Thanks to its complicated regulatory structure and the continuing popularity of Web-enabled feature phones, Japan’s mobile market is difficult for foreign companies to penetrate–but Apple has finally managed to work its way to the top, according to a report by Counterpoint Research (h/t TNW).

Apple took a 16 percent market share in Q4 2012 and 15% for the full year of 2012, taking the top slot for the first time in annual terms and displacing Sharp’s six year reign as champion. Sharp and Fujitsu each took 14 percent of the market in 2012. The research report notes that Apple had temporarily displaced Sharp in Q4 2011, but that the Japanese company climbed back top for the first half of 2012.

The Cupertino-based company has been in the number one spot since November, says Counterpoint Research. Other foreign brands, including Samsung and LG, also increased their shares in Q4 2012, and their combined share of the market exceeded 50 precent for the first time in Japan’s history.

Apple’s performance is thanks in large part to telecom operators Softbank and KDDI, which both promoted the iPhone 5 as a challenge to DoCoMo, which does not yet carry the device. While DoCoMo tried to ward off competition with new smartphone models, its president has said that the company is willing to add the iPhone to its current lineup if it can reach an agreement with Apple.

As for Apple’s new position at the top of the pack in Japan might change the company’s cloistered mobile industry, Counterpoint Research commented that things might get downright Darwinian as foreign competitors finally begin to duke it out with local brands:

Japan was once considered to be like a Galapagos Island, an isolated terrain, in terms of mobile technology. It had its own unique digital cellular technology. It was far more advanced than any market in the world and it seemed nearly impossible for any foreign technology company to penetrate the market. Motorola had failed and Nokia had failed. The wave of smartphones has changed the situation now and it looks like the Japanese market is a market that can be transformed after all for better or worse.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft today added another $250 million to its Partners In Learning Project, a global professional development program it has created to equip teachers with the skills they need to teach IT and other future-looking subjects. Microsoft has been running this program since 2003 and to date has invested $750 million in the project.

It is a bit of soft diplomacy/marketing for Microsoft — education, after all, is one of Microsoft’s target verticals for its software and IT services businesses. Projects have included teacher training in IT and other “21st century skills,” as it calls them, and it also works with governments on digital inclusion programs and links up with its YouthSpark education initiative.

The idea is to bring a worthy message through a pragmatic medium — events like the Global Form in Prague currently underway are sponsored by hardware partners (in this case, Acer) and are showcases for Microsoft products (in this case, Windows 8).

Still, $750 million is certainly nothing to be sniffed at, especially at a time when so many governments have cut spend on education and IT, and among the efforts there have been some other partnerships that have had prescient partners, including a joint research project with SRI International, the R&D group that spun off and sold Siri to Apple.

This latest investment could see more money pumped into similar projects, but for now Microsoft is focusing on using the investment to expand the global footprint of the program. Currently it’s in 119 countries, and has trained 11 million teachers and 200 million students. With 75 million teachers working today, Microsoft’s aim is to extend the number in its PiL program to 20 million teachers by 2018.

The program is the corporate extension of the philanthropic work that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has been involved in with his wife Melinda, focused on developing countries. “We started this program nearly 10 years ago based on the belief that education is a fundamental human right and the single most important investment in our collective future. This has never been more true, and I’m really pleased to see the continuing commitment to innovations that can help all students and teachers reach their full potential,” Gates said earlier today in Prague.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

comScore is reporting its annual holiday retail e-commerce spending data. Already for the first 18 days of the November – December 2012 holiday season, $10.1 billion has been spent online, a 16 percent increase from last year. Thursday, November 8 has been the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $829 million.

That’s pretty impressive considering we haven’t even hit the marquis spending days yet, including Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

For the entire season, comScore is forecasting that consumers will spend $43.4 billion online, up 17 percent from last year. Last year saw a 15 percent increase in sales online. comScore says this is also ahead of the retail industry’s expectation for a 4.1 percent increase in consumers’ overall spending this holiday season.

“The 2012 online holiday shopping season is off to an encouraging start with a 16-percent growth thus far,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni, said in a release. “Recent 5-year highs in consumer confidence and early retailer promotions appear to be serving as wind in the sails for the beginning portion of the holiday season, with consumers opening up their wallets early and often. This spending growth also reflects the continuing channel shift to online as consumers increasingly opt for the attractive pricing, convenience and product selection it offers.”

Gartner is reporting that online holiday purchases will increase by 12% over last year, reaching almost $96 billion in revenue. And they are reporting that more than 51% of consumers will shop online this holiday season.

In Q3, consumer spending online jumped 15 percent. And we’re definitely going to see an increase in mobile shopping as well.

According to comScore’s quarterly online retail survey, 37 percent of U.S. consumers use a smartphone while in a brick and mortar store to check prices or to even purchase a product online, an increase of 5 percentage points in the past two quarters.

