Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming with the launch of Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency that is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of dollars” worth of Amazon Coins.

Coins, which were first announced in February, are the company’s move into an area that has been a strong way for app publishers to generate revenue through their apps. In that sense, the launch serves a two-fold purpose for Amazon: a way of encouraging developers to come to its platform (something Amazon has already been working on), and to spur more revenue generation.

A lot of the talk in virtual currency of late has been around the potential for bitcoin and other new monetary instruments fuelled by a network effect. But before bitcoin became the buzz, there were already a number of other virtual currency networks run by Facebook, Zynga and many more, with aim being to spend the “money” on gaming and other apps on their platforms.

Unlike bitcoin, and more like Amazon Coins, most virtual currency is based on users redeeming standard currencies for “virtual” ones on the network in question. This money can then be used to buy new features in a game, or extend your life, or to send “virtual gifts” to friends. One idea here, I think, is that users are more likely to spend money when it’s less transparent that they are doing so; in Amazon’s case, 500 Coins sounds a lot more exciting than $5. Another is that it ties a user more closely in with a particular game and a particular platform. Amazon Coins will give Amazon a way of more reliably monetizing users longer-term.

Amazon Coins is an extension of other social services that Amazon has added to its app platform. Specifically, Game Connect lets developers list virtual goods for sale on Amazon.com — a way of also marketing those games themselves; and GameCircle is a kind of social network that lets users measure their achievements in games against their friends and other players. On top of that, Amazon also allos for in-app purchases using real-world money as well.

Amazon says that it will be offering discounts of 10% to those users who buy Coins in bulk. Developers will get a standard 70% revenue share on all coin spend.

This looks like it is just the beginning of Amazon Coins, which the company says will extend to other services on the platform — and likely outside of the U.S. over time, given that virtual currency has proven popular outside of the U.S. in markets like Asia and Europe.

“Today we are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds Star Wars. And with discounts of up to 10% when you buy Coins, this is a great way for customers to save money when they buy apps, games and in-app items,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon, in a statement. “We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities—today is Day One for Coins.”

Whether that will ever include making purchases on Amazon.com with Amazon Coins remains to be seen — but it seems that in any case Amazon Coins will be one more way that Amazon will build out its e-commerce empire ever further.

Release below.

Amazon Coins Now Available for Kindle Fire Customers
Every Kindle Fire owner in the U.S. will find $5 worth of free Coins deposited directly into their Amazon account

Customers can also purchase Coins in bulk and receive a discount up to 10%

Tens of millions of dollars worth of Amazon Coins are now in customers’ accounts to spend on developers’ apps

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 13, 2013– —(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced that customers can now use Amazon Coins to purchase apps, games and in-app items in the Amazon Appstore and on Kindle Fire. To celebrate the launch, existing and new Kindle Fire customers in the U.S. have had 500 free Coins—a $5 value—deposited into their Amazon accounts today. For customers, Amazon Coins is an easy way to purchase apps and in-app items on Kindle Fire, and for developers it’s another opportunity to drive traffic, downloads and increased monetization. With discounts of up to 10% for purchasing Coins in bulk, it’s also an opportunity for customers to save money on their app and game purchases. Customers can purchase Coins by visiting amazon.com/coins.

“Today we are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds Star Wars. And with discounts of up to 10% when you buy Coins, this is a great way for customers to save money when they buy apps, games and in-app items,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon. “We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities—today is Day One for Coins.”

Amazon Appstore developers will earn their standard 70% revenue share when customers make purchases using Amazon Coins. No Coins-specific changes are required for developers with apps and games currently in the Amazon Appstore. Developers not yet in the Amazon Appstore should submit their app today through the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal (https://developer.amazon.com/welcome.html).

