Amazon powers across retail doubling down its share in many categories like portable power tools. It's leveling traditional retailers like Home Depot and betting on the promise of Amazon prime. Retailers respond by pressuring tax authorities to get Amazon to pay state taxes. Netflix is no House of Cards claims hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson, who reverses his earlier short. If some TV networks get their way, then competing with Netflix may not be in the cards for Time Warner Cable, even though 79,696 subscribers downloaded their live-TV iPad app on launch day this past week. 80% of all ecommerce in China goes through Taobao, which now has $60 billion in merchandise volume. eBay's global merchandise volume is $53 billion. Newspapers continue to lose share of advertising dollars in the U.S. $26 billion spent on newspapers ads in 2010, the lowest nominal level since 1985 (adjusted for inflation, the 1985 number is actually $49 billion today). Using adjusted numbers, the 2010 U.S. advertising volume dropped to the 1962 level of $3.9 billion. Hal Varian explained newspaper economics last year. The New York Times ad revenue is also getting smaller - 6.3% drop in 2010 vs. 2009, which had been the worst year on record. In response, the New York Times bets on making up lost ad revenue through erecting a paywall. 76% complain but it's the price of good news. paidContent thinks the New York Times gamble will generate $100 million a year.  Reddit is playing a different game - it has 6 people for a news website that generates 1 billion page views a month. Groupon is also having no trouble growing - 70 million subscribers in 500 markets with a $25 billion valuation rumored this week. This retailer thinks Groupon may be ruining retail. Here's the real deal with Groupon. Groupon's also no Redditt. It has 5,900 employees - 50% started in the last 3 months. Twitter is signing up 500,000 new users a day and generating 1 billion tweets a week. But, according to Pew Research those 500,000 daily new users shouldn't bet on too many listening - only 36% of Twitter users read other people's tweets. Caterina Fake says it's hard to read tweets because of FOMO. Digg is trying it dig out of the hole it threw itself into when it bet on the smarts of its founders more than the concerns of its users.  18 million unique visits to Digg in August 2010 before it relaunched its user-unfriendly site. That number dropped to 12 million in January 2011. The Daily is betting that its hundreds of thousands of iPad readers will pay when they switch next week to a pay model. Apple's bet on using customer insights to make great products continues to payoff. It's having no problem getting people to ante up for the iPad2 - it's sold out everywhere.