Amazon has been aggressively trying to get consumers to purchase on the e-commerce site while in stores, but retailers are catching on to this. It should be interesting to see how this translates into sales and numbers this season.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Boston-based Locately, a location analytics firm which combines GPS signals with mobile surveys to understand how people shop and make decisions about where to dine, has been acquired by the customer research firm Service Management Group (SMG). Locately had previously raised just over a million via grants and angel funding, which included investment from Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo CEO), Joshua Schachter (Delicious founder), David Cancel (Compete founder), Mike Volpe (Hubspot CMO), Jeff Miller (Punchfork CEO), and Roy Rodenstein (Founder going.com, SocMetrics).

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Locately co-founder Drew Volpe says that investors “got a good return.”

Locately, for those unfamiliar with the company, had built a proprietary data-mining engine which collected data from customers’ (opted-in) mobile phones in order to understand more about what sort of behaviors they were engaging in out in the real world. It could tell how a customer moved from one location to the next, what stores they passed along the way, how long they visited stores, what sort of lifestyle or shopper segment the user fell into, which competing stores a consumer would frequent, how a business compared to its rivals, and much more.

After its funding two years ago, Locately won Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I and II grants from the National Science Foundation, and received the START Phase I award from MassVentures, the VC arm of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The company also raised funding from Project 11 Ventures and the loose affiliation known as HackerAngels.

Locately’s clients included some of the biggest name brands in consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, and over the course of the past year, it detected 1.5 million shopper visits and received over 600,000 responses to its location-triggered mobile surveys. New owner SMG meanwhile, has relationships with hundreds of brands and receives feedback from 70 million customer experiences per year.

Andy Fromm, CEO of SMG, said his company had tested the service with some of its clients prior to the deal and came away impressed. “Consumers respond well to short and relevant mobile surveys,” he said. Now Locately’s technology will be made available to all of SMG’s clients.

Locately Co-founder Drew Volpe told us he felt the acquisition is “good further evidence of how valuable mobile big data is and the continuing trend of using mobile phones as sensors to get feedback from consumers and measure the world.” He says their team is excited to have access to SMG’s experience in consumer insights as well as its relationships with over 200 retailers and restaurants.

SMG is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri and has offices in the U.K. Following the acquisition, the entire six-person Locately team will remain in their same office in Boston and will continue to work on the technology.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million. [Update: A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] The acquisition will give Oracle a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients as part of its social cloud suite of products and services.

Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year. TC understands there was a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive.

Oracle is no stranger to massive acquisitions. It bought talent management solution Taleo in February for $1.9 billion.

Beyond Facebook, Vitrue helps marketers manage their presences on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and other platforms. Vitrue had been pursuing a strategy of acquiring small companies to add to its service offering. It is “nearly profitable” and was projected to reach profitability in this fiscal year, said our source. TechCrunch understands that Reggie Bradford, the CEO, will “very much remain part of the equation” when Vitrue becomes part of Oracle. Exact title to come.

The purchase underlines the continuing trend of large, old-world Internet marketing companies buying their way into social after being slow to adopt. Adobe bought social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million in November 2011, just a few months after Efficient Frontier had bought Facebook marketer and application developer Context Optional for a reported $50 million.

With time, social has proven too important to ignore. Rather than scrambling to build something and trying to pull brands away from established social marketers, Oracle will instantly gain a massive list of notable clients along with Vitrue.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Well, here we are. Excuse us while we unpack a few boxes, but as you can see we’re just about moved out of the old EU.TechCrunch.com sub-domain, into this palatial place called TechCrunch.com/Europe. Yes, folks, after five years or so out there in the wilds of the EU, tapping away about startups on the other side of the Atlantic, our European secret agents are coming in from the cold…

Put simply, we’ve moved the archive of the old TechCrunch Europe sub-domain site over to the TC mothership and this is where you’ll be getting your regular feed abut the European tech scene from now on.

It’s appropriate in many ways. When I was hired by Mike Arrington back in 2007 to launch a standalone TechCrunch Europe blog, he gave me just one word of advice: “Experiment.” The idea that blogs would have a network of several titles looked like a good one back then. But times change, and it’s clearer now that bringing our coverage under the one roof works a lot better, just as it has for other, formerly separate, sites like MobileCrunch and CrunchGear. Plus, European readers will benefit from any new innovations that happen to this site, such as a new design (ok, let’s not go there…).

The good news for European startups is that we’ll be able to give you a lot more TechCrunch luuurve here on TechCrunch.com/Europe. And it’ll be much easier for us to put you on the home page of TechCrunch.com, should the story warrant it, of course.

I hope you’ll enjoy the continuing coverage from myself, Mike Butcher, and Ingrid Lunden and our roster of contributors and guest writers.

Meanwhile, we’d love to get your feedback about what we can do to improve what we do. What stories would you like to see? Who would you like to read about? What do you think are the gaps in our coverage? This is your chance to unload and tell us what you think, so we can go on improving. Feel free to sound off anonymously or otherwise here on this feedback form here or below.

Thanks people!

