Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Woot.com

Amazon.com Acquires Woot

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:30:55 +0000

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has acquired Woot.com, the website best known for having a solid deal every day. “Coincidentally” today’s deal on Woot.com is the Amazon Kindle Wireless Device for $149.99+$5 shipping and it is sold out.

Woot will continue to run independently just like how Amazon.com is letting Zappos and Audible run themselves after the acquisition. Woot.com made about $164 million in sales in 2008. Although there is no word on how much the acquisition was worth, rumor has it that Amazon.com paid $110 million, meaning that sales must be down since 2008.

[BusinessInsider]

Woot.com Traffic Surge Implies Economy May Be Recovering After All

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:03:32 +0000

Woot.com is an Internet retailer website based near Dallas, TX. Woot was founded by Matt Rutledge in July 2004. The website focuses on selling one discounted product per day. Woot’s tagline is “One Day, One Deal.” When the economy is in a recession, people tend to spend less, especially on randomly discounted products.

Considering the United States has been in a recession since 2007, Woot.com’s traffic has plummeted during that time. Between the post-holidays of 2009 until about May 2009, Woot’s traffic dropped to about half a million unique visitors and now its back up to about one million.

If you bought something from Woot recently, leave a comment. Let us know if you’ve been shopping at Woot consistently for a while or if you took a break from the website during the recession. The unemployment rate in the U.S. was about 9.7% in August 2009. Perhaps people are getting jobs again and are willing to spend more these days.

List Of April Fools Pranks 2009 On The Web, Reddit Tops All Of Them

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:41:57 +0000

1. Google gave us CADIE, upside down YouTube videos, and GMail autopilot.
2. TorrentFreak told us that Warner Brothers plans to acquire The Pirate Bay.
3. Arrington announced that he is looking for a date from readers and that General Mills has acquired CrunchGear.
4. CenterNetworks announced the CN51 Startup Conference.
5. SocialBlade claims they cracked the Digg algorithm.
6. The Guardian claims they are killing print version of their site and is going Twitter only.
7. Woot.com is selling a bag of crap for $3.00 and $1 million shipping.
8. Opera announced face-gestured web browsing.
9. Car and Driver is reporting that President Obama wants “a complete withdrawal from America’s premier racing series is expected to save more than $250 million between GM and Chrysler, a substantial amount considering the drastic measures being implemented elsewhere.”
10. Qualcomm stated that their convergence program has implemented tiny base stations into thousands of pigeons. They also stated that these are no ordinary pigeons but a hybrid wolfpigeon.
11. SlideShare told their users that they are Rockstars.
12. Funny or Die wrote that they have been acquired by Reba McEntire and is now called RebaOrDie.com.
13. AOL Radio was considering playing Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up all over AOLRadio.com.
14. Amazon.com launches brand new cloud computing service called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE).

More to be added as they are discovered…

These were all good, but I think out of all them, Reddit had the best April Fools prank. They replaced their entire user interface to look just like Digg as you will notice in the above screen shot.

Star Wars Bobble Heads, 6 Pack For $29.99

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:03:43 +0000

Woot.com reported earlier this week that you can buy two sets of six Star Wars bobble heads, each for $29.99. Now you can make Darth Vader say yes to everything you command. The bobble heads stand at about 7″ tall. The bobble heads have an over sized head with a spring attached and are safe for children 4+.

The first set has Darth Vader, C-3PO, Boba Fett, Greedo, Stormtrooper and Tusken Raider. The second set has Obi-Wan, Jawa, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Jango Fett and Darth Maul.

[via Woot]