Archive for April 11, 2012

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Apple and book publisher Macmillan could be sued by the Justice Department as soon as today for collaborating in the pricing of e-books, reports Bloomberg.

The companies deny it, of course, and will argue that pricing agreement enhances competition in the marketplace.

Simon Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins have also been tagged in the matter, but the report indicates that these companies are more likely to settle than drag out a legal case.

In the meantime, the Justice Department is probing how Apple’s e-book pricing works to determine if it actually helps or hurts competition.

eBay-owned online payment giant PayPal has announced today that it has teamed up with DocuSign to provide a way for business users and individuals to electronically sign their PayPal payments and see them processed immediately.

The partnership will see DocuSign’s Payment platform — which helps companies get signatures on contracts, agreements, and other legally binding documents — outfitted with a new PayPal payment option, adding the online payment service to its existing debit and credit card platform.

DocuSign says that its Payment tool will now process “transactions within seconds via PayPal so businesses can capture revenue and begin product and service delivery sooner,” whilst allowing them to “sign documents and pay from any browser or mobile device making every kind of business transaction faster, easier, and more convenient than ever.”

Payment processing with PayPal is easily set up using DocuSign’s web interface or by calling upon its standards-based API. Users select the “Enable Payment Processing” feature in their DocuSign account and specify the PayPal account they wish to collect the payments.

“PayPal’s integration with DocuSign helps accelerate transactions,” said Eddie Davis, senior director of North America Partnerships at PayPal. “We are excited to be the first payment processor to work with DocuSign to make transactions completely digital, so they’re simple, fast, and secure.”

DocuSign’s Payment system will be incorporated into its DocuSign for Business and DocuSign for Enterprise editions later in April, extending the payment options to its users.

Spotify has gone from strength to strength since it launched in 2008, and last year its deep Facebook integration and US launch helped take the music-streaming service to the next level. From today, however, Spotify takes a pretty big step towards really establishing itself in the mainstream, as it rolls out a new embeddable button for bloggers and Web editors.

The Play Button will let you embed any Spotify song, album or playlist directly through your website. This essentially lets you tap 16 million tracks and let your readers play legal music directly on your website, much in the same way as you can do with YouTube videos.

“Today we’re giving every blogger and Web editor the ability to light up the Internet with music,” says Gustav Söderström, Chief Product Officer at Spotify. “Adding a personalised soundtrack to your website or blog has never been this easy.”

Indeed, Spotify has partnered with the likes of Tumblr, Time Out Group (NYC, Paris, London), GQ UK, Vogue, MSN, The Guardian, Virgin Media, The Independent, NME, ShareMyPlaylists.com and others, to let them offer the Play Button to their readers (and listeners) from today.

“You want to give your fans access to any song, album or playlist of your choosing and in its entirety, while ensuring people stay glued to your site”, continues Söderström. “The Spotify Play Button does all of this for free, while making sure artists get paid for every play.”

It’s probably also worth highlighting that the Spotify Play Button is now integrated into the Tumblr dashboard, and you can just type in the song or album you want and Tumblr makes the widget for you to fit with your blog’s theme.

“We deeply value music as a form of creative expression,” says David Karp, Tumblr founder and CEO. “That Spotify now lets our users share from millions of their favourite songs is revolutionary, and as huge fans of the product we are absolutely overjoyed about this partnership.”

To get the Spotify Play Button for your website, you just grab any song, album or playlist URI from within Spotify and head to its developer website to get the embed link.

Spotify is still only available in thirteen countries – the USA, UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain – and as such, the embeddable Spotify tracks will only be playable in these countries.

It’s also worth noting that you will also need the Spotify desktop app to use the button, as this is what powers it in the background.

For more information on the Spotify Play Button, click here.

Meanwhile, we’ve embedded our very own Spotify track here:

Spotify wants to make it easier for anyone to legally soundtrack their websites, oh, and get links to its own download page plastered all over the Internet. So today it launches the embeddable Spotify Play Button for news sites that when clicked starts playing a designated song, album, or playlist in your Spotify desktop app. Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, and the Guardian are amongst the marquee launch partners that will start featuring the button today, and Tumblr bloggers can instantly add Spotify music to their posts straight from the audio dashboard.

While Spotify tells me this is all about improving music discovery and the listening experience, the real benefit for it comes when someone without its desktop app clicks the button — they’re prompted to download Spotify (shown below). The company’s user acquisition costs are supposedly sky high, so free promotion through the Play Button could be key to making its business model hum.

The Spotify Play Button solves a big problem for publishers looking to stream music from their websites. Normally they’d have to embed a YouTube video with often crappy audio quality, host a questionably legal MP3, hotlink to another blog’s file that could get taken down, or dig around on sites like SoundCloud for a legal streaming version. Spotify’s Play Button gives them a quick, stable, reliable, high-quality, and legal way to soundtrack their site and make sure artists get paid for their work.