Amazon Coins is the latest offering in an array of services that make Amazon the most complete end-to-end ecosystem for building, monetizing and marketing their apps and games. These capabilities include:

The ability for app developers to use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) technology platform for their infrastructure needs. Building blocks such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB allow developers to focus on what differentiates their app rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure.
App submission for distribution to nearly 200 countries globally enables developers to reach millions more Amazon customers worldwide.
In-App Purchasing on Kindle Fire, Mac, PC and web-based games. This enables developers to sell virtual items in their apps and games while allowing their end users to simply use their Amazon accounts to make the purchase.
GameCircle, which includes capabilities like Achievements, Leaderboards, Friends and Whispersync for syncing games across devices, and leads to better engagement with games.
Game Connect, which lets developers list their virtual goods for sale on Amazon, increasing discoverability of their games and making the purchase of virtual goods as easy and convenient as possible for customers, leading to increased monetization for developers.
About Amazon.com

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including http://www.amazon.com, http://www.amazon.co.uk, http://www.amazon.de, http://www.amazon.co.jp, http://www.amazon.fr, http://www.amazon.ca, http://www.amazon.cn, http://www.amazon.it, http://www.amazon.es and http://www.amazon.com.br. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

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Since the launch of personalized magazines this March, social magazine maker Flipboard has added 6 million new users to its platform, bringing its total number of users to 56 million – and that’s before the feature even arrived on Android, which now comprises roughly half of Flipboard’s user base. Today, that changes as the personalized magazine option arrives on Android phones and tablets, alongside the launch of a new web-based magazine editor designed with the needs of curators and publishers in mind.

Android users have a couple of unique options, including the ability to “flip” items from other native applications such as YouTube, the browser, or their own photo gallery, into Flipboard. The updated app is also now making use of Facebook Single Sign-On for registration, the company notes.

In addition, while previously a mobile-first and generally mobile-only company, the launch of the online magazine management tool shows that Flipboard is carefully considering how it should proceed when it comes to the web. The company has previously acknowledged that there are challenges with Flipboard’s magazine sharing features – that is, when someone tweets or posts a link to a Flipboard magazine on the web, it can be inconvenient for those who click that link from their non-mobile device.

For example, if you click on a link to Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue’s awesome “Metazine” magazine (a magazine of magazines!) at http://flip.it/qyXu1 on the web, you’ll only be taken to a landing page which directs you to download the app to your mobile devices for access. This is something the team is working through now.

As Flipboard head of product Eugene Wei explains, the web has mainly served as a companion to Flipboard’s mobile and tablet applications to date. “But,” he adds, “we think the web is super important, and we plan to do more on the web over time…I think a lot of our partners want things like embeddable buttons or badges to help drive more viewership to their magazines,” Wei says. He points out, too, that the Flipboard has a limited web presence with its web browser add-on, the Flip It button.

The new web interface for magazine management is a good first step in thinking about what role the web should play in this mobile-first company. On the newly launched site, editor.flipboard.com, users can create, edit and share their magazines much as they could previously on mobile, as well as take advantage of new, web-only options, like re-ordering the stories, photos and videos within their magazine, deleting content, or even changing the order of the magazines under their account.

Flipboard also announced today that The Financial Times has launched on its platform. FT.com subscribers will get unlimited access to FT content on Flipboard, while other Flipboard users will be able to access FT blogs and videos. This is the second major media publication to offer paid subscriptions through Flipboard, following The New York Times’ subscription debut last summer.

CEO Mike McCue had hinted at this Android release during his chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. At that time, he also shared that users had now created over 1 million magazines using the new tool, and some of those might even be worth paying for in the future.

Whether or not some of the upcoming analytics features for publishers will also be worth paying for, however, has yet to be determined, says Wei. He notes that the stats and measurements Flipboard will offer curators today on the new Editor interface will become more robust in the future, informing magazine creators what stories work for their readers, what other types of stories or magazines they read or curate themselves, and how readership data is trending over time.

To manage your own Flipboard magazines from the web, you can sign in to the Editor interface here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Local Market Launch, a startup that helps companies manage the online presence of local stores, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding.

The company was founded by Brian Coryat, who previously founded ValueClick, an online ad company that went public in 2000. Coryat told me that he spent much of the past decade working with small businesses, and that Local Market Launch was created to address one of the big issues that he saw during that time — the need to manage the presence of these businesses on the web, both through their own websites and their listings on other properties. There are companies tackling parts of the problem, he said, but it’s a fragmented landscape with tools that aren’t easy to use.

“Our charge is to make businesses findable on all locations, apps, and devices,” Coryat said.

