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The 'Anti-Amazon Law' Is About To Become A Reality In France, But It's Not A Bad Thing
Jan 10, 12:07PM
The cultural exception strikes again — France’s National Assembly will most probably pass the so-called ‘anti-Amazon’ law in the coming days. In a few months, Amazon won’t be able to offer free shipping for books in order to protect independent bookstores. It’s a logical evolution of the Lang Law. Book prices in France are hard to understand from a foreigner’s perspective. Back in 1981, French Minister of Culture Jack Lang established a fixed price for books sold in France. Since then, publishers have been fixing the price, printing it on the back of the book. Retailers from supermarkets to independent book sellers have had no choice but to sell those books at the official price. If you really wanted to compete on price, you could discount the book 5 percent below the publisher’s price — many bookstores chose to take advantage of this exception, but 5 percent was a reasonable price difference. When it was created in 1981, the government wanted to protect independent bookstores against supermarket chains. It worked really well, and independent bookstores are still around, for the most part. In fact, similar fixed book price laws started popping up in other European countries, such as Italy, Portugal, Spain or Germany. But bookstores had no idea that the most serious threat had yet to come — Amazon, Fnac and a few others opened their online stores. Despite having to wait a couple days before getting your book, the two heavyweights Amazon and Fnac found a way to remain competitive: they priced the books 5 percent below the publisher’s price and they offered free shipping, all the time, for all book orders. Independent bookstores saw that as unfair competition. As Amazon bills from Luxemburg where sales tax is very low, this model was sustainable and allowed the company to gain market share. The company is playing its usual market share game in France as well — profit and margins are not as important as increasing sales. Theoretically, the company can flip a switch any day now, increase prices and start the money-making machine. Today’s French Minister of Culture Aurélie Filippetti says that she has nothing against Amazon despite the law’s informal name — but free shipping has to stop. In a few months, online retailers will have to choose between free shipping and the 5 percent discount. If they choose the 5 percent discount, it won’t deduct 5 percentMeet ChoiceMap, A New App That Helps You Make Better Decisions
Jan 10, 7:48AM
Making complicated decisions is an emotionally fraught process and (if you are like me) the process can leave you feeling paralyzed. ChoiceMap is a new free iPhone app that helps you break down complex dilemmas into a list of priorities, rate them by how they will affect your life, and then uses an algorithm to score decisions. You can use it for everything from figuring out the future of your relationship to just deciding what to eat for dinner.Airlock, Facebook's New A/B Testing Framework, Will Help Improve User Experience On Its Mobile Apps
Jan 10, 4:55AM
Facebook has developed a new mobile A/B testing framework, it announced today. In a post on the company’s engineering blog, engineers Ari Grant and Kang Zhang explained that when Facebook switched to native development stacks two years ago, it gave them finer control over many aspects of mobile development, but also meant losing the ability to A/B test. With Airlock, Facebook can make new updates to their iOS and Android apps that “support 10 to 15 different variations of a single experiment and put it in the hands of millions of people,” which means that the company’s developers now have the ability to figure out which features work the best (or don’t) and improve mobile user experience much more quickly. Even though 73% of its 1.19 billion users (as of September 2013) access the social network primarily through their mobile devices, Facebook has struggled to make sure that its mobile strategy keeps up with rivals like Twitter. Airlock will make it easier for Facebook’s developers to figure out what mobile users want, which is especially important because Twitter recently issued a major redesign of its own iOS and Android apps. Both social networks also have to compete with the increasing popularity of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Line and WeChat. Airlock is the latest sign that Facebook is focused on fine tuning its mobile strategy. Back in April, it acquired Parse, which marked its entry into a new business category, or paid tools and services such as back-end data storage, for mobile app developers. And earlier this week, Indian startup Little Eye Labs, which makes a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps, announced its acquisition by Facebook. The Bangalore-based company’s team will move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where they will build analysis tools to help develop apps.After A Troubled 2013, The PC Market Looks For Stability
