Prime Day grows despite Amazon's technical issues, Netflix stock tumbles after disappointing subscriber growth and Booking invests in China's ride-hailing service Didi. Here's your Daily Crunch for July 17, 2018. 1. Amazon Prime Day U.S. sales bigger than last year, despite site issues Although massive glitches prevented online shoppers from browsing Amazon for significant stretches of the day, Amazon says its Prime Day sales numbers are "bigger than ever" in the United States. It also says consumers bought "millions" of Amazon devices. Amazon is sticking to its long-established stinginess in releasing real sales numbers, but a third-party report from Feedvisor seems to back this up, finding that shoppers spent 54 percent more in the first three hours of Prime Day this year versus last year. 2. Netflix is falling off a cliff While Netflix is still adding subscribers (a lot of them), the company fell below the forecasts it set for itself during the second quarter. That, in turn, shaved off more than $10 billion in its market capitalization yesterday afternoon. 3. Travel giant Booking invests $500M in Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing The deal will see Booking Holdings — which was formerly known as Priceline — work closely with Didi to offer Didi's on-demand car services through Booking.com apps. Similarly, Didi customers will have the option to book hotels through Booking.com and its sister site Agoda. 4. Connie Chan breaks the mold at Andreessen Horowitz, becoming the first general partner to be promoted from within Chan is only the second woman in the firm's nine-year history to be appointed to the role of general partner. 5. It's official: Brexit campaign broke the law — with social media's help The U.K.'s Electoral Commission has published the results of a nearly nine-month investigation into Brexit referendum spending and has found that the official Vote Leave campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits. It did this, in part, by channeling money to a Canadian data firm to use for targeted political advertising on Facebook's platform. 6. Coinbase reportedly gets approval from U.S. regulators to start listing tokenized securities This opens up the scope of Coinbase's ambitions to the billions of dollars that have been raised in initial coin offerings over the past several months. 7. ClassPass is headed to Asia via an imminent launch in Singapore The move into Asia has been expected for some time after ClassPass hired a head of international in May. The company told us at the time that it would soon arrive in three Asian countries — the identity of the other two cities remains unclear, but Hong Kong is probably one of them. |