For musicians, the pacts provide a foothold online, an increasingly important distribution channel.
Wal-Mart is seeking a foothold in online music as downloading is blamed for the declining sales of CD's.
Dropbox, originally pitched as a way for people to store and share personal documents online, has also gained a foothold in businesses.
The move will give Google a large foothold in the online travel search market, and control over a critical data source used by many of its competitors, including Kayak.com, Orbitz.com and Microsoft's Bing.
Using data on internet usage from a representative survey of Americans, as well as data on the size of firms in each of the three industries in each county in the continental United States, the Chicago economists are able to tease out the impact of the internet on firms in the ten years to 2004, when online shopping first gained a foothold in American life.
[C4.] Bank Tries to Lure Skittish Investors ING Direct, the online bank that gained a foothold in the United States by wooing customers fed up with the miniscule interest rates, will now try to convince skittish stock market investors that its savings accounts would make a fine investment option.
Microsoft and Google, which aired its first TV commercial during the Super Bowl on Sunday, are competing for the strongest foothold in the online advertising market.
Kobo wants to be the go-to platform for any and all other book retailers and e-reader makers that are trying to gain a foothold in the online e-book market, but do not have the scale to compete against Amazon on their own.
This AOCicle originally appeared on VICE US.
To entice merchants to adopt the system, Google discounts the fee when they also buy advertisements sold through its hugely successful AdWords system.That has raised some eyebrows, because this tactic using a strong position in one market (online ad-placement) to establish a foothold in another (payments)—is exactly what has landed Microsoft in so much hot water over the years.
