Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Amazon has reached a point in its evolution where the company is now surfing a feedback loop of dominance.

Internet startups sprout all the time promising to send you just about anything via UPS. But one new company has taken the idea a little meta: They'll ship you an empty box....

...Sold is the brainchild of three graduates of the MIT Media Lab—Matt Blackshaw, Tony DeVincenzi and David Lakatos—who figured out that boxes aren’t as trivial as they seem. One-click buying has become commonplace online, Sold’s founders say, but not so one-click selling. And sometimes the difference is a box.

With Sold’s app, you take a picture of the thing you want to sell and write a description. The company uses a mix of algorithmic and human judgment to figure out how much you can probably get for the item and sends you the proposed price. If you accept, Sold posts your product on whatever online marketplace the company determine is best—eBay, Amazon or smaller niche sites, depending on what you’re selling. When your item sells, Sold sends you a pre-labeled box to ship it in. (You can track the box while it’s on its way to you.) Tape up the box, schedule a UPS pickup and that’s it....

Instead of refocusing Yahoo, Marissa Mayer is broadening the company. That's odd, given that Yahoo was once considered a bloated, obsolete leviathan. But it turns out giant internet conglomerates still have some big advantages....

Since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo last year, there’s been a lot of talk about how the famously detail-oriented ex-Googler will “refocus” the company. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mayer is broadening, not narrowing, Yahoo’s scope, cementing its once passé reputation as the original internet “portal.”

The latest sign of this trend came just this past weekend, when multiple reports had Mayer in talks to acquire the online television hub Hulu. Less than one week earlier, Yahoo announced it would pay $1.1 billion for microblog network Tumblr. Two months ago, the company paid a reported $30 million to buy news digest app Summly from a British teenager. The common thread: Yahoo keeps expanding into new areas, even though it was already a sprawling internet conglomerate when Mayer took control, with everything from movie listings to stock quotes to a photo-sharing social network to a news hub to a search engine. (And don’t forget the “OMG!” section.)

Yahoo’s mission creep is a useful case study in why web companies like Google and Facebook continue to grow their functionality and why startups keep selling to the seemingly bloated leviathans, even though tech advances have made it cheaper and easier than ever for software companies and web services to go it alone, and despite the fact that consumers are migrating to highly specialized mobile apps.......