P.S. Stay tuned on a dedicated Europe channel RSS feed. We need to unpack the kettle first…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Paulo Coelho, the world famous author of The Pilgrimage, The Alchemist and many other works which have in many ways become an inspiration for entrepreneurs, gave an exclusive and rare interview to TechCrunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos last night, the recording of which is published below. Coelho and I had previously been moderators at a dinner curated by Loic Le Meur on the future of social status and the interview took place in a taxi to another venue. (My write-up from the dinner will come later, suffice it to say that it was most entertaining and enlightening).

Coelho last gave an interview to Mike Arrington in 2008 where he said “MySpace Is my wife… Facebook Is my mistress”.

Coelho has oft-repeated his view that artists and artistic works do no suffer when they are copied, quite the opposite. Their distribution becomes greater and the artist comes off better as a result. Coelho has even taken to pirating his own books on The Pirate Bay.

What is interesting about our interview is his continuing vehement repudiation of the traditional book publishing industry’s response to the new platform of the Internet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While thousands of people swarmed all over CES, I went off-beat and headed north to downtown Las Vegas. This is the old part of the city where once gamblers at slot machines listened to Sinatra wafting through the Casino doors rather than Beyonce. This area of faded glory is now the scene of the Downtown Project, an initiative by Zapos CEO Tony Hsieh to transform the area from an unloved poor relation to the famous Vegas “Strip” of huge casinos and hotels down the road, into a hive of tech startup activity. Silicon Strip, if you will.

The timing could’t be more interesting. As governments around the world look to the continuing boom in technology to revive their battered economies – from ‘Startup Chile’ to ‘Tech City’ in East London – Hsieh’s project could well become a blueprint for others to follow. After all, if you could re-create the fecund atmosphere and economic success of Silicon Valley in the middle of the American desert, surely you could do the same anywhere in the world?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A large survey of consumers and manufacturers from around the world has found a number of interesting statistics, though some are interesting not in and of themselves, but in what they imply about those surveyed.

For instance, 57% of consumers say they’re “always or usually” aware of a product’s country of origin. This seems rather generous, considering how incredibly complex the supply chain is, and how a given high-tech product might include pieces from 10 or 20 different countries, depending on how deep you want to dig.

And while 67% of people said that product quality is better today than it was 5 years ago, 75% think manufacturers don’t use the best-quality materials and don’t follow environmentally friendly procedures.

Perhaps most entertainingly, 97% of manufacturers consider themselves “ahead of the curve” in safety and reliability, and nearly that many think the same regarding sustainability and innovation. They can’t all be above average.

The full survey can be read here. The NY Times takes a few of the stats to suggest a “global gadget fatigue.” A generalization that isn’t really supported by this survey, but probably is true nevertheless. The amount of money and research going into consumer electronics has made product turnover much faster, and the nature of PR demands that products not be released all at the same time. So the results is a new “revolutionary” phone, TV, laptop, tablet, or what have you pretty much every week.

It’s a major shift from the slower-moving world of the 90s, when much common wisdom was established about computers and mobiles among the population at large.

The study also suggests that environmental concerns and consumer interest in the origin of their devices is going to be playing a major part in brand and marketing over the next few years. This may have to do with the simple flattening of the world that is the result of the internet and globalism in general. More products are being manufactured internationally, yes, but more people are aware of it, perhaps partially because of the continuing decline in manufacturing jobs in the US. But the 57% figure cited above is globally; in the US, only 46% say they’re aware of the country of origin, compared with 70% for India and 66% for China. Still, the number is probably far higher than it was ten years ago.

As I have argued, it’s unlikely that people will agree to an increase in price for “ethical” devices, as much as we would like to think so. And although labeling and regulation should be established regarding the country of manufacture, component manufacture, and material sourcing, that’s still something of a fantasy. But it’s a good thing that consumer interest in such things is growing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile shopping is undoubtedly on the rise, and today comScore is releasing new data reinforcing this continuing trend. According to the data research and analysis firm, 38 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone to make a purchase at least once in the course of their device ownership.

The most popular products purchased on smartphones during the month of September included digital goods, clothing/accessories, tickets and daily deals. In September, two-thirds of all smartphone owners performed some sort of shopping activity on their phones, including comparing products and prices, searching for coupons, taking product pictures or locating a retail store.

In September, digital content purchases, such as music, eBooks, TV episodes and movies, were the most popular mobile purchases with 47 percent the share; 37 percent purchased clothing or accessories directly from retailer, and 35 percent of purchasers bought event tickets. Slightly more than one in three mobile purchasers bought daily deals and gift certificates on their device in September.

In terms of where shoppers were when they purchase items via their phone, 56 percent did so while at home, whereas 42 percent of consumers made purchases while out of home or at work. And 37 percent of the shopper who made remote purchases did so while traveling or commuting. Slightly more than one in three purchasers used their smartphone to make a purchase while in a store.

The fact that over 30 percent of purchasers used their smartphone to buy a product while in a store is interesting, considering that many are probably using their phones as a tool for real-time price and product comparisons. This holiday shopping season is expected to be the year of mobile, so we’ll see if consumers use their phones for retail purchases in record amounts.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch