Also: eBay loses its head of local; Twitter buys app-crash reporter startup.
Barnes & Noble to whittle stores for years [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
“In 10 years we’ll have 450 to 500 stores,” said Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group, in an interview last week. The company operated 689 retail stores as of Jan. 23, along with a separate chain of 674 college stores.
From humble beginnings to a bookselling behemoth, Barnes & Noble has seen ups and downs over the decades as it tried to straddle the world of paper books and e-books.
Mr. Klipper said his forecast assumes that the company will close about 20 stores a year over the period.
EBay loses head of local Jack Abraham [FORTUNE]
Abraham spearheaded some of the tech company’s newer features, including the Pinterest-like news feed introduced late last fall amid a sweeping redesign to the e-commerce site. The feed, apparently, was an idea Abraham had been kicking around during his Milo days but only got around to implementing at eBay. It was also Abraham’s idea to develop eBay Now, the mobile app available in New York and San Francisco, which lets users order products from retailers like Target and Macy’s and receive them in an hour or less.
Marissa Mayer calls Yahoo turnaround a ‘multi-year march’ [CNNMONEY]
While the turnaround will take years, Mayer insisted that Yahoo is moving fast day-to-day: “There’s basically been a new major initiative every other week.”
At least for now, industry watchers and investors believe in Mayer. Shares closed Thursday at their highest level since September 18, 2008.
But Yahoo’s core problems are longstanding, and analysts are especially focused on those involving Yahoo’s two main sources of advertising revenue: search and display.
Crashyltics: Twitter purchases the iOS app-crash reporter [READWRITE]
So why did Twitter make the deal? “It seems like a strategy to grow the mobile team,” says Jad Meouchy, a mobile app developer in Los Angeles, and co-founder of Osurv, a custom mobile survey app. “It looks like a straight talent acquisition.” But Meouchy also calls Crashlytics a strong and mature mobile additive that gives Twitter “the people they need to start making their own mobile apps.”
Pebble smartwatch review [THE VERGE]
After using the Pebble for a few days, I realized that I was daydreaming about it: I wanted it to do more. That’s unusual — I rarely trust new products to work correctly, especially new products from unproven companies. But the Pebble’s charming simplicity and fundamental competence inspires confidence. It’s so good at what it does now that it’s easy to imagine all other things it might do in the future. There’s no reason it can’t replace a Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, for example, and I’d love to be able to send replies to emails and text directly from the device. And Pebble’s promised app support means we’ll eventually see even more uses for it.
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