Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.”

Worlds joins Kindle Singles and Kindle Serials as a way for authors to earn money from digital publishing, and the best part is that in this case you don’t even have to be all that creative – the idea is to let fans create stories around original properties from other authors, offering them up for purchase on the Kindle book store. Amazon then pays out royalties to both the original rights holder, as well as to the fan fiction author, with the author making around 35 percent of all net revenue for works over 10,000 words.

There’s also a new revenue model aimed at shorter works, which would be between 5,000 and 10,000 words and will typically sell for under a dollar. Under this scheme, the author’s cut will be a digital royalty of 20 percent.

Fanfic writers can sign up now at the official Amazon Kindle Worlds website, and the company expects to launch the Worlds storefront in June. There will be over 50 commissioned works included in the store at launch, Amazon says, and then it’ll be launching its self-serve submission platform for all authors to add their own completed works for consideration.

This is a very shrewd business move on the part of Amazon, since it leverages existing popular properties in a way that would never be possible with just one series author (or even a small list of a few running a title), and since it taps into the existing massive market for fan-created fiction that already exists on the net. Heck, I’ve still got an extremely bad and extremely long Star Wars extended universe manuscript hidden in a closet somewhere. If I can find that, read my childish scrawl well enough to transcribe it, and if Amazon ever secured those rights from Disney, I’d consider throwing it up on Worlds for some easy cash.

Amazon says it’s in the process of securing licensing deals from a variety of sources, including TV, movie, books, games and music properties. The only question I really have about this to be honest is why did this take so long to happen? If you want a near-bottomless supply of written content, fanfic is where it’s at.

XOXO, Gossip Girl.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Former Windows Phone developer evangelist, Charlie Kindel, has joined Amazon to head up an undisclosed project. Kindel left Microsoft in mid 2011 to work on his own startups but, according to his LinkedIn profile, is “now at Amazon working on something wonderful”. The profile lists him as ‘Director, something secret’ at Amazon in Seattle. That something secret may be mobile-related, judging by another paragraph of description which reads: “I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers.”

At Microsoft Kindel was a high profile platform evangelist for Windows Phone, before his rather abrupt departure to do his own thing. While working for Redmond, Kindel frequently trash-talked Android, with a particular penchant for criticising the fragmentation of Google’s OS. But after his departure from Microsoft and Windows Phone he has blogged about the opportunities presented by a fragmented Android platform – not for Google, but for others to compete and innovate – so if he has joined Amazon to work on building a smartphone powered by a fork of Android, a la Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, then it’s an area he’s been preoccupied with for a while.

Kindel joining a company that makes a product called the Kindle on a day traditionally associated with fools (April 1st), gave rise to speculation that the entire announcement was an elaborate prank — fuelled by Kindle posting his own April Fool about how he was joining Amazon to build the “Amazon Kindle Charlie… Amazon’s entry into the hotly contested home server market”. However a note before his faux press release says “part of the following is true” — and Kindel has also confirmed he has genuinely joined Amazon via Twitter:

Rumours that Amazon is working on building a smartphone have been doing the rounds for years, although suggestions of a 2012 unboxing proved to be off the mark. Bloomberg also reported Amazon phone rumours last summer. More recently, a deal between Amazon and carrier billing company Bango also hints at possible preparations for a smartphone – although Amazon of course is remaining tight-lipped on the phone rumours.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BlackBerry announced earlier today that its BlackBerry World content portal has officially crossed the 100,000 app marker, and has chosen to celebrate by talking up availability of some select, high-profile apps. New Amazon Kindle, OpenTable and Wall Street Journal apps have already gone live in the market, and BlackBerry has said that eBay, Skype, Soundhound, and Viber (just to name a few) are being prepped for launches in the “coming weeks.”

If you’ll recall, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins already said in an interview with Australia’s Financial Review that he expected the company to hit that particular app milestone ahead of its U.S. Z10 launch. That makes today’s announcement not a surprise in the slightest, but it still speaks to the considerable developer traction that BlackBerry has managed to cultivate over the past few months — after all, the platform launched with some 70,000 apps this past January, so racking up another 30,000 submissions in two months is nothing to sneeze at.

While it’s totally understandable that BlackBerry would make a fuss about 100,000 apps in its app store, a number like that only ever tells part of the story. Some have a tendency to look at the size of an app store as some sort of tell-all indicator of ecosystem health, that’s just clearly not the case. Back during the Windows Phone 7 days Microsoft had to deal with this a lot — there were long stretches of time when new, well thought out apps were effectively drowned out by spam and reiterative crap. It eventually got so bad that Microsoft had to cut down the number of allowable app submissions per day to keep would-be spammers from flooding the New Apps section with lousy apps that didn’t bring much value to the table.

Don’t get me wrong here — I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with BlackBerry 10 right now, but a quick look at the time-sorted list of apps launched in BlackBerry World indeed reveals quite a few stinkers. Sure, they arguably serve a purpose, but those aren’t the apps that are going to help move units and make people want to use BlackBerrys again. Hopefully, now that BlackBerry 10 has crossed a major milestone so early in its life, BlackBerry can deflect some criticism from bearish investors and pundits and work with developers to create the unique, polished native apps that devotees are really yearning for.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year American Express trialled a Twitter-based social commerce service, enabling Amex cardholders to get discounts on purchases made with their card (synced to their Twitter account) if they tweeted about them (using a hashtag).  The discount was applied directly to their Amex statement.

Today, Amex has upgraded this save-by-tweet into a pay-by-tweet service, emulating a similar service offered by Chirpify.

Here’s how it works, Amex cardholders sync their Amex card with Twitter at sync.americanexpress.com/twitter. Then, when Amex/Amex retailers offer deals (published in the @AmericanExpress Twitter feed), cardholders can buy them by simply tweeting the deal’s special hashtag – e.g. #BuyAmexGiftCard25.  This effectively promotes the deal – and Amex cards – to all the cardholders followers. To avoid errors, Amex tweets back to the user (@username) to check they want to buy, and the user must confirm with a tweet reply within 15 minutes. The cardholder’s card is debited, and the purchase sent out.

The upgraded Amex pay-by-tweet service is launching next Monday in the US and going live with a deal for Amazon Kindle Fire HD for $150 and an Xbox 360 4GB console with a three-month Xbox Live subscription for $180.

So will it work?  The Amex pay-by-tweet initiative is part of a broad industry move for financial services companies to get more intimately involved with e-commerce. For example, the world’s second largest lender.  China Construction Bank is reinventing itself as a fully-fledged e-commerce portal that is home to thousands of vendors, big and small.  And Twitter powered commerce has precedent, Innovative Thunder’s free-for-a-tweet (paywithatweet.com) service has been popular – winning a marketing award at Cannes, whilst PayPal-connected Chirpify has long allowed consumers to buy and sell directly in-stream Twitter (and Instagram).

But linking payment cards to social media accounts has had a rocky history.  Remember Blippy, and the original Swipely?  That didn’t end to well; surprisingly (not) people didn’t want to share their payment card purchases with the world.

Perhaps times have changed, but othe Amex Sync service on Twitter will only succeed if the deals are really great – worth talking about, and there is a cast iron guarantee that if an account is hacked – or “borrowed” by your sister – the user will not be responsible for unauthorised purchases.

What do you think – would you buy with a tweet?

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Christmas Day is increasingly the day that a flood of new phones and tablets come online; it regularly sets and breaks records for new device activations. This year was no exception, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry’s annual study, which found that 17.4 million devices activated on December 25 this year, a 332 percent increase over activations covering December 1 – 20, and a 156 percent increase on the numbers from a year ago.