There are three main pieces to the startup’s offerings for multi-lcoation businesses. First, it creates a landing page for each location, and each page is optimized for local search, he said. Second, it promotes those pages by pushing out the information to a number of search portals and channel partners. Third, it offers monitoring tools so businesses can track social media buzz and reviews.

The company launched in 2012, and Coryat said it doesn’t usually work with these businesses directly — instead, its customers are print directories who can sell Local Market Launch as part of their services, as well as certified marketing representatives (basically, agencies who work with these types of businesses).

As for the funding, it comes from Rincon Venture Partners. Combined with seed funding provided by Coryat himself, Local Market Launch has raised a total of $2.7 million.

Rincon general partner John Greathouse told me that his firm likes to work with “serial entrepreneurs in an adjacent space” — in this case, Coryat actually tackled a similar problem with his first company, AAA Internet Promotions. Greathouse also emphasized that Local Market Launch is trying to drive real-world sales: “If you boil it all down, the goal of Local Market Launch is to generate door swings and phone rings.”

I asked Coryat about the competitive landscape, particularly Yext, a company that helps local businesses update their listings across a range of websites. He replied that Yext has “kind of a neat platform,” but he said that for most small businesses, the real-time updating that Yext emphasizes just isn’t as important, and that Yext doesn’t have Local Market Launch’s focus on optimizing for Google.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about the launch of Facebook Fone and my own horrible attempts at becoming a bitcoin billionaire.

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

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As we wait for Twitter’s music app to be launched, the company has put up a site at http://music.twitter.com  giving you the chance to sign in. Some outlets reported it would launch today, but then updated to say that the weekend was the target to tie-in with Coachella. We’ll be watching.

The site itself? It’s very exciting It just loops you back to the same page, so nothing is going on there yet. This will most likely be the landing page for the app, however.

It’s not known if there will be a web component to the app, but it would make sense — at least a mobile web version anyways.

As we know, only “cool” people like Ryan Seacrest are able to access the app, as the company is clearly placing it with celebrities who can help with an orchestrated launch.

lovin the app…shows what artists are trending, also has up and coming artists… spinning u now @frankturner

—
Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) April 11, 2013

Twitter #music in out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

T-Mobile is kicking off its official sales of the iPhone 5 today, marking the first time the U.S.’ fourth largest carrier has offered an Apple smartphone. Thanks to T-Mo’s new Uncarrier plans, the iPhone 5 can be had starting at just $99, with two years of $20 monthly payments to cover the balance, or for free if you’re switching from another carrier and bring a device in for trade. So far, so good, according to reports of lines forming at retail stores for a phone that’s now over six months old.

BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk tweeted the photo above of a line at a location this morning, and reports on Twitter suggest that small lines are forming at various locations around the U.S. Our own intern Michael Seo said there was a small one outside the T-Mobile store near our New York offices when he came into work this morning.

The appetite for the T-Mobile iPhone is good news for both Apple and the small carrier. T-Mobile’s existing potential reach only represents around 26.1 million total additional subscribers for Apple (a smaller percentage of which are realistically potential iPhone 5 buyers). That’s not a huge number in global subscriber terms, but it does give Apple room to expand its smartphone dominance in the U.S., and could provide it a late-stage bump for the iPhone 5, which is going to face increasing pressure from new competing flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4.

T-Mobile has consistently been left out of launch day hype surrounding the release of Apple’s iPhone, with the carrier relegated to watching from the sidelines as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon locations saw customers queue for the iPhone 5 back in September, so it’s probably very happy to see lines form with this launch. Combined, the iPhone 5 and the carrier’s new model could lure away quite a few switchers, but we’ll have to wait and see if that impacts the overall distribution of U.S. wireless customers in any significant way.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Asana, the high-profile productivity startup that’s trying to redesign the workplace around tasks (instead of email), is announcing a major update today, adding more powerful search functionality, bug tracking capabilities, and manager reporting.

Search is the biggest update in this launch, with the addition of full text search, structured search, and custom saveable search views. Co-founder Justin Rosenstein explains people spend a lot time finding information within an organization. But with the new search feature, Asana users should never face this problem again.