Jan 10, 4:03AM
Today Gartner released a preliminary set of results for the global PC market in the fourth quarter of 2013, indicating that PC sales fell 6.9% to 82.6 million units. 2013 has certainly been a historically tough year for PCs and the industry that builds and sells them. Gartner, with its fourth quarter predictions now mostly in place, estimates that the PC market shrank 10% during the year. Total unit volume was 315.9 million units, a level that The Next Web points out is equivalent to shipments in 2009. I think that we can cap 2013′s PC market with a few statements. Let’s begin: The PC market had a very difficult year, shrinking around 10%. That 10% figure is directly in tune with predictions. With 315.9 million units shipped in the year, the PC market remains massive. That fact will keep Microsoft’s Windows operating system relevant, even as it sorts out remaining difficulties — developer interest gap, app deficit, training the world on a new UI, etc — with its new Windows 8.x platform. The folks that correctly predicted the 2013 PC unit volume decline anticipate that the market will contract less in 2014, and stabilize thereafter. That last point is not news. The prediction (IDC, not Gartner if you were curious) expects a 3.8% contraction in 2014, and then for the pace of sales to become “slightly positive in the longer term.” All told this means that the PC market should manage to stay above 300 million units per year for the forseeable future. Oh no, the world is ending. I’ve been as guilty as most in using hyperbolic language to describe the PC market. Plummeting, decimating, falling, crashing and the like have been the lingua franca of reporting on the year’s results. But historic declines can be accidentally conflated with existential threat if we are not careful. I think that in retrospect, 2013 will remain a decidedly black eye on the PC market’s history. But provided that the folks counting boxes have it right, the swan dive (I did it again) is all but in the pool. Why was 2013 such a bad year for PCs? You could point to a weak economy, issues regarding Windows 8 and its market reception, unimaginative new PCs from OEMs, rising tablet demand, a general shift to mobile, and a host of other reasons. There is no single cause. But it’s worth noting that whatSource: Yahoo Bought Aviate For $80M
Jan 10, 2:48AM
Earlier this week, Yahoo announced that it had acquired Aviate, a startup providing contextually relevant information on Android homescreens, but it didn't say anything about the acquisition price. Now a source with knowledge of the deal tells me that the deal was for $80 million. My source didn't know any of the details beyond the acquisition amount — the mix of cash and stock or how much of the total is tied to an earn out, for example. Regardless, that's an impressive price for a young startup that raised a $1.8 million Series A less than a year ago.Ifbyphone Raises Another $9M For Voice Marketing Tools
Jan 10, 2:07AM
Marketing technology company Ifbyphone is announcing that it has raised $9 million in Series D funding. The round was led by new investor River Cities Capital Funds (a growth equity firm focused on healthcare and IT) and brings Ifbyphone's total funding to more than $30 million. Previous backers Apex Venture Partners, Origin Ventures, and I2A also invested in the Series D, as did SSM partners. The round was also disclosed in a regulatory filing.Google Play Services Gets Improved Mobile Ads And Multiplayer Support, Google+ Sharing And Preview Of Drive API
Jan 10, 1:10AM
Google today started rolling out the latest version of its Google Play services for Android. Just like earlier updates, version 4.1 brings a number of incremental changes to the company’s service for integrating Google services into mobile apps. The rollout is currently in process and should land on all Android devices worldwide within the next few days. Today’s update brings support for turn-based multiplayer games to Play services, for example. With this, developers can easily build asynchronous games with up to eight participants. Every time a player takes a turn, the data is uploaded to Google’s servers and shared with the other players. Google has integrated this service with its tools for matching players with others, too. Also new in this update is improved support for Google+ sharing. This, the company says, will make it “even easier for users to share with the right people from your app.” As part of this update, users will be able to get auto-complete support and suggested recipients for all Gmail contacts, device contacts and people on Google+. Developers can now also use Play services to