Email Is Crushing Twitter, Facebook for Selling Stuff Online

“Email, on the other hand, has a certain unfair advantage in that shoppers getting the emails have already given up their addresses to a site, suggesting they already have some prior relationship with that retailer. Still, despite the avalanche of spam we all get, it’s easy to see how the staying power and greater potential for personalization of a medium without a 140-character limit gives email distinct advantages.”

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/07/email-crushing-twitter-facebook/?

A million engineers in India struggling to get placed in an extremely challenging market

“Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India’s engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India’s overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India’s engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.”

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news/40049243_1_engineers-iit-bombay-batch-size

Experience Slows You Down

“My theory is this: when you know everything about an industry, you don’t know whats good for it. The only thing you know is the rules and confinements that have been set up by the people within that industry to prevent change. That’s human nature. People don’t like change, people like change they like. So you follow the rules, and learn some more and before you know it. You are 50 years old, wears a suit and dictates the rules by yourself. You don’t change the industry you’re in, the industry changes you.”

https://medium.com/design-ux/9b25a4153669

Square moves from the smartphone to the browser, building its own online market

“Square isn’t merely content with processing credit cards for local businesses. It wants to handle their online transactions as well.

Square is essentially moving in the opposite direction of its main mobile payments rival PayPal, the entrenched provider of online payments for small businesses. While PayPal is horning in Square’s turf with its Here credit card reader, Square hopes to chisel off a piece of PayPal’s peer-to-peer payments with a new service called Square Cash. Now Square is going after the business of PayPal’s parent eBay with Market.”

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/26/square-moves-from-the-smartphone-to-the-browser-building-its-own-online-market/