The Social

Your decaf caramel macchiatos and no-whip pumpkin spice lattes are going mobile.

In a double-shot launch (sorry), coffee giant Starbucks unveiled late Tuesday its first two iPhone apps. The first one, called MyStarbucks, is a no-brainer: you can use the phone's GPS capability to find nearby stores (previously, this was available via text message), search ingredient and calorie information for Starbucks beverages, study coffee bean varieties, and build virtual drinks to see what exactly would be in one if you ordered it.

But it's the second app, called Starbucks Card Mobile, that could be worth a double-take. The app allows for balance check and refilling of Starbucks gift cards, which the company has expanded into a customer loyalty program by offering discounts, free refills, and two hours of free Wi-Fi to cardholders. And in two experimental test markets, the Starbucks Card Mobile application can use a barcode to replace the plastic gift card altogether.

As far as mobile e-commerce is concerned, this could be a big deal.

Mobile retail promotions, from text-message codes to redeem for free drinks to the nascent pop-up deals in geolocation app Foursquare, are nothing new. And mobile payments are commonplace in countries like Japan and South Korea. In the U.S., they haven't caught on yet. But having a ubiquitous national retailer like Starbucks in the game could change this.

The barcode-based electronic gift card from the new Starbucks iPhone app.

(Credit: Starbucks)

"We're really venturing into new waters in terms of mobile payment," Stephen Gillett, senior vice president of digital ventures at Starbucks, said regarding the Starbucks Card Mobile app.

"The mobile app is really the powering of some of our most frequently used functions on (the Starbucks card's Web site) and our in-store activity in terms of balance and payment and favorite orders," Gillett said. The app was developed internally with some help from third-party companies like mobile billing start-up mFoundry, he said.

Unless you're geographically very lucky, you won't be able to pay for a venti frappuccino with your iPhone just yet. Only 16 Starbucks outlets, eight in its home turf of Seattle and eight in Silicon Valley, can currently handle the barcode-based gift cards. These are stores already internally designated as test spots for new Starbucks technology, Gillett said.

"In some of these Seattle stores we've tested store manager laptops, allowing them to get instant messaging, full access to e-mail, and conferencing," he said. "These are some of the stores that got the new AT&T Wi-Fi earlier."

As a result, that means the integration process may be smoother for the test stores than it would be for a random Starbucks elsewhere in the country. "The store employees are used to getting new kinds of technology, new kinds of services earlier than most markets," Gillett said.

Estimates vary on just how big the U.S. gift card industry is, but according to the Federal Reserve, it's certainly well into the billions and continues to grow. As for Starbucks, already one in seven transactions at the coffee chain involves its array of gift and loyalty cards, Gillett says. "We see a significant amount of our traffic represented by loyalty cards of some sort," he said.

And eliminating that need for a physical gift card is a pretty obvious next step, especially if you've ever spent any time fishing around for one in a handbag.

The question is whether a new concept like barcode-based gift cards can easily scale to a chain as widespread as Starbucks. Mobile barcode systems have typically been rolled out in far smaller contexts--short-term advertising campaigns, for example, or companies with far smaller reach such as Equinox, a high-end gym in a handful of U.S. cities that recently began letting members check in with an iPhone-based barcode. And while Starbucks has been battered by the recession and has closed several hundred stores in the U.S., it still operates or licenses over 10,000 outlets in the U.S. and thousands more overseas.

So Starbucks is taking a slow approach to mobile payment testing, which means that customers outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle might not be seeing it any time soon.

"We're really working on getting that (customer) feedback before we put any long-term plans in future markets," Gillett said. "This really is a consumer-driven app in so many ways. This is an app that we need the customer experience to have a very strong influence on."

He was equally mum om whether Starbucks Card Mobile will offer advance mobile ordering options or other potential features. "Again, we're really looking to this app hitting the real world before we lock in future functionalities," Gillett said.

The same goes for taking the app beyond Apple's handset. Apple and Starbucks have a years-long and complicated history encompassing both iTunes and AT&T wireless service, but a mobile payment option ideally wouldn't be restricted to the iPhone.

"We are definitely interested in non-iPhone based platforms, particularly Windows and Android and BlackBerry," Gillett said. "But at this point we're just really focused on the launch for this."