access Google Drive through a new API that’s now in preview. With this, they can read and write files in Drive. Users will be able to work on these files offline, and changes will be synced automatically. For developers who use Google’s ad products, this new version introduces full support for DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Search Ads for Mobile Apps. What’s most interesting for advertisers, though, is that publishers can now also use a new location API to give Google access to a user’s location when requesting ads. Location-based ads are likely to perform better than generic ads, after all, though users have generally been a bit nervous about sharing this data with advertisers given the potential privacy ramifications. One other feature most users will likely appreciate is improved battery life. While Google isn’t sharing any details about this, the company said that anybody who has Google Location Reporting turned on should see longer battery life after this update, though whether that means less than 1 percent more (likely) or 10 percent more (very unlikely) remains to be seen.Oculus VR's New "Crystal Cove" Prototype Is Kind Of Amazing
Jan 10, 12:20AM
Oculus VR has been showing off a new version of its virtual reality technology at the Consumer Electronics Show. According to Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell, the "Crystal Cove" prototype features two big improvements — positional tracking and low persistence. I have to admit that when Mitchell first said this, I started to worry that these were going to be minor changes, only relevant to hardcore gamers and serious virtual reality geeks. Then I tried out the new prototype and, well, it was kind of amazing.It's Never Too Early To Say Goodbye
Jan 09, 11:55PM
“You can’t just quietly slip out the door,” I’ve been told by too many people I trust. So okay, fine, here’s this post about my departure! Since you asked, TechCrunch is in a really good place right now. The various numbers we use to measure ourselves — from traffic to revenue to some leaderboard provided by a tech news aggregator site whose name I forget — are once again quite healthy or even record-setting. That’s despite widespread predictions of doom a couple years back, about the time I took the co-editor job. But measurements are a means to find the essence of something, they are *not the essence itself*. That’s particularly true for a qualitative craft like news. The essence, of course, is writing great stories that help people make better decisions in life and in work, that create accountability in the world, and that maybe even delight and entertain readers from time to time. My goal from the start has been to build a new system for greatness at TechCrunch. To put the writers in front and create something that could survive any number of staffing changes while getting better and better. This has happened, gradually at first, but faster over time. From gadgets to tech policy, long-time TechCrunch writers and a whole bunch of new people have come together and formed something new and strong. Today we’re publishing posts like Ryan Lawler’s exposé of a startup that was screwing over its investors, or Kim-Mai Cutler’s first-person exploration of Silicon Valley’s boom-and-bust cycles over the years — and a lot more that you’ll just have to find on the site, or wait for in the coming weeks and months (I am privy to what’s in the pipeline). Beneath the surface, we’ve added about as much editorial structure as the team would collectively tolerate. This has meant normal newsroom stuff like a fleshed-out weekend plan and mandatory vacations, and more aggressive journalism efforts like allowing writers to take lots of time away from the day-to-day grind to go after the big stories. For me, though, it’s time to try something pretty different. I’ve been in tech since everybody wrote it off as a dying industry town about to be fully outsourced, to a scarily mainstream phenomenon. Back in the old days when my media-tools startup got covered by TechCrunch, or over the years when I’ve competed against this publication, weAnd Now For Something Completely Different, Leadership Changes
Jan 09, 11:23PM
As you may have read, our beloved co-editor Eric Eldon is moving on to do other things. Clearly Eldon will leave a huge hole, and therefore we're going to be making a couple of editorial changes to make sure TechCrunch meets 2014 staffed up for greatness. Our esteemed Senior Editor Leena Rao will become Managing Editor as part of these changes. The force behind "Ask A VC," Rao has become a fixture in the Silicon Valley community since she moved back from Chicago to San Francisco. She will be instrumental in making sure TechCrunch stays true to its roots as it grapples with an increasingly competitive news cycle.And The Winner Of Our First Hardware Battlefield Is… CubeSensors!
