TechCrunch
Apple Patents Smart Home And Media Center Remote Control Via iPhone
The fabled Apple television set is still a fable, lo these many years after it first was whispered into the waiting ear of an analyst or blogger, but today Apple has secured a new patent (via AppleInsider) which could renew interest in rumors of Apple’s television plans, since it describes an iPhone-based remote control system for completely setting up a home theatre system tailored to specific types of content, moods and themes.
Apple’s multimedia system/smart home-type remote would be able to recall, store and set things like lighting, channels, music and window shades as well as set stereo components like amplifiers and more to desired settings. It’s essentially a Logitech Harmony universal remote, with settings like “Watch a movie” or “Play a game” very similar to those available on Logitech’s highly customizable home theater control devices, but with a lot more options and features thrown into the mix, and a control scheme that extends to connected home devices, which could conceivably include things like Philips Hue connected lighting system.
The system also has some neat automated components, like suggesting themes and whole home settings based on metadata associated with content being watched. This means that you don’t have to sit down with intent aforehand to watch something and choose the appropriate theme – while you’re browsing or channel surfing, and if you happen to light upon something you seem to like, the system could suggest an appropriate mode to go with it. So if you get sucked into Spartacus, for instance, Apple’s iPhone-based multimedia concierge could offer to change your system over to the idea setting for classical epics with a single tap.
Apple’s patent appears to be designed to work with content sources including broadcast television, since it contains a provision for waiting for a commercial break before it even offers up any kind of scene suggestions at all, so it could definitely be included in any kind of over-the-top service that the Mac maker might have in the hopper. The patent application itself is quite a few years old, which might be reason enough to suspect this idea has been shelved, but at the time of its original filing it also would’ve looked a lot more science fiction than it does given today’s technology.
Japan's NTT Docomo Buys Fine Trade, An Austrian E-Commerce Solution Provider, For ‘Several Tens Of Millions Of Euros'
Japanese carrier NTT Docomo today announced one more acquisition in Europe both to continue building out its operations in the region and beyond vanilla offerings like voice and mobile data: it is acquiring fine trade, an e-commerce and payment solution provider based out of Austria. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we’re trying to find out. The price, NTT Docomo tells us, is in the “several tens of millions of Euros,” along with a reason for why it cannot be more specific: “We cannot disclose the exact price as it affects the business development,” a spokesperson says.
The deal is the latest in a series of moves by the Japanese carrier to build out is business in Europe. Last year, it paid $300 million to acquire mobile content company Buongiorno in Italy. After that it participated in a $19 million funding round for femocell maker Ubiquisys, based out of England.
The acquisition of fine trade operationally fits with what Docomo has been doing with Buongiorno.
As you can see from the diagram below, Docomo’s put Buongiorno’s carrier billing mobile payment platform alongside its existing net-m solution; it sells this as a service to mobile content companies (and for the content that Buongiorno itself produces and sells).
Fine trade, meanwhile, will sit alongside this providing a platform for so that partners will have the option of offering customers the ability to pay for goods and services online by invoice, credit card, direct debit and other methods. If you go to fine trade’s site, it looks like one of its stronger areas is in the area of providing liquidity to merchants so that they can accept payments by invoice without being strapped for cash. Fine trade will operate under Docomo’s subsidiary, Docomo Deutschland, which also controls Bongiorno and net-m.
“In Europe, Docomo’s group companies have been providing mobile operators and content/service providers with payment platforms that enable fees for digital content used by subscribers to be added conveniently to their phone bills. Concurrently, the companies also have been expanding their finance and payment business by leveraging their banking and credit-card business licenses,” Docomo notes in a statement. “Through its investment in fine trade, DeDocomo will now expand its payment platform portfolio in Europe to include the online retail market for consumer goods, where fine trade operates its own payment platform business.”
Indeed, this looks to be as much about offering customers more options for payments and billing as it is about wider plans for Docomo to take its services and revenue generation not only to new markets beyond Japan, but also into new areas — a move being made by many carriers (Telefonica is another example) as services like voice and data become increasingly commoditized.
“fine trade is a unique and innovative player in the worlds of e- and m-commerce,” Hiroyuki Sato, Chief Executive Officer of DDL (the German subsidiary), said in a statement. “I’ve long held the view that disruptive innovation is possible in the financial industry, much the same as mobile devices and the Internet revolutionized the telecom industry. DOCOMO, which has played a pioneering role in telecom, looks forward to playing a disruptively innovative role with fine trade, which shares our vision of becoming a Smart Life Partner.”
And in the world of e-commerce, which is predicated so strongly on economies of scale, getting acquired by a bigger company is perhaps a no-brainer for fine trade.
“We share the vision to pursue smart innovations in the e- and m-commerce area with DDL,” said Dr. Marcel Vaschauner, Chief Executive Officer and founder of fine trade, in a statement. “Through the acquisition, we are equipped with strong backup and can create synergies at the same time. These synergies will enable fine trade to realize its vision to offer innovative solutions for e- and m-commerce faster than ever before, and to enhance payment services for retailers and customers. Now we are delighted to continue our growth strategy as a DDL group member.”
Docomo says that as part of the deal, which it expects to complete by late October subject to clearance from the clearance by the German Federal Cartel Office, it will buy a 75% stake from Three Little Birds AG and another 25% from Schneider Holding.
CO Everywhere Wants To Fill The Hyper-Local News Gap With Its New Mobile App
Hyper-local news is hard and difficult to scale and monetize. CO Everywhere, which is the completely redesigned and rethought version of BlockAvenue, says it wants to fill in the gap between existing hyper-local sites and social media. The service lets you mark an area on a map that you want to watch and will then track every public social media update from Twitter, Facebook or Instagram (among many others), as well as reviews on Yelp and other services to present you with a feed of everything that’s happening in your area.
The service is now available on the iPhone and the team plans to launch apps for Android and the iPad soon.
According to CO Everywhere co-founder and CEO Anthony Longo, users will find a lot of value in this stream of local information, whether it’s a tweet about local street art or a review of a new restaurant. Because it’s essentially an unfiltered stream, users in densely populated areas will likely want to keep the areas they follow relatively small while those who live in the suburbs may be better served with a larger area.
CO Everywhere allows you to follow multiple areas, too. In its private beta, the company found that most users follow around eight areas, though Longo expects that most users will likely follow fewer (home, school, work, their parent’s town, etc.) in the long run. The service also indexes local deals and events.
As Dan Adams, CO Everywhere’s co-founder and CTO told me earlier this week, BlockAvenue, which focused mostly on ranking neighborhoods, targeted users who were about to move into a new neighborhood. While this service allows the company to gather lots of interesting analytics, the team quickly started looking into how it could expand its feature set to get more regular users (people only move every now and then, after all).
The hyper-local space, Adams noted, is especially hard for a startup because a lot of the most interesting data is either not available through APIs, expensive or just simply hard to parse. CO Everywhere decided to approach as many partners as it could and even got Yelp to allow it to display its ratings on a mobile app – something Yelp’s terms of service generally forbid.
Even if you’re not all that interested in the app itself, it’s worth a quick download because of its design, which already follows most of Apple’s iOS 7 design guidelines and is one of the best I’ve seen in the hyper-local space in a long time.
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