Sony Music Entertainment's catalog is coming to indie music retail site Amie Street, in the New York-based start-up's first major label deal.

But here's the catch: Sony's catalog will not be participating in the "dynamic pricing" model that's been Amie Street's trademark--unpopular songs are the cheapest, and the price rises as a song is downloaded more. Instead, Sony songs will be available for a flat 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29 based on popularity.

"It wasn't a hard decision for us," Amie Street co-founder Josh Boltuch told CNET News. "This isn't affecting all the other dynamically priced music on the site." He noted that RED, the indie music distribution company owned by Sony, already offers its songs on Amie Street through the dynamic-pricing model. "Sony Music obviously has the option to experiment with dynamic pricing at their discretion," Boltuch added. "Clearly we would love to do that with them."

This isn't the first time that an indie music retailer has had to compromise to ink a major-label deal. Sony was also the first major label to bring its catalog--well, its "classic" back catalog--to subscription site eMusic. But the deal resulted in eMusic raising some of its prices in tandem.

Amie Street, which pitches itself as a way to discover as well as purchase new music, made major headlines last year when it was the only place on the Web to buy songs recorded by Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call-girl-slash-aspiring-pop-star at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

One of Apple's smaller announcements at Wednesday's music-focused event was that you'll be able to share your deepest iTunes hopes and dreams through Facebook and Twitter.

Well, more specifically, you'll have "Share on Facebook" and "Share on Twitter" options in a drop-down menu on album purchase pages in the iTunes Store to broadcast which music in which you're interested.

Basically, this means that you can show off your music taste or attempt to convince friends to buy albums for you. The links in Twitter tweets and Facebook posts will likely go straight to the option to purchase the album, potentially driving up sales.

An example of what you can get when you 'Share on Twitter.'

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This is a pretty standard practice likely accomplished through implementation of the social sites' APIs rather than a formal partnership--the latter of which was probably required when Apple brought Facebook Connect to the iPhoto desktop software.

The more interesting part? It looks like this officially proves that an extremely dubious set of screenshots that hit the Web last month--showing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and social-music site Last.fm integrated directly into the iTunes app--are indeed fake.

Disclosure: Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was coy about exactly why he isn't thrilled with Google's attempt to forge its way into the digital publishing business.

"We have strong opinions about that issue which I'm not going to share," Bezos said to interviewer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference. "But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited."

In a court battle rife with twists, turns, and delays, Google has been attempting to push forward its Book Search initiative, which could potentially give the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant exclusive access to digital editions of some out-of-print books. That could, as Levy pointed out, get in the way of Amazon's goal of offering every book ever printed in every language on the Kindle and its new, bigger Kindle DX sibling. And it sounds like that's where Amazon has some beef.

"There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights," Bezos said.

Bezos was speaking at the conference, which had the subtitle "Disruptive by Design," to talk about Amazon's legacy of shaking up the retail industry and now potentially the publishing industry with its Kindle e-reader device. Most of his talk was focused on the sort of business advice that one might expect a tech company to provide to a room full of big-business and old-media types ("be stubborn on the big things and very flexible on the details," "you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time"), but he did get a few minutes to talk about how he thinks the Kindle is changing things.

In New York, a longtime global hub of the beleaguered publishing, media, and advertising industries, what he had to say was particularly weighted. The Kindle, after all, is doing extremely well: Bezos said that out of the entire offering of 300,000 books available for both the Kindle and physical retail on Amazon, that the Kindle's sales are 35 percent of physical books' after only 18 months on the market.

"Internally, we are startled and astonished by that statistic," Bezos said.

But he wouldn't promise that the device will singlehandedly save the newspaper industry.

"I never want to convey that I think we have a sinecure with any particular product offering, but if we execute well and other companies that do these kinds of electronic readers, that is going to be part of what happens with newspapers," Bezos said. "And I do think there are going to be multiple companies competing with reading devices and I think there's room for multiple winners."

Like much of the speakers at the Wired Business Conference, Bezos talked extensively about how things have changed over the past few years, and how it demands a deep rethinking of business practices in all industries. In this case, he was talking about the media business.

