Google Shoppable Ads – Competition For Pinterest

In light of Pinterest’s recent IPO, I wanted to point out an article from Mobile Marketer: https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/google-pushes-deeper-into-visual-search-with-shoppable-ads-in-images/549957/ .

Monetizing Pinterest will largely come down to showing relevant ads within user searches – for example, showing an ad for wedding supplies within an user search for wedding ideas. However, we see Google moving into this business as well, as highlighted in the above article. Google will be showing more ads within Google Images searches – but more importantly – those ads will be image based, which should help clickthrough and purchase rates.

I fully expect Pinterest to thrive and grow, but we’ll be seeing a fair bit of competition from Google and others as well.

Amazon Error Pages

As I’ve said before, I love documenting error pages from popular web sites: they often have a sense of humor or show off another face of the company.

Here’s an example of an Amazon error page. What a handsome looking dog!

An Amazon error page.

Amazon Cloud9 IDE Python 3

I spent today morning pulling my hair out trying to get a Python 3 application running within AWS’ Cloud9 IDE. Essentially the problem is that if you pip install some-package, that package only becomes available within the Python 2 runner, not within the Python 3 runner (the current Cloud9 machine image includes Python 2 aliased as python, and Python 3 available through python3).

Fortunately for me, someone else had the same problem, and an Amazon staffer suggests creating a virtual environment: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=822214&tstart=0 . I followed the steps mentioned, but it didn’t work – pip still installed dependencies for Python 2. I wonder if this staffer forgot to mention another step, such as remapping the pip command to a Python 3 install.

What finally did work was calling the pip command through the python3 interpreter, like so:

First, ensure pip is installed:

python3 -m ensurepip --default-pip    

Then upgrade pip:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

Then you can install any requirements of your app, such as BeautifulSoup:

sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade bs4

And after all that, my Python 3 app was able to access the BeautifulSoup dependency.