret sauce. We had more data than anyone else, better tools and models, and super smart people who were challenged by the problem. It doesn’t seem glamorous, but that was the reason.

Fast Company emphasized Thompson’s background as PayPal’s CTO and made clear to its lay-business audience that when he’s talking about data, he’s not just talking about a better dashboard to understand advertising opportunities. He’s talking about the “big data” opportunity, tapping into large datasets produced by the transactions and interactions of Yahoo’s 700 million members around the world.

From E.B. Boyd’s Fast Company post:

Every day, those 700 million souls log in to the Yahoo universe and start making their way around its sites, moving from story to story to story to story — effectively giving Yahoo a media mogul’s dream: the largest petri dish in the world to understand what sorts of content appeal to which sorts of people and what sorts of things will make them likely to consume more and more.

Of course, this is hardly news to Yahoo’s data engineers or the big data community, but it will be interesting to see what effect a data-savvy CEO will have on Yahoo’s prospects.

X.commerce harnesses the technologies of eBay, PayPal and Magento to create the first end-to-end multi-channel commerce technology platform. Our vision is to enable merchants of every size, service providers and developers to thrive in a marketplace where in-store, online, mobile and social selling are all mission critical to business success. Learn more at x.com.

Flurry: More than one billion apps downloaded in 2011’s final week

While most retailers focus on the crucial weeks leading up to the holidays, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — when customers are off work playing with their newly received devices — is more important for app developers. In fact, Flurry reports that this particular week was the largest ever for iOS and Android device activations and app downloads.

Flurry estimates that more than 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.2 billion applications were downloaded on the two platforms. Christmas day itself was the biggest day ever for downloads: Flurry estimates that 242 million apps were downloaded while happy recipients explored their new toys.

Flurry also predicted that Apple’s App Store will have delivered more than 10 billion apps in 2011 — more than twice the number downloaded in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined.

EBay’s mobile VP goes shopping with Robert Scoble

Just before the holiday, we reported on the “Watch with eBay” feature in eBay’s iPad app, which offers viewers a sort of real-time catalog, proffering goods related to the program they’re viewing on TV. Robert Scoble has an interesting follow-up interview with Steve Yankovich, eBay’s vice president of mobile. Yankovich dropped by Scoble’s home office with the app to show him how it works, and he revealed a new feature that identifies fabric patterns in clothing and taps related clothing items in eBay’s inventories.

Posters on Scoble’s related Google+ thread were more fascinated (or irritated) by Yankovich’s comments that even though Android devices are dominating the market, the iOS platform is still more important from a commerce perspective.

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