To configure the Play Button, publishers can right-click any song, album, or playlist in Spotify, copy its special Spotify URI, and paste it into https://embed.spotify.com/ . Then they copy the embed code for a compact button or one that shows album artwork, and paste that into their website’s code. Music can even go viral as other publishers can grab a widget’s embed code by hovering over a Play Button.

Other sites you can check it out on include ShareMyPlaylists.com, FanRx, Popdust, The Independent, Time Out Group (New York City, Paris, London), NME, Mashable, FanBridge, Wonderwall, The Fader, Chegg, ELLE , Noisey.com, Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and SPIN.com. The color and size of the button can be customized by messing with the code, and Spotify says more options will eventually be added to the configurator.

Tumblr users have it even easier. The post composer’s audio dashboard now lets you search for Spotify content, and with a click an optimized player is inserted into your post — no embed code necessary. The Play Button makes it easier for heavy Spotify users too. Instead of having to pause your current Spotify jam before clicking some other music stream on a website to avoid having two songs playing, Spotify will automatically override what’s already playing on your app.

Spotify has clearly taken a lesson from the march of Facebook’s Like Button across the web. Not only will the Play Button increase engagement and retention of existing users, and drive signups from new users, it will help make Spotify a house-hold name. AppData shows Spotify as having 17.7 million monthly users, and 7.1 million daily users, and some peg its U.S. subscriber count around 3 million, though Spotify denies this as a lowball. In any case, it needs more subscribers and ad listeners to pay for the high initial and licensing fees the record labels demand for their content.

The question now will be whether serious music bloggers will be willing to show Spotify Play Buttons instead of their old streaming sources even though they might exclude some readers who don’t want to download the app. Otherwise the unfamiliar Play Button could end up playing second fiddle to YouTube and SoundCloud streams.

• SPOTIFY

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010.

Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record…

Learn more

Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based clone merchant, is one of Europe’s most powerful internet businesses — and it’s growing all the time. With the recent news that the incubator-slash-accelerator is apparently now looking to copy Square, it’s worth examining how far the company has already come.

Plenty has been written about the Samwer brothers’ history, from early wins such as selling clones Alando and CityDeals to eBay and Groupon respectively, to more recent plays such as the Amazon knock-off Lazada.

But while many still think of Rocket as a European phenomenon that’s starting to break out elsewhere, the reality is that the company’s already running a vast number of properties all over the world.

It’s not easy to get a handle on all of Rocket’s babies, as the mothership doesn’t provide a comprehensive list. But this map shows all the countries where I’ve found Rocket to be either already operating or (in the cases of Slovakia, Hungary and Romania) about to open something.

We counted an astonishing 24 companies across 58 countries.

There are a couple of important things to remember here. Firstly, a huge amount of this expansion has only taken place in the last year or so. Secondly, there’s big money behind these operations – Zalando, for example, continues to pull in funding and is valued by some at around half a billion dollars. Thirdly, once Rocket has feet in a country it keeps using that infrastructure to swiftly roll out new services.

Not all countries have multiple Rocket operations. The map includes several countries where the only functioning Rocket offering I could find was the Airbnb clone Wimdu, namely Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.

The map doesn’t include non-geographically-based Rocket products such as Pinspire (the Pinterest clone), or games operations Plinga and Panfu. I also left out Groupon, in which Rocket gained a stake through its CityDeals sale, but which could hardly be called a Rocket outfit.

Oh, and I also left out the Zalando redirect page in the Cook Islands, which I’m pretty sure is just there to rule out .co.ck jokes.

Here’s a breakdown of the operations shown on the map, in descending order of the number of countries in which each outfit is operating or about to open:

• Wimdu (holiday accommodation, Airbnb clone): Italy, the UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, the U.S. and Uruguay.
• Zalando (fashion, Zappos clone): Already open: Italy, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. With holding pages: Poland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Australia, China and Romania (coming soon).
• GlossyBox (cosmetics, BirchBox clone): Italy, the UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, Israel, Australia, India (coming soon), Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Chile and the U.S.
• Bamarang (designer goods, Fab clone): Italy, the UK, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, Australia, India and Brazil.
• eDarling (dating, eHarmony clone): Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Czech Republic and Turkey.
• DropGifts (social gifting, Wrapp clone): Italy, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France, India (coming soon), Japan, South Africa (coming soon) and Brazil.
• Zalora (fashion, Zappos clone): Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong
• Lazada (general retail, Amazon clone): Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Egypt/GCC (as Mizado).
• HelloFresh (food delivery, Middagsfrid clone): Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Australia.
• FashionForHome (furniture): Germany, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands and the U.S.
• Betreut (classifieds for carers etc): Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Austria.
• Foodpanda (food delivery): Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
• Dafiti (fashion, Zappos clone): Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia.
• BillPay (payments): Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
• Enamora (underwear): Germany and Poland.
• Lamoda (fashion, Zappos clone): Russia and Kazakhstan.
• Immobilo (accommodation): Germany and Austria.
• The Iconic (fashion, Zappos clone): Australia and New Zealand.
• Zando (fashion, Zappos clone): South Africa.
• 5rooms (kitchenware): South Africa.
• Toptarif, Wunderkarten, Netzoptiker and Ladenzeile, which are older Rocket operations, are only found in the company’s home country of Germany.