Jan 09, 11:00PM
Three days go by awfully quickly, don’t they? The Consumer Electronics Show — and by extension our Hardware Battlefield — only started on Tuesday but we’ve seen no shortage of cool gadgets and hot startups take our stage here in Las Vegas. This is the first time we’ve tried to put together a Battlefield solely for hardware startups and to be quite honest, we were blown away by both the number and the caliber of the companies that threw their hats into the ring. In the end we saw hundreds of applications beget 14 great contenders, and here we are — three days later — faced with the task of choosing a winner from a great batch of finalists that includes Atlas Wearables, Blaze, CubeSensors, and Owlet Baby Care. That unenviable decision fell to our final panel of judges — Bre Pettis, Yves Béhar, Matt Turck, and Jen McCabe — who deliberated for half an hour until they came up with a winner. We’re awfully proud of all the companies that participated in our inaugural Hardware Battlefield, but in the end only one can take home the trophy and the giant $50,000 check. So without further ado, say hello to our 2014 Hardware Battlefield winner and runner-up: The Winner: Cube Sensors CubeSensors are home air monitors packed with seven different sensors that measure over air quality, temperature, humidity, noise, light, weather pressure, and motion. You can read our full coverage here. The Runner-Up: Owlet The Owlet is a baby sock that tracks a young one’s heart rate, oxygen levels, skin temperature and even provides rollover alerts during sleep. You can read our full coverage here.Bioniq Health Compares Features And The Quality Of Health Trackers
Jan 09, 10:00PM
Health trackers, from pedometers to smart scales, are flooding the market and there’s no place to conveniently compare all the different competitors. BioniqHealth.com is a new website to compare the features and quality of all varieties of health trackers. In the future, Bioniq hopes to give doctors the option to “prescribe” certain health devices and build a community to offer detailed reviews. Our readers can access an early version of the site with code “TechCrunch”. Bioniq is impressive at curating novel features. It’s my job to monitor these health trackers and I learned few new things from the comparison chart. For instance, I didn’t know the Fitbit force monitored elevation levels–a feature that’d be super useful for running hills in San Francisco. Bioniq covers the full range of the newest consumer health gadgets: smart scales, glucose monitors, neurofeedback devices, and diagnostics. CES attendees are getting early access to the site today and users will notice that it’s still sparsely populated. There’s still a lot more information and few new gadgets it could include (it does not, for instance, have features about the software aspects of the wrist bands and didn’t automatically compare the Misfit Shine to its competition). I expect that in the full release, these issues will be fixed. The more interesting elements are yet to come. “Bioniq will help individuals to find tools and technologies most relevant to their specific needs (i.e. I want to run a marathon, I want to better understand and manage my sleep, or back pain, or high blood pressure),” writes Co-Founder Dr. Daniel Kraft to me in an email. And, “For clinicians, who will increasingly be ‘prescribing’ apps and devices we will serve as a platform to enable technology (for the clinic, home, and wearable) to facilitate better diagnosis as well as disease treatment and management,” he continues. “In the near future I may ‘prescribe’ you exercise with a ‘fitbit’ or others most relevant to the patient, or a BP Cuff to help manage your hypertension.” So, why couldn’t Amazon just do everything that Bioniq hopes to do? “Amazon is a great marketplace but the essence of these new technologies for health and wellness is not just buying them. It’s how they are used, what happens with the data, and who is involved,” Kraft argues. “The features soon to emerge on Bioniq will quickly clarify that Amazon is barely related to what wePintrips Files A Motion To Dismiss Pinterest's Trademark Suit, Says 'Pin' Is Too Generic
Jan 09, 9:23PM
Pins, pins everywhere! Back in October, we reported on a trademark infringement suit filed by Pinterest against planning travel startup Pintrips, accusing it of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution. Now Pintrips is fighting back. It has filed a motion to dismiss on two grounds: first, that the term "pin" is too generic; and second, that Pinterest has made a claim on insufficient grounds as a result.Overstock.com Partners With Coinbase And Starts Accepting Bitcoins As Payment
Jan 09, 8:41PM
