The traditional way to think about ecommerce penetration is to look at share of total retail sales, and then deduct things like car repair, gasoline and restaurants - to get to ‘addressable retail’.

We’re now a couple of weeks into Apple’s latest iOS privacy move. If you want to track users between apps and the web, or from an ad through the app store to an install, then you need to ask permission, and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes.

Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company. iPods were a much bigger business than the Mac, and they also made Apple a dominant force in the music industry.

Of Amazon’s top 50 best-sellers in “Children's Vaccination & Immunisation”, close to 20 are by anti-vaccine polemicists, and 5 are novels about fictional pandemics. This poses two questions

Apple launched the App Store in 2008, and tightened up the payment rules in 2011, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since. In many ways the issues haven’t really changed - it’s just that the numbers got a lot bigger.

Exchange and commerce platforms – and the tooling that comes with them – are having a moment. Hundreds of new marketplaces are being launched each month, leveraging new technology to supercharge supply and demand across sectors and geographies.

Decentralised finance – or DeFi – is gathering pace. After the ‘DeFi Summer’ of 2020, we’ve seen further growth in adoption this year. But is DeFi really moving towards the mainstream – and if it is, what are the second-order effects?

The recent lockdowns led to a forced adoption and forced experiment, and a lot of future growth was pulled forward into a couple of quarters. The UK had a much more rigorous lockdown than the USA, and it had a much larger increase in e-commerce adoption.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft was the evil empire, and a big part of ‘evil’ was that it was too closed - it made things too hard for developers. But then came the great malware explosion

Startups face many challenges on their growth journey – but breaking international markets is one of the biggest. The US and UK investment ecosystems might speak the same language, but they’re worlds apart: investor attitudes, founder profiles, culture and working styles all differ significantly.

The merging of production tools and ML-driven creative tools will redefine creative processes. In the next 10 years we’ll be able to turbocharge templates to create whole new forms of rich media.

Amazon is a big and very aggressive company, that’s radically changing how retailing works, and that attracts a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism. Some of this is entirely justified. However, there’s one strand of criticism that fascinates me because it attacks Amazon for something that’s been part of retail for 150 years - the private label business.

New tooling will emerge to power the next generation of online retail. The future is headless, social, and content-driven.

Sooner or later, every founder has to talk about what they’re building to external people. The most dreaded group of all may just be investors. We sat down with Toby Coppel to unpack how early-stage founders should go about the investor pitch.

#Cryptocurrencies are crossing the chasm. Meaningful adoption from companies like @PayPal, @ChristiesInc and @MorganStanley mean there’s now no going back.

When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.

There’s an old and common narrative around Amazon that it doesn’t make money, it sells below cost, it’s subsidised by investors and in particular it’s subsidised by AWS. People tend to repeat these to each other as though they’re unquestionable true, but they’re either debatable or objectively false.

I generally think about retail as sitting on a spectrum from logistics to experience. At the logistics end, you know exactly what you want and retail’s job is to provide the most efficient way to get it. At the experience end, you don’t know, and retail’s job is to help you, with ideas, suggestion, curation and service.

Shopify’s 2020 results came out today, and much as expected, it reported that consumers spent a total of $120bn on its platform, almost exactly double the figure from 2019.