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After it jumped the gun and unwittingly unveiled its new Lumia 610 NFC smartphone ahead of its official Monaco launch at 1pm GMT, Nokia has made its new Windows Phone handset official, announcing that it will launch on Orange networks early in the third quarter.

Updating its Conversations blog, Nokia says its ‘most affordable’ smartphone in the Lumia range will be aimed at new smartphone owners but with its NFC feature, it hopes to capture a ‘younger, broader audience’.

The Lumia 610 NFC will launch with NFC payment support and has already been certified for contactless payments using both Mastercard PayPass and Visa payWave. The company says it achieved this by “adding an NFC software stack on top of the Windows Phone platform. The necessary NFC hardware was added into this version of the Lumia 610.”

As a result, the Lumia 610 NFC becomes Nokia’s 8th NFC smartphone it has released in two years.

NFC will help users pair the new Windows Phone device with Nokia’s Play 360 speaker, allowing them to connect with other accessories quickly and more easily than the traditional PIN-based Bluetooth solutions that already exist.

The device will launch early in the third-quarter, no pricing has been set yet.

We published a version of this note in March on Business Insider Intelligence, BI’s internet industry research service. If you were a subscriber, you’d already know this! Click here to learn about BI Intelligence and sign up for a free trial →

GraphEffect

James Borow, GraphEffect

One of Facebook’s innovative ad formats, Sponsored Stories, can be an ROI-profitable means of doing direct-response advertising, James Borow, CEO and co-founder of GraphEffect, tells us.

This is potentially hugely important for Facebook and its war with Google, as it means that Facebook could start competing directly with Google for direct response, bottom of the funnel advertising budgets, and not just media/brand advertising budgets. 

But wait, isn’t Facebook atrocious at driving clicks and conversions? That’s certainly the conventional wisdom in the ad industry, and what we’ve heard many times. 

However, Borow tells us, that’s because those clicks are not tracked properly. 

Here’s how it works, according to Borow: 

• Sponsored Stories are native actions taken by Facebook users (liking a brand page, checking into a page, and so on) that a brand turns into an ad and shows to that user’s friends.
• That ad itself will usually have poor click metrics. But, crucially, that ad can lead to other actions. “A sponsored story may influence someone to share a post and then that share leads to the sale. We can now attribute that to the original ad.” Because that second-order effect isn’t usually tracked, Facebook ads seem to have a much lower ROI than they do. It should be noted that GraphEffect sells a tool that solves that problem, so obviously they’re talking their book, here. But Borow assures us that the numbers are very encouraging, often beating the ROI of Google search ads. And it makes sense to us. 

“I often refer to it as the death of the click,” Borow told us. “What now is relevant is the connection, or the share, and that is why Facebook is going to be a force for [direct response] advertisers in the coming years.”

If this effect works and can be measured well for advertisers, this could completely change the picture for Facebook. 

Google’s bottom of the funnel business is the most amazing online business model because it delivers measurable, reliable ROI for direct response advertisers. (In advertising lingo, “top of the funnel” advertising seeks to generate demand while “bottom of the funnel” advertising seeks to satisfy demand. Google is the king of the latter online, and Facebook is thought to want to dominate the former.)

It’s always assumed that Facebook advertising is mostly top of the funnel, brand/media advertising, and that this is the huge pot of money that Facebook is going after. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told us as much during Business Insider’s IGNITION conference. 

But bottom of the funnel advertising, which Google dominates, is a market that’s just as big and can be much more profitable.

If it turns out that Facebook’s ad formats can also work well for direct-response advertising in a scalable way, it would put Facebook in much more direct competition with Google—and instantly double its addressable market.