"Unfortunately, there's a collision of several major issues happening to the magazine, newspaper, and publishing industries all at once, including most recently the recession which has taken a bad situation and made it much worse," he said. "But the biggest structural problem in my opinion is there's just so much supply of advertising space. That's a fundamental problem that's not going to go away."

But at the same time--in keeping with the conference's theme--there's an extraordinary amount of opportunity, Bezos insisted.

"Some of the most important barriers to entry in that industry have been dissolved, and they've been dissolved permanently."

The Onion's Baratunde Thurston gives his impression of Tony Hsieh's keynote.

(Credit: Twitter)

AUSTIN, Texas--In the dot-com world, Tony Hsieh's story is pretty much canon.

We know he got his entrepreneurial start running a pizza delivery business in college, and eventually went on to co-found LinkExchange and sell it to Microsoft for $265 million.

Then, after founding a venture firm that invested in shoe retail start-up Zappos.com, he took over the helm of the company and has been there ever since. Now nearly 10 years old, Zappos has become renowned among the digerati for its heavy investment in top-notch customer service, quirky company culture, and use of Twitter to promote corporate transparency.

"We put our 1-800 number at the top of every Web page, and we encourage our customers to call us even if it's not to make a sale," the soft-spoken Hsieh said Saturday in his keynote address here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "The telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for 5 to 10 minutes."

With thousands of people filling up the Austin Convention Center's biggest ballroom and several surrounding simulcast rooms, Hsieh had a chance to really shake up the conversation in the digital-media set. Unfortunately, he didn't do it.

CEO Tony Hsieh--in a photo not from SXSW.

(Credit: Zappos.com)

He explained some of the company's idiosyncrasies: the fact that it will pay new hires $2,000 to leave the company just to make sure they're completely on board with their new jobs, the fact that customer service representatives are instructed to direct customers to better deals at competing retailers if they exist, the "Culture Book" that contains unedited contributions from every Zappos employee. Many of those in the audience probably knew most of this already. Hsieh, after all, has become a conference-circuit regular.

"The thing that ties all of these things together is really that Zappos is about delivering happiness, whether it's to customers or to employees or even to our vendors or other customers that we work with," Hsieh said.

He went through Zappos' 10 "core values," which include "build a positive team and family spirit," "do more with less," and "create fun and a little weirdness." He talked about "frameworks of happiness" and recommended some books like Timothy Ferriss' "The Four Hour Work Week" and Chip Conley's "Peak." It was a talk that would have been perfectly attuned to an audience of old-school marketers that needed to hear something totally new.

"A company's culture and a company's brand are just two sides of the same coin," Hsieh insisted. OK. But that's nothing that anyone who's been involved in the business of the Web hasn't heard before, many times. This is the sort of thing that unfortunately became a hallmark of the dot-com bust when companies invested too heavily in foosball tables and not enough in revenue models. Then, of course, there's Google and all things "Googly."

What Hsieh could have addressed was the fact that while so many of the nodding heads in the audience claim they fully grasp the admirable values that power Zappos, in reality there's a whole lot of hypocrisy out there--not to mention uncertainty. He talked about both the importance of personal branding and his distaste for egomania, two things that some people in the audience might find mutually exclusive. He mentioned "doing more with less" as a core value of Zappos, but not once even made reference to the dire financial climate. How, for example, do we have to try differently to focus on happiness these days?

Hsieh has the enormous respect of an industry. But if he's going to live up to the visionary hype, he's going to have to do more than just talk about what his company's done right and recommending a few business books.

This MacBook at the 14th St. Apple Store in New York could load Facebook just fine. Taken, naturally, on my iPhone.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

NEW YORK--It involved three shopping districts, two subway lines, and a whole lot of walking in the freezing cold. But I completed my mission to hit up all three Manhattan Apple stores to see if it was true that the retail outlets' computer stations had blocked access to Facebook because too many people were using the popular social network to waste time. (Editors' note: at publish time, the link above was experiencing a network time-out error.)

The verdict: An Apple Store representative told me in a phone call later on Friday, "We have not blocked Facebook from our stores." But it looks like some stores may have put a block in place on their own accord.

Apple retail stores are famously stocked with Internet-accessible workstations that, while intended to be used as demonstrations for prospective buyers, are also free for the public to use. That's led to some problems with nonshoppers monopolizing the machines and taking up space: in mid-2007, Apple blocked access to MySpace, which was then the world's biggest social-networking site.

I hit up Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in midtown (you know, the big glass cube), the 14th Street store in the Meatpacking District, and the store on Prince Street in the downtown neighborhood of SoHo.

At the Fifth Avenue store, I was able to access Facebook from one laptop, but on another, the facebook.com domain redirected to an Apple Store page. In the Meatpacking District store, meanwhile, two laptops loaded Facebook without a problem, but a desktop computer brought up a message explaining that the parental controls feature in the Safari browser had blocked it.

In the SoHo store, meanwhile, I had no problem accessing Facebook from any of the random computers I checked out. Ironically, it was in the SoHo store that was populated by the most people who clearly weren't customers; by the time I swung by, it was lunch hour at a local high school, and the computers were occupied by teenagers checking out games and music.

So, what it looks like is that even if there is no nationwide ban of Facebook at Apple stores as some had speculated, a few individual stores have chosen to go their own route.

This post was updated at 1:05 p.m. PT with comment from Apple.

Amazon has enlisted a half dozen of its most dedicated (addicted?) reviewers to act as holiday gift experts this season. They'll be responsible for providing gift picks, tips, and other advice regarding their favorite products available on the mega-retail site.

Putting a "real people" face on holiday shopping is key for Amazon in a season full of thin wallets and nervous spenders: research firm eMarketer just lowered its projections for online holiday shopping. Many of the tips provided by Amazon's reviewers, for obvious reasons, deal with cost-cutting recession strategies.

Amazon has offered customer reviews since 1995, and says that over 5 million people have submitted reviews so far. Its "Holiday Customer Review Team" members have between 367 and 1,483 reviews under their belt apiece.

The six chosen ones, in case you happen to live next door to any of them or anything, are: Mark Espinosa of Jersey City, N.J.; Debbie Lee Wesselmann of Allentown, Penn.; Marty Hogan of San Francisco; Zack Davisson of Seattle; Joseph Boone of Irvine, Calif.; and Ed Uyeshima of San Francisco.

Wow, way to ignore the "Real America," Amazon! What would Sarah Palin think?

Hey, indie bands. Does MySpace Music's big focus on the major labels make you sad? iLike wants to hear from you--literally.

The "social music" company, best-known for its add-on apps for Facebook and iTunes, has partnered with music distribution start-up TuneCore so that unsigned artists can market their music through iLike and get royalties when it's streamed there.

TuneCore already lets independent artists sell their music through iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Rhapsody, which has a deal with iLike (and MTV and Yahoo).

It's not surprising that a company such as iLike would choose to make a move in favor of indie artists. The most high-profile digital-music initiative to emerge this year was MySpace Music, a streaming and retail marketplace created by the News Corp.-owned social network. But while MySpace got its start as a promotional center for indie bands, MySpace Music has focused on the four major labels, all of which have invested in the project. While independent distributor The Orchard also has contributed to MySpace Music, some indie musicians have said they feel jilted.

iLike CEO Ali Partovi says partnering with TuneCore isn't, in fact, a MySpace Music-induced move.

"Not at all. We've been in dialogue, I think, since February," Partovi said of TuneCore. "We've been fans of each others' companies for a long time, trying to work out a way to work with each other, and this was well under way before all of that (MySpace Music) surfaced. We generally have tried to focus on what we're doing ourselves, not to do things in response."

He added, "Frankly, I think the talk about MySpace's issue--I think over time, they will work that out too." MySpace Music is indeed still new and has plenty of time to renew its focus on the indies. But for now, iLike has quite the opportunity.

Discount retailer Target has signed a deal with photo-sharing service Photobucket, adding it to the small collection of online partners for its in-store photo-printing service.

Through the partnership, members of Photobucket can directly order photos for pickup at most Target stores (presumably any Targets that don't have photo-printing stations would be the exception). Typically, the photos will be ready within an hour.

Photobucket, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, is the third current partner for the retailer; Target already has partnerships in place with Shutterfly's and Kodak's online photo services.

Last week, Photobucket announced a partnership with start-up Scrapblog to make it easier for members to put their photos into online (and eventually print) scrapbooks.