Flurry’s data covers a catalog of 260,000 apps that use its mobile analytics platform, across Android, iOS and Amazon devices, and the firm claims it can account for roughly 90 percent of total new device activations given its reach. Not surprisingly, app downloads likewise spiked alongside the record activations, with 328 million app downloads on Christmas Day, a record high for a single day since Flurry started measuring app downloads. Downloads per hour peaked early at around 11 AM on the 25th, and remained high throughout the day until around 8:30 or 9 PM. While Christmas represents a single-day peak, Flurry projects that app downloads will remain high throughout the next week and into New Year’s Day, ending the holiday period with over 1.5 billion downloads, and possibly reaching as high as 2 billion total.

Lat year, app downloads were at 242 million for Christmas Day, so this year’s total represents a 36 percent increase over last year’s number. Total holiday downloads were at 1.2 billion in 2011, so if they experience a similar spike, Flurry’s predictions make sense, since 36 percent growth would put the total at just over 1.6 billion downloads for the holiday period.

Tablets won the day over smartphones, at least compared to their average performance. 51 percent of new devices activated on Christmas were tablets, vs. just 20 percent during the baseline period covering December 1 -2. That suggests that tablets are considered by most to be a more suitable gift than smartphones, perhaps owing to their availability without contracts. It could also reflect that while people are generally willing to spend on a smartphone for themselves, a tablet is seen as more of a luxury item, and therefore not something most folks are likely to have bought themselves. Flurry says the top winners among tablets for the holiday look to be the iPad, iPad mini and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 9-inch, specifically.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon today launched FreeTime Unlimited, a subscription service that offers movies, games, and books for the kids. The launch follows the recent software update to Kindle Fire, which introduced FreeTime, a profile system designed to restrict access to certain content.

Independent from its existing Amazon Prime subscription, FreeTime Unlimited adds to this safe environment by including an entire library of content from Disney, Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Marvel, HIT Entertainment, and others. And to build out its games collection, Amazon has worked with app developers to institute safety measures. Kids are presented with stripped-down versions of existing apps minus in-app purchase capability, Facebook or Twitter integration, and advertisements.

With the launch, Amazon introduces different ways for kids to browse the library. For example, kids can select a character, such as Elmo, Dora or Buzz Lightyear, then see everything related to each character. For existing Prime members, the service costs $2.99 a month per profile, or $6.99 for a family. Non-Prime subscribers will have to pay $4.99 per month per profile, or $9.99 for the entire family. Of course, you can choose to make all your kids use the same profile. It works on the first-generation Kindle Fire and the two new Kindle Fire HD models.

When asked whether it was hard to negotiate with Disney, Peter Larson, VP of Amazon Kindle, answered “it’s hard to negotiate with us as well.” It remains to be seen whether content partners provide a meaningful collection or just a sample of their productions. The latest Pixar movie won’t be included, for example. International support is another issue, as well.

With the launch of FreeTime Unlimited, Amazon adds another component to its content strategy. The company has said for months that it makes little to no profit with each Kindle sale. Instead, they want people to use their devices and buy content.

As I previously wrote, people buy an Amazon device because it is very easy to watch movies or read books if you are already using Amazon’s content platform. The FreeTime Unlimited subscription creates another use case for the Kindle Fire.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon has released some detail on Kindle sales over Thanksgiving Weekend: as usual, it’s giving no hard numbers but instead providing general buying trends. It says that Kindle device sales more than doubled worldwide, and with discounts running on the Kindle Fire Tablet, Monday was the biggest sales day of all, and overall the whole weekend set a record for the company.

It’s a frustrating release, to be honest, because while on the one hand it appears to point to obvious popularity for the Kindle devices — and how effective the combined machine of online marketplace+products can be — it doesn’t give enough clarity on how something like the Kindle Fire is performing. However, separately analysts have noted that the Kindle has proven to be one of the most popular of all Android-based tablets on the market.

As I mentioned yesterday when noting Amazon’s UK sales figures — in which Kindle family sales tripled on Black Friday — it sometimes feels like Amazon spins them to help promote particular items, such as the Fire tablet, rather than giving a frank picture of what is actually proving to be popular, and by how much.

Still, here are some more of the details. Make of them what you will. These are global figures, so covering sales across www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es.