Essentially the default view in Asana to-date has been “Project View.” Now, with the launch of the advanced search functionality, Asana offers a “search view” of work. The new search views let you see the results of any search, from a simple keyword search to a rich structured search, in the Asana center pane. These views can be sorted by the task due date, creation time, or modification time. You can also navigate between tasks to see their details, or select multiple tasks to change them all at once. And you can save these views to create custom reports that update each time you switch to them.

Here’s how it works. For a simple full text search, you can type into the search box and choose “Search Tasks”. For a structured search, click the arrow at the right of the search box. You can then specify Assignee, Projects, Tags, Attachments, Completion Status, Due Dates and more. You can then narrow down to incomplete tasks, those with attachments, or the ones not assigned to you. Once you’ve created a search you want to use again, you can click the star next to the Search title to save it.

Additionally, Asana is debuting new manager reporting features to help managers keep track of their team and projects. You simply add your teammates to the “Assigned To” field, then filter by project or tag to drill down to the information you need. For example, Rosenstein says, a manager could pull up a comprehensive view of all the tasks their team is working on at the moment, their status and correspondence associated with these tasks.

Lastly, as Asana is fairly popular amongst the developer community, the startup is doubling down on bug tracking. Rosenstein says that Asana talked to a number of developers to determine what their needs are for bug tracking, and heard over and over that current bug tracking tools are not up to par.

So search has been updated to work well for bug tracking. For example, you can used the saved search function to allow the QA team watch for completed bugs that haven’t been QAed yet, or let the customer service team watching the bugs they opened to see as they become assigned and then completed.

Rosenstein says this update is a big step forward for Asana as a productivity application. “This is only the beginning of our plans,” he says. “Search is one of the core pillars of our product and we’re a company that is querying collective memory.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is making an announcement this Thursday, and our own Josh Constine reports that at this event we’ll see the company unveil its own slightly tweaked flavor of Android, to power select HTC smartphones. But why would the company do that, and why now? A new report from Reuter provides very good motivation: Facebook sees a potential threat in the growing success of mobile-first messaging platforms that make the social networking experience more about conversation and less about broadcasts.

In the article, Reuters flags a number of successful mobile-first startups and companies that have managed to attract a very sizeable user base, and which it claims are especially popular among a younger demographic, including KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat, Kik and WhatsApp. These apps mostly seem to succeed by focusing on brief one-to-one or group communication, with provisions that also allow for direct sharing of media like YouTube clips, audio and games, where Facebook and other web-based social networks before it have emphasized one-to-many broadcasts, and a less direct model of social interaction.

Facebook has obviously seen the effect of this shift, and has altered its product to try to anticipate or react to it, with moves like the Beluga purchase in 2011, which led to the launch of Facebook Messenger. It also built a Snapchat clone, over the course of just a few days, in a move that seemed to be little more than a display of power: the big dog saying essentially, ‘if this is what people want, we can do that too, and without breaking a sweat.’

But there’s reason to suggest Facebook is sweating. The Reuters piece cites Kik’s recent introduction of Kik Cards, a means for sharing content on the messaging platform quickly and easily, and most importantly, without cluttering the core experience. I spoke with Kik founder Ted Livingston twice about Kik Cards, once before their launch and once shortly after, and he agreed with me that there’s a huge opportunity out there for someone like Kik or another mobile-native startup to take things further and become a full-fledged mobile-first social network, possibly even one to usurp Facebook’s dominant position.

Kik has 40 million users, however, and event WeChat’s 400 million users is a far cry from Facebook’s more than 1 billion monthly active users, 680 million of which are active on mobile. Others like LINE and KakaoTalk, which have been primarily successful in Asia so far, still only have 120 million and 80 million users respectively. Point being, according to the numbers in black and white, Facebook still has an immense lead on its mobile competitors, and one that isn’t likely to suffer a huge reversal in the immediate future.

