Ouch, what did you guys end up doing? Move to your own platform?

We stopped shipping things to FBA. Sadly we still had to sell on Amazon since it's the best way to sell books online, even with their shenanigans. But without FBA benefits there's no way to compete with Amazons deep discounts on new books, so we pretty much only sold used books.

It feels absolutely horrible knowing that the only way to make any money online with books is to sell on your biggest competitor's site.

Right, because everyone just has their own "platform". And one that can compete with Amazon no less.

That really sucks...

Google Ventures is an investor.

Yes, but as mentioned in the article: "Google always maintains its venture arm operates independently from the rest of the organization"

Are there other examples of something like this happening to a GV backed company?

I'm sure that the venture arm operates independently of main Google -- but it's not like the folks at Google Maps are somehow unaware of the fact that GV sunk a quarter-billion into Uber.

And Uber is one of the, if not THE, biggest investments GV has made. They have $1.5 billion in assets, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ventures). So 1/6th of all their assets is Uber. Which means that asking whether other GV-invested companies have experienced easier Google integrations is not all that meaningful -- Uber is an outlier.

Looking at the market cap, it's around $128 Billion USD.

If you are in the NYC area coffee or drinks on me! Just shoot me an email to [email protected]

Just remember it's not the end and there is much more to look forward to perhaps in a future startup months or years down the road.

Congrats to everyone at Branch. Can't wait to see what's to come from them over at FB!

Where is this free LTE tethering? Have been told it still requires the extra monthly fee.

I got free LTE tethering (on AT&T) once I switched from my grandfathered unlimited plan to the newer metered plans.

Which is ironic, as tethering is the only context in which I would come anywhere close to using up my monthly bandwidth allocation.

You get tethering when you switch to the mobile share plan. If you are grandfathered into the unlimited plan then you don't get tethering.

Sad to see Winamp go and hopefully AOL won't do the same with Shoutcast. Would be nice to see AOL update the Shoutcast app more.

It's really beautiful. Did Twitter ever offer to buy TweetBot? Still pretty upset tweetdeck was killed.

Congrats to the Bump team! Would be interesting to see where the future leads with Bump & Google and how it integrates into Android!