Have a wallet with several bitcoins and shopping for a new patio set or maybe several lamps? Overstock.com is ready to take those volatile bitcoins off your hands. No word on Dogecoins, though. Overstock.com struck a deal with Coinbase, a sort of PayPal for Bitcoin, to handle the processing. Just today, Overstock.com and Coinbase flipped the switch, marking a milestone in Bitcoin history. Overstock.com just became the largest online retailer to accept the digital currency.Gametime Aims To Provide The Best Mobile Experience For Last-Minute Sports Ticketing
Jan 09, 7:34PM
Online ticketing services are moving onto mobile, but Brad Griffith, CEO of a startup called Gametime, says the experience still isn't good enough. For example, Griffith (whose previous startup Zappedy was acquired by Groupon) recalled using the mobile app from "a current leader in the space" to purchase baseball tickets recently, but he didn't realize until the last minute that he had to print those tickets out. As a result, he and a friend had to convince the owner of the bar that they were at to print out the tickets, and they ended up missing out on the first inning — that might not seem like a huge deal, but Griffith argued that they lost a significant part of the value of their ticket.Twitter Toys With Ways To Boost Engagement With '@AchievementBird' Experiment
Jan 09, 7:30PM
Twitter has begun experimenting with an account, called @AchievementBird, that will direct message you ‘achievements’ that you earn with your tweets. The account is protected but has granted follows in the past few days. Once you’re on the list, the account will occasionally send you messages about how one of your tweets has performed. Xero engineer Owen Williams noted the account on Twitter, as well as a couple of the messages that he had received so far: One of my tweets was ‘used in an article’ and AchievementBird notified me of the fact. When I clicked on the link, the relatively new ‘Related headlines’ feature showed me exactly where the tweet had been used. Another Twitter experimental account called @magicheadlines is likely related to this effort, as it claims to let you ‘See where tweets are embedded around the web’ — though it could have some wider applications as a digest of newsworthy tweets. Update: This account appears to have been a part of a Twitter hack week project, as the bio has now been updated to reflect that. So probably not a part of Twitter’s main ‘experiments’ pipeline, but something team members were working on as a side project. When asked for comment on the AchievementBird account, Twitter referred us to the blog post on its continuing experimentation efforts. It appears that AchievementBird is tapping into Twitter’s analytics package to surface the results of user tweets. Though it rolled out analytics to business users and verified users first, anyone can now get access to the page using their ‘ads’ dashboard. This is what it looks like: If you’re a frequent tweeter, you’ll have some stats stacked up about RTs, favorites, followers and more. I’ve talked before about how Twitter is experimenting with an account called @magicstats, which appears to measure the popularity of tweets by velocity. In that piece I mentioned that third-party Twitter engagement tracker Favstar is one of my go-to sites on a daily basis. One of the features that Favstar offers is accounts that hit you up when your tweets have passed fav milestones like ’50′ or ’100′. It also offers a ‘tweet of the day’ award that you can bestow on friends or follows you think gave good tweet. Who knows what Twitter will end up doing with the AchievementBird account in the end, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it weaveWith Revenue Now In The Millions, Piqora Prepares A "Content Management System" For The Visual Web
Jan 09, 7:25PM
Piqora, a company that began its life as a Pinterest-centric company once called Pinfluencer has over the past year expanded further into the visual web space with marketing tools for Tumblr and Instagram, as well. Today, the company is giving a peek inside its business, and announcing it’s now generating revenue in the single digit millions, with monthly recurring revenue up 600% in 2013. In addition, the company is also publicly disclosing a $2.1 million round of venture financing from last April, which comes on top of a previous seed round of $1.4 million. Freestyle Capital again led the newer round, which also included participation from WTI (venture debt), Baseline and Lazerow Ventures. Over the past year, Piqora has grown its customer base 400 percent, and now serves over 300+ clients, generally in the fashion, home decor and e-commerce space, including several well-known brands like Crate & Barrel, Wayfair, Etsy and Steve Madden, for example. These businesses pay anywhere from $12,000 to $24,000 on for an annual subscription to Piqora’s services, which include its analytics dashboard as well as a hands-on customer relations component which sees the firm advising brands on how to