But Facebook’s Thursday announcement (which is where it tellingly directed Reuters when the pub sought comment for its story today) suggests that even if its crown isn’t under immediate threat, the company is thinking hard about how to woo mobile users in a meaningful and lasting way. Building Facebook DNA into the very core of the OS could be a good way to do that, and one that others might find hard to replicate owing to Facebook’s stronger influence. The bottom line is that Facebook is looking ahead to anticipate a time when it might not be in a position of power, and a strike at the young, mobile demographic right where they feel most at home could help considerably in avoiding that future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SimCity is getting a lot of flack from players and consumers about its policy of requiring that they remain connected to EA’s servers to enjoy the game, even when playing in single-player mode. Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw has indicated that SimCity actually requires the online connection, since it does a lot of important calculations on remote servers. But now a modder called UKAzzer has created a demo (via Polygon) that shows the game is indeed workable in an offline setting.

UKAzzer’s demo shows unlimited offline editing of city highways by accessing debug mode, and even claims that these changes are saved back to the server once again when you reconnect later without issue. Is it perfect? No. The mod apparently shuts off key game features like playing across regions and the ability to save games. But it’s meant to demonstrate just that editing is possible in an offline environment, over extended periods of time, without communication back to the server.

The demo is meant to counter claims that it would require a significant amount of engineering to render SimCity playable offline, claiming that it simulates the entire region within which a player’s city is situated on its servers. This hack was essentially designed to refute that claim, at least in part. It follows claims by an anonymous Maxis engineer who claimed that Maxis servers aren’t doing much of anything regarding important computation.

SimCity’s online requirement is likely more about enforcing DRM protection to prevent piracy of the game than about user experience, and users like UKAzzer are clearly trying to make that more apparent. EA has just today said that it completed server upgrades designed to address the launch problems, so it’s now likely hoping the negative reviews and backlash fall by the wayside.

But while requests for offline play might get quieter, they likely won’t go away entirely any time soon. And the fractured and hurt gamer community won’t forget this launch or the impact of the online only requirement on people’s perceptions of a beloved brand. Big studio blunders, however, make for small player opportunity. Diablo III’s always-on requirements were definitely helpful to sparking interest in Torchlight 2, the sequel to Runic’s dungeon crawling alternative to Blizzard’s classic. It’d be great to see a scrappy city sim emerge to help ease the pain for spurned SimCity fans.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Boxbee, a startup that’s looking to make urban storage (not of the digital variety) less of a pain in the ass, just won the best new startup award at the Launch conference in San Francisco.

The winner was chosen by a jury from the 50-plus startups that demonstrated on-stage at Launch over the past three days. The conference included a bevy of categories, 12 awards in total, including “1.0,” for startups launching for the first time (that’s the category that Boxbee won), and 2.0, for startups that were launching a major new product.

The San Francisco-based Boxbee took home the best overall new startup award this year for its urban storage service, which aims to simplify the process so that users can just box up what they want to store and let Boxbee do the rest. For those who are moving, traveling or are just looking for extra space at home, the startup’s “secure storage hive” allows you to order boxes, which it claims it can deliver to your doorstep within the hour.

Once you’ve packed your boxes, Boxbee helps you to schedule a pickup, taking the lifting, truck-packing and transporting out of your hands. On top of that, the startup claims to go the extra mile to adapt the whole storage process to its busy customers, by allowing you to schedule pickups and returns on the Web or via its mobile app and promises to complete pickup and returns in less than two hours. Well, two hours for “carloads” and next-day pickup and delivery for storage that requires a cargo van or truck.

The service then stores your possessions until you need them again, and provides complementary services to sweeten the deal, allowing you to ship your boxes elsewhere from its app or web dashboard or have them donated. To streamline the process of pickup and returns and offer more flexibility, Boxbee’s dashboard keeps an inventory of images for the contents of each box in your account, including tagged descriptions, which allow you to choose the particular box you need without requiring someone to open it and rifle through its contents. It will then return the box to you in two hours.

Meanwhile, a Y Combinator-backed startup called Zillabyte won the “Best Enterprise 2.0″ award. We actually wrote about it more than a year ago, when it was trying to help businesses analyze big data.

Since then, the company has shifted focus, and at Launch it announced a new product that it described as “Pandora for leads.” In other words, similar to the way that Pandora can recommend music based on you preferences and listening habits, Zillabyte claims that it can look at a company’s existing customer base and recommend sales leads who are similar. The company says that an early customer has already seen conversion rates improve 35 percent.

Updating

Article courtesy of TechCrunch