Category: Tech news

Well, folks, it’s September. The holiday gift giving season is ON!

Wish, the mobile shopping app that lets users create lists of items they would like to purchase later, has launched Gifting, a feature that enables others to purchase and ship products to their friends. It draws from users’ existing wishlists and uses them to predict other items they would like. It’s a frazzled gift giver’s dream.

Gifting has been part of the plan since the inception of the app, Wish CEO Peter Szulczewski said, which makes every bit of sense, since it’s the natural other half to wishlist creation. At this point, Wish is seeing half a million people on the app daily, at an average session length of 29 minutes.

According to Szulczewski, sending presents was already a use case among Wish users prior to the feature’s launch this week. In looking at transactions, the team realized that people were requesting different shipping addresses for their purchases in order to send items to their friends.

In addition to allowing users to create and share targeted wishlists (the easiest way to get it right), Gifting also predicts items that friends most want and uses social integration to notify users on their friends’ birthdays.

“We use collaborative filtering in the same way that Amazon.com uses it,” Szulczewski said. “People that buy this will also buy these items.”

As Szulczewski explained, the Wish demographic skews toward the young and female. Gifting is a way to access an older demographic, like fathers who don’t really know what to buy their daughters, nieces, or granddaughters. While there are a slew of gifting apps out there — like Giftly for gift cards, the locally-focused Yiftee, Karma, and Wrapp — the fact that Wish draws on pre-existing knowledge of the recipient’s likes ups the giver’s odds of nailing it.

Wish has been bulking out its features this summer, having launched Wish Closet in late July to provide users a platform to resell their clothing. The plan is to grow internationally. Currently 55% of usage comes from North America, although there are growing communities in Europe and Latin America, which Szulczewski said present huge opportunities to grow the brand.

Microsoft wants to take your Apple product off your hands, today expanding its trade-in programs to allow owners of dated iPhone hardware to cash in their now-passé electronics.

If you own an iPhone 4S or 5 that is “gently used” and not much worse, Microsoft will offer you no less than $200 for it. The kicker? The funds come in the form of Microsoft Store credit, so you are trading in your Apple hardware for the chance to buy Microsoft goods.

What does Microsoft want? That you drop that iPhone off with them and wander out with a Surface 2 pre-order or a Lumia Windows Phone handset. Microsoft has cash and wants market share; this is a natural outgrowth of those two facts.

Microsoft also has in place a deal that will grant store credit for iPads. In short, if you have an Apple device that Microsoft competes with – recall that Microsoft doesn’t build PCs that are not tablet-based, through its Surface line – it wants to buy it from you and get you onto its own hardware.

In a way the move is ballsy: Microsoft is betting its own money that you will be content with its wares after a long stint on Apple silicon. And it is paying to make the wager. Precisely what Microsoft intends to do with all its accumulated Apple hardware remains opaque.

Microsoft is in the process of purchasing Nokia’s handset business, and recently announced new Surface hardware that replaces its first-generation attempts at OEM supremacy. Expect more moves like this to support Microsoft’s yet-nascent devices business.

Top Image Credit: brett jordan

VMware VP of Engineering Mark Lucovsky is leaving the virtualization giant for a ‘new chapter’ he’s referring to as ‘#nine’ on Twitter. Lucovsky has been with VMware for around four years and before that held positions at Google and Microsoft.

VMware told GigaOm that “during his more than four years at VMware, Mark Lucovsky  has been an important contributor to the company’s developer efforts as a Vice President of Engineering, including his work to help establish VMware’s Cloud Foundry which is now part of Pivotal. We thank Mark for his contributions and wish him well.”

At Google, Lucovsky served as an engineering director working on its API strategies. Since he went there from Microsoft, where he worked on Windows NT, a lot of people read into his hiring as a harbinger of a ‘Google OS’. Lucovsky spent 16 years at Microsoft working on a variety of projects including the ‘open web’ project HailStorm, which never quite materialized. He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Engineer’. 

Though he worked on many projects during his Microsoft tenure, the most memorable anecdote of his career there undoubtedly came when he told CEO Steve Ballmer that he was going to leave for Google. A statement given in a corporate poaching case between Microsoft and Google back in 2004 paints a vivid picture:

Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….

Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

Lucovsky only used the cryptic hashtag to indicate what he might be up to next, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more. It is doubtful any chairs were thrown when Lucovsky turned in his notice after 5 years with VMware.

For all the good it’s capable of, Twitter is all too often a cacophonous mess of marketers, celebrities, talking heads, and friends who all like to jabber at the same time. Sage Wohns and Mohamed Altantawy are co-founders of a New York startup called Agolo, and as far as they’re concerned, not every bit of information pouring forth from that social firehose is worth paying attention to. Instead, they want to home in on just the stuff that’s important to you and make sure you see if before it’s too far gone to catch up with.

Sounds logical enough. After all, if you’re up to your neck in a Twitter debate centered around, I don’t know, whether the Palm Pre was a bigger smartphone flop than the BlackBerry Z10, you’re probably not going to pay much attention to the snarky quips your followers are flinging at each other. That’s where Agolo comes in.

Co-founder Sage Wohns showed me an incredibly early version of Agolo several months ago, and it bears very little resemblance to the service the team ultimately hopes to bring to the masses. The original concept saw users tweeting the @agolo Twitter account asking for advice on local venues and happenings — as long as you defined a location in the tweet or enabled the proper location settings, you’d almost immediately receive a reply with three of the most popular options nearby.