better succeed with their advertising, marketing and community-building efforts across the visual web. For instance, Piqora’s team can suggest what to do when Pinterest pins and re-pins are declining, or which popular and trending hashtags they should use when posting to Instagram. With the Instagram product in particular, the company is now tracking over 1,000 hashtags, CEO Sharad Verma tells TechCrunch. In addition, over 400 brands have connected their Google Analytics and Omniture accounts to measure the social ROI of their images, and Piqora has tracked over 450 (up 800% year-over-year) photo contests and sweepstakes on visual networks, which delivered over half a billion in product impressions. Now, the company is embarking on a plan to expand its product suite yet again in 2014, with something Verma likens to a “CMS for the visual web.” “The number of images that brands have to now monitor has exploded beyond imagination. What they’re looking for is a unified way to manage all the images – to collect branded images from a variety of networks – and the ability to see all the images in a consolidated library, sort of like a content management system for the visual web,” he says. This product, Verma explains, would allow marketers access to internal resourcesRobin Labs Builds A Rear-View Mirror Personal Assistant For New Strategic Investor Pioneer
Jan 09, 7:11PM
Robin Labs -- maker of the eponynous personal assistant app -- has been in the news of late because of a leaked video that shows a mobile app personal assistant customized to run on Yahoo services. While that app and their association remain the subject of "ongoing conversations," Robin Labs has come to CES in Las Vegas with other news: it's raised funding from electronics maker Pioneer Corporation, and it's working on a new version of its personal assistant that integrates into Pioneer's in-car rear-view mirror system.Pocket Drones Gets $50,000 In Pledges Overnight
Jan 09, 6:25PM
Hardware Battlefield entrant Pocket Drones blew past their initial goal of $30,000 last night after launching on our stage at CES 2014. The company, run by long-time friends and moderators of the Drone User's Group, Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth, built their drones as an alternative to expensive, bulky toy drones.New Gmail Feature Allows Anyone On Google+ To Email You & Vice Versa, But Opt Out Is Provided
Jan 09, 6:04PM
Google is today making a change to Gmail that will further bake in Google+ to its webmail product in a way that’s actually somewhat practical, though also potentially invasive. Going forward, you’ll now be able to directly email your Google+ contacts from Gmail, even if you don’t know their email address. And by default, anyone on Google+ will be able to email you as well, thanks to this new option, if you don’t adjust your settings. This feature appears as you begin typing your contact’s name in the “To” field of an email message. Matching contacts display first at the top of the list of suggestions provided by Gmail’s autocomplete, while your Google+ connections appear below. Because of the privacy implications of this feature — and the possibility of overwhelming the inboxes of more public figures — Google has at least put controls in place that allow you to specify who can send you emails. You can choose from “No one” to continue on as normally, or open things up a bit wider by choosing from “Circles,” “Extended Circles,” or even “Anyone on Google+.” And of course, because Google+ is now the default platform for YouTube commenting, and required for things like setting up a new Gmail account, the “Anyone on Google+” option is much larger today than in earlier years. Many people are technically “on Google+,” even if they aren’t active on the Google+ destination site itself. In addition, Google explains that not only are you able to specify who can send you emails, your email address isn’t visible to a Google+ connection until you send that person an email, nor is their email visible to you, unless they send you an email. The feature also takes advantage of Gmail’s previously introduced tabbed interface, which breaks the Gmail inbox into sections like “Primary,” “Social,” Promotions,” and more. Going forward, emails from those in your Google+ Circles will appear in the “Primary” section, while those you don’t have in your Circles will be filtered over to the “Social” tab instead. Those users will only be able to start a conversation with you if you respond to them or add them to your Google+ Circles – something you can do right from the email header (which fortunately offers a visible “Report Spam or Abuse” link, as well). This new feature is an expansion on the Google+ integrations the company first introduced back inIf at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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