Tim O'Reilly Quotes

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Online advertising works, although it lands especially on search engines like Google and Yahoo. They achieve much higher revenues online than the websites of publishing companies.

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

I've sold everything from fashion, make-up, couture magazines, radio, reality television, movies. There isn't a thing I haven't sold, including Tampax. You name it.

I actually don't invest in anything that is social, mobile, deals or ad networks simply because those are areas where there are so many players and so many other smart people in the space, I feel like I don't have a competitive advantage. So I tend to go after things that are e-commerce, like healthcare.

One of the Internet's highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to 'name your own price' for a variety of products, including airline tickets.

All American consumers have the same needs - to buy great consumer products, with savings and value, and with the convenience of easy delivery.

There are millions and millions of products out there. You can look at eBay and Amazon. You can look at every product on the planet, but trying to figure out which one is best for you is really the challenge.

Netbot was the first comparison shopping company. We realized comparison shopping can be quite tedious if you are driving from one furniture store to another. On the Internet, you can automatically look at a bunch of different stores and see where can you get the best price on a computer or some such thing, so that was the motivation.

My parents supported me through university, and after I graduated, I got a job as an analyst at a price comparison website called TotallyMoney.com.

In the '90s, I went on eBay to buy some paddle tires for my four-wheeler ATV and couldn't find any. When I did find a manufacturer that sold them, I bought 20,000 and had no problem reselling them. So the next time you get mad when you can't find an item, realize there's a market waiting to be explored.

We spend a lot of time looking at the things we like: Amazon, Google, Facebook.

You can find a product and be aware of all the other products out there in just seconds. That's a very attractive method for companies and consumers. At the same time, it also creates a lot of competition.

Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information. Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter. Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.

Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.

When we're looking at strategic partners, it may be that they're larger partners or big corporations or start-ups. But, when you look at Gilt and places like Amazon and Starbucks, they're all places where it's a lot of foot traffic or digital traffic.

We're very much an advertising agency, but it's not about creating ads as we know it.

I think it's about being really smart about hitting the right consumer product spaces at the right time.

Ukip had undertaken a survey on why people wanted to leave the E.U. or not, and they also had membership data. So we were able to build personas out of that. That was work that would normally be paid for.

Art.com is a fantastic opportunity to move into the consumer space, as we have the content and now we have the means to go to the consumer and sell to them directly.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

I joined bit.ly as chief scientist in October of 2009. The company is a URL-shortener and content-sharing platform; we provide tools for people to share and track links on the Internet.

I've spent 10 years checking my analytics on my end to see what people were talking about and what they like.

Buying involves decision-making. It's a performance activity, like sports or acting.