Tag Archives: Amazon

How badly targeted “personalized” ads can be

Picture by geralt on Pixabay

One of the main reasons – and quite possibly thé main reason – why the big platform players, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are collecting data by the bucket load on everyone (obviously including you, dear reader) using their platforms, product and services is the belief that this enables them to serve “better” a.k.a. “more personalized” ads, and thereby deliver you a better user experience.

An important element during this data collection effort is keeping track of all the websites you have visited, the underlying logic being “if you have visited that website, it is very likely that you Continue reading

Another novelty of this digital age: e-borders

Picture by Paolo Cuttitta (https://www.flickr.com/photos/paolo_cuttitta/)Amazon hates Belgium. Or at least that is the conclusion I’m inclined draw after having been an Amazon customer for quite a few years now. On several occasions I’ve come across services Amazon is offering that sound really great to me, only to find out – a numbers of steps into the signing up process – that the service is not available in Belgium, the country I spend most of my time in.

Now, I do understand that Belgium will never be Continue reading

E-books are the next big thing. Definitely maybe. Some time.

The sarcastic undertone of the title might be a bit weird for US readers of this blogpost, as e-books have quite a substantial market share in the US for a while already, as you can see in the statistic below.

Statistic: E-book sales as a percentage of total book sales in the United States from January 2012 to March 2013 | Statista Statistic provided by Statista

The adoption of e-books in Europe is no where near that level – it’s stuck at something like 1 or 2% in a lot of European countries, Continue reading