• As in previous years, the Kindle family has taken the top slots in Amazon’s best sellers list, it says, and taking into account Kindle products, including accessories, e-books and other digital content, the range takes up nine out of the top 10 best-selling products worldwide since September 6.
• Amazon does not spell out what ranked as the most popular device sold. It notes that aggregating both items sold and items “wanted”, Kindle Fire HD is the most gifted and most requested product on Amazon worldwide since launch.
• “Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fires have held the top 4 spots on the Amazon worldwide best sellers list since launch, and that was before the busiest shopping weekend of the year,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle, in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a particularly strong Thanksgiving for online sales, shoppers continued to look for e-commerce deals on Black Friday. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark is reporting the final tally for Black Friday online sales: a surge of 20.7 percent in spending from last year. The biggest surge on Friday came from mobile consumers, with sales reaching 16.3 percent, led by the iPad.

Overall, mobile purchases soared over the holiday with 24 percent of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 14.3 percent in 2011. Mobile sales exceeded 16 percent, up from 9.8 percent in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the iPad contributed to more traffic than any other smartphone or tablet, taking 10 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and Android at 5.5 percent.

The iPad also dominated tablet traffic at 88.3 percent followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook at 3.1 percent, Amazon Kindle at 2.4 percent and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8 percent. Overall 58 percent of consumers used smartphones compared to 41 percent who used tablets to surf for bargains on Black Friday.

IBM says that average order value dropped by 4.7 percent to $181.22. In addition, the average number of items per order decreased 12 percent to 5.6.

Shoppers referred from social networks generated .34 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, a decrease of more than 35 percent from 2011.

IBM says the surge in sales this year was likely due to earlier promotions, more personalized deals and mobile shopping increases. By sector, department stores online continued to see sales grow by 16.8 percent over Black Friday 2011. Health and Beauty sales increased 11 percent year over year; home goods saw a 28.2 percent increase in sales and apparel sales saw an increase of 17.5 percent over 2011.

IBM doesn’t actually release a dollar amount spent, but we’ll see this number from comScore soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kit Kat is this week’s top gainer for the People Talking About This metric among product and service pages on Facebook. The page has seen huge weekly growth as it earned over one million stories across their pages.

The top 10 product and service pages saw PTAT growth between 85,211 and 1,063,923 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Kit Kat	1,077,156	0	+1,063,923
2	P&G	475,216	0	+224,385
3	Petcentric by Purina	444,555	+22,076	+168,847
4	Under Armour	174,580	+6,927	+151,494
5	慕妮佧 Muñeca	185,775	+87,529	+150,528
6	AXE	297,351	+26,332	+134,358
7	Amazon Kindle	179,246	-59	+132,748
8	supportstore.us	120,609	0	+114,135
9	Grandparents.com	186,302	+9,006	+97,517
10	RebelsMarket	114,207	+103	+85,211

Apple managed to sell a lot of iOS devices over the last three months. But iPad sales are still declining. They are down 17.6 percent to 14 million compared to 17 million in Q3 — a bit more than expected. Analysts expected at least 15.55 million units, and sometimes more. Apple missed on those sales.

Last year, Apple sold 11.12 million iPads in Q4. It’s still a 25.9 percent increase year over year. Overall, Apple barely managed to beat the estimates.

Comparatively, in Q4 2011, iPad sales increased by 166 percent year over year. Those sales were above street expectations.

The company just released the fourth generation iPad. And of course, there is the iPad mini. Those devices are going to be released a little bit more than a month after the ending of Q4 on September 29. It will help the sales in Q1 2013. We could expect a new sales record for the iPad in the next quarter.

Over the last quarter, many competitors unveiled and released tablets. The smaller form factor and the price attracted many customers. Among those tablets, we can name the Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

The iPad is still a young product. When it was first released, even though tablet computers existed already, it was a big opportunity for Apple. Now that many people have bought one, the adoption rate is slowing down.

The iPad mini and its lower price tag will certainly help putting the device in the hands of new customers.

Developing…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch