Tag management company TagMan is on the prowl for new office space, and the company has conscripted CresaPartners' Jack Petrie to aide in their hunt, he told The Commercial Observer Monday.
TagMan, which currently leases an office space at 260 W. 35th Street, is citing a growing headcount and a future demand for larger space as its reasons for the impending move, Mr. Petrie (pictured) said yesterday morning. Read More
This morning, a writer named Farhad Manjoo wrote an article for Slate called "Don't Support Your Local Bookseller." Mr. Manjoo called your local independent booksellers the "least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find." Read More
Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, has written an acerbic open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about the company's campaign to encourage shoppers to compare prices in retail stores with those at Amazon. The promotion, which starts tomorrow and lasts 24 hours, gives shoppers 5 percent discounts if they use their smart phones to compare prices and then purchase products through Amazon. Books were not included in the promotion, but since books are still a big part of what Amazon does, indie booksellers apparently saw it as a threat.
"We suppose we should be flattered that an online sales behemoth needs a Main Street retail showroom," writes Mr. Teicher. "Forgive us if we’re not." Read More
Amazon has started what it's referring to as "a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers." It sounds like a fellowship program but it's actually a pot of money for luring self-published writers into exclusive short-term contracts with the Kindle store. The more bestselling writers the company can lock into the Kindle (however temporarily), the less appealing rival e-readers will be. This has already gotten some authors into trouble with Barnes & Noble, which has refused to stock print books by authors it cannot sell through its own digital platform, the Nook. Read More
At a congressional hearing today, the Justice Department's anti-trust authorities confirmed they are investigating the way publishers price electronic books for possible violations, reports The Wall Street Journal. In what's known as the agency model, publishers set the price of books and allow stores like Apple and Amazon to take a 30 percent cut. This differs from the wholesale model used for print books, where publishers set a retail price that bookstores can choose to ignore. Read More
Chris McGrath, an author who self-published a book called The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need to Know under the pseudonym of "Scrooby" is now suing an Amazon reviewer, Vaughan Jones, who apparently maligned his book. Mr. Jones also outed Mr. McGrath as the man behind Scrooby in the reviews section on Read More
Earlier this week, a glitch in the Amazon matrix caused some readers of Haruki Murakami's new novel 1Q84 to mistakenly conclude that the Kindle version of the book is only available for reading on one device rather than the usual six. This turned out to be a mistake, but before the problem was resolved a half dozen readers left one star reviews on the page for 1Q84. Read More
Yesterday Mat Honan wrote a blog post for Gizmodo asking if Amazon was "letting publishers ruin the Kindle." The blogger had trouble reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 across his array of mobile devices, and decided it was probably because the publisher of the book, Knopf, had decided to ruin the Kindle and restrict books to a single device. He failed to place a phone call to Knopf to see if the synching problem wasn't due to some lightning storm in the humid Amazonian data cloud. Read More
The fastest way to an emerging tech company’s heart is through its venture capitalist.
Such has been the modus operandi of Jack Petrie, a senior vice president at CresaPartners who has amassed a list of clients that reads like a veritable who’s who of Silicon Alley. He’s found these clients through contacts and clients of his in venture capital.
“I [find] that usually I can connect the dots with a lot of these companies with relationships I have with V.C. firms and people I have met through the community,” said Mr. Petrie, 50.
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Soon Times Square may be known for its iconic signage, its assortment of apparel shops like Forever 21 and American Eagle Outfitters, and, erm, Google?!
The vaunted tourist trap may be the perfect location for the web giant to test out a “brick and mortar” entity, said David LaPierre, executive vice president of CB Richard Ellis,.
“Theoretically at some point I envision brands like Google or like Amazon... finding a way to manage and spread, I think, their customer base beyond just the internet,” said Mr. LaPierre during CBRE’s third-quarter Manhattan retail media breakfast Monday.
“Time Square is a classic, great place to make that be your flagship."
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Wait, did you say Amazon is publishing books? So The New York Times has discovered! And on the front page no less. Publishers Marketplace referred to today's story as "Things You Know About Amazon's Publishing, Rounded Up Into an Article." On Twitter, Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards had a small outburst of commentary, Read More
Amazon has added to its stable of genre fiction imprints with 47North, an imprint specializing in Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Like the company's Montlake romance imprint and Thomas & Mercer thriller imprint, 47North's name derives from a Seattle-specific location, in this case the the city's latitude. Read More
Amazon was very pleased with itself last month when it announced that 100 titles from DC comics would be available in digital format exclusively from Amazon. Barnes & Noble, purveyor of the color Nook, was less delighted. Was this any way for DC Entertainment to treat an old friend? Especially one that announced an expansion of its comics section earlier this year? So now B&N made a nasty little decision of its own. Read More
Amazon has taken great pains to assure consumers that its forthcoming tablet device will not only rival the iPad in technology but also in content. All Things D reports that Amazon has already cut deals with Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith to offer magazine subscriptions and today the company announced a deal with Twentieth Century FOX that allows all Amazon prime members to stream FOX videos and movies. Presumably this will carry over to the new tablet -- you can watch Mrs. Doubtfire sitting on the subway! Hurrah.
More importantly, however, Apple's dominance in digital magazine apps will likely be broken, and publishers are salivating at the prospect of a duopoly. Will Amazon strike a subscription deal with Time, Inc., a feat that Apple has yet to accomplish? Will this give magazine publishers the power to re-negotiate the 30 percent cut retailers traditionally take for magazine apps?
“You’ve got beauty and design with Apple, which we love,” a publisher tells All Things D. “But with Amazon you have marketing, and ease of use. We’ve very optimistic.” Read More