We published a version of this note in March on Business Insider Intelligence, BI’s internet industry research service. If you were a subscriber, you’d already know this! Click here to learn about BI Intelligence and sign up for a free trial →

Nokia has been weathering a series of glitches around the launch of its Lumia range of Windows Phone devices — the most recent of which saw the company issue credits to users affected by data connection issues on the new Lumia 900. It is pressing on with new devices, though, and we have confirmed with sources close to the company that it will be launching its first NFC-enabled Windows Phone in Europe, a version of the Lumia 610, at 1pm UK time today — along with a partnership with a European operator, France Telecom’s Orange, to launch the device “across Europe.”

Update: Orange and Nokia have now officially announced the 610. The details are noted as below. The pair say that the device has been certified for contactless payments both with MasterCard PayPass technology, and with Visa’s mobile application for payments at the point of sale, Visa payWave, which means it will work when activated and used with merchants that have linked up with this technology.

Nokia first unveiled the phone accidentally via a video on YouTube, which it then made private. Before it did that, a copy of it was made by TheGadgetBuff and picked up by The Next Web, which also published a photo of a display noting a 2pm launch. We have confirmed with sources that the launch is taking place at 1pm UK time.

The source told us the device will be launching with an operator, and in the video (embedded below) Nokia’s lead program manager for NFC, Andrea Bociaccola, says that the operator is Orange. We have confirmed that the launch will be “across Europe” according to our well-placed source.  It is not clear whether this launch is going to be in one of Orange’s market or several Orange has mobile operations throughout Europe, including the UK, as well as Africa and the Middle East.

Orange has made a big push into rolling out NFC in its home market of France, and more recently has also committed to services in the UK. In March the company said it had sold 500,000 NFC-enabled handsets in France — a mix of Samsung, Acer and BlackBerry devices. Rollouts of actual commercial services to use them more widely, however, have been slower in coming.

Today’s launch, it appears, was scheduled to take place in Monaco at the Global NFC Products, Applications Services Congress, where Nokia’s VP of product marketing and smart devices, Ilari Nurmi; and Orange’s mobile contactless services director, Didier Durand, are scheduled to speak together at 2pm Monaco time. TechCrunch understands that may now be moved forward in light of the video leak.

Bociaccola demonstrates how the NFC can be used with (Nokia) speakers to manage music, and he notes that in future it can also be used for monetary transactions — although this doesn’t seem to be something that will be available at launch.

It will also be usable with Foursquare check-ins, judging by the video, as well as to interact with other social networks (eg ‘tap to follow us on Twitter’).

Nokia was one of the first handset makers to incorporate NFC into mobile phones. However, up to now NFC has not gained much critical mass among other handset makers, merchants and others that might utilize the technology (like other consumer electronics companies) — so Nokia hasn’t had much of an early mover advantage as a result.

On top of that, there have been a multitude of solutions rolled out that bypass NFC altogether (Square and PayPal’s Here being two notable examples). That raises the question of whether NFC really will be as central to mobile commerce and other kinds of mobile transactions as people once thought it would be.

However there are plenty of companies out there putting big stakes into NFC, including the big payment processors as well as Nokia competitors, and so it’s an important area to keep pursuing.

Nokia’s putting NFC into the 610 means also that Nokia is continuing to forge ahead and make sure that it’s bringing along some of its legacy innovation into the next stage of its strategy to remain relevant in the mobile world.

• NOKIA

Nokia is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries.

They make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more.

Nokia is the owner of Symbian operation system and partially owns MeeGo operating system.

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Internet e-commerce company eBay has covered the roof of its data center (called Topaz) in Utah with solar panels. The project is eBay’s largest solar installation to date at 665 kilowatts, which is slightly bigger than the solar installation at its headquarters in San Jose, and over 6 times the size of its solar panel project at its small data center in Denver.

But yes, as Amazon’s web infrastructure guru James Hamilton pointed out recently, these types of solar panel installations at data centers are usually small enough that they only power a portion of the data center’s needs. According to this Data Center Knowledge post from 2010, the Topaz data center has a 30 MW substation nearby, and the first of the four phases of the data center consumed 7.2 MW. A 665 kW solar system could provide for about 2 percent of a 30 MW data center, before you even factor in the variable nature of the sun.

Apple’s planned 20 MW solar farm, for its estimated 100 MW data center, is by far the largest of its kind being built in the U.S. Google has also invested about a billion dollars into clean power projects as both a financial investment, and as a way to explore clean power development near its data centers. Facebook has a lot smaller solar panel project, at 100 kW, at its 25 MW data center in Oregon.

Hamilton isn’t convinced that solar and data centers are a good mix. And it’s true that energy efficient data centers are low hanging fruit for data center operators compared to costly clean power. eBay has been pretty aggressive on making its data centers more energy efficient, particularly for its new Project Mercury data center in downtown Phoenix (check out Derrick’s Harris’ awesome post after visiting Project Mercury.)

eBay worked with SPG Solar for the design and installation of the Topaz solar roof project.

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