To their credit, the service still works rather well (I used it to track down some lunch the other day), but the pair have bet the startup’s future on the notion that people often miss the things that they care most about because of the sheer volume of tweets being sent and delivered every second. It’s madness. But Wohns and Altantawy are conducting a private beta for the new Agolo, which quietly keeps tabs on your Twitter followers, the people you follow, and the things you talk about the most.

By gathering that information and chewing on it with the help of some clever natural language processing algorithms, Agolo is able to cobble together a profile of you that includes your preferred topics of conversation and the sorts of events that you like. The real gist of the revamped Agolo is that it’s able to sift through all that stuff in realtime, so you’re ultimately left with a mobile web app (native apps are said to be in the works) displaying a curated feed of tweets that align with what Agolo thinks your interests are.

If you’re a big music fan for instance, all of your friends’ tweets mentioning upcoming concerts will be flagged for your perusal. There’s one more hook, though: while the service highlights relevant conversations and events that you may otherwise miss, the team also wants to make it easy to take action. Going back to that concert example, Agolo will be able to provide links to ticket vendors so users can close the loop that much faster.

Sounds like a pretty natural way to make money, right? Since Agolo can highlight certain trends or events and make it easy for users to jump in and engage with them, Wohns said that they’re starting to build up “key affiliate partnerships to monetize some of the actions we recommend.”

At this point though, there’s one major drawback to the Agolo system — it only works with Twitter. It’s not a bad place to start considering how the service facilitates conversations and sharing at a breakneck pace, but it only accounts for a fraction of the social conversations that take place at any given moment. Ultimately, the small team hopes to be able to digest Facebook and LinkedIn messages, along with that bane of my existence: email. I suspect it’ll be quite some time before they manage to get that far, but they may just be on the right track.

A big regulatory victory for Airbnb today: the company has managed to win an appeal in New York City over a fine against a host called Nigel Warren, whose landlord was fined $2,400 in June after Warren rented out a room in his apartment. If the fine had stuck, it would have set a business-threatening precedent for Airbnb in the city.

“This decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we,” David Hantman, Airbnb Global Public Policy Director said today in a statement.

The key, as Hantman points out, is that “as long as a permanent occupant is present during a stay, the stay does not violate New York’s short term rental laws.” How that will be enforced is another question. For now it looks like the case pertains only to shared spaces, meaning that if a full home is on offer, it could be exempt from both the violation and the requirement of having a permanent occupant present.

The backstory: Earlier this year, Airbnb provided legal support to Nigel Warren in the case against him, when a judge decided that Warren was violating rules on short-term rentals by listing a room in his apartment on Airbnb. As Ryan pointed out at the time, those laws were originally designed not for small-scale room lets like the kind on the peer-to-peer site, but for landlords who would buy up property to list spaces as hotels. Essentially, the law made renting out space for less than a month illegal. 

There have been exceptions made for shared spaces, and Warren apparently hadn’t been much of a power-hoster, but Warren’s landlord had been fined anyway (and Warren took the costs upon himself).

When Airbnb announced its participation in the case earlier this year, it said it would be in it for the long haul, even going so high as the trial courts — although it hasn’t come to that in the end.

The bigger picture here stands on two levels:

First, how and if Airbnb can leverage this win into a bigger play for more regulatory clarification on city and state levels in New York and beyond. This is something the company — like Uber, another groundbreaker that is changing the game for how services are consumed and sold — continues to work on trying to achieve.

Second, if those rule changes don’t come quite as fast as Airbnb hopes, will Airbnb continue to stand by the side of its users to help defend them?

The ruling from the New York City Environmental Control Board is embedded below. Airbnb’s statement is below that.

Huge Victory in New York for Nigel Warren and Our Host Community
(David Hantman)

In June, I wrote about Nigel Warren, a New York host who was fined by an administrative law judge for renting out a room his apartment for a few days. I said at the time that the decision was clearly wrong on the law and bad for New York, and we were proud to support Nigel and his landlord as they appealed this ruling over the past few months. Yesterday, the New York City Environmental Control Board reversed Nigel’s fines, agreeing with our arguments and delivering a major victory for Nigel, New York and the Airbnb community.

In the appeal, we and Nigel argued – and the appeal board now agrees – that under New York law as long as a permanent occupant is present during a stay, the stay does not violate New York’s short term rental laws. Much of the New York law is confusing, with some provisions applying to certain buildings and not to others. But this shared space provision was crystal clear. We intervened in this case because the initial decision on Nigel’s case was so clearly wrong, and we are pleased to see that the Board agreed.

We know there is more work to do. This episode highlights how complicated the New York law is, and it took far too long for Nigel to be vindicated. That is why we are continuing our work to clarify the law and ensure New Yorkers can share their homes and their city with travelers from around the world.

But in the meantime, this decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we.

Some people will look at the iPhone 5c and just see an iPhone 5 with a colorful plastic case and a price drop. But that’s not the point.

Like its predecessor, the iPhone 5s is one of the best handsets you can buy. But more importantly, it’s laying the groundwork for the smartphones of tomorrow.

With its understated chrome detailing the matte black ATIV Book 6 looks good on paper and in reality. But the laptop clearly suffers from a few first-generation hiccups.

The Nest Learning Thermostat is about to get a little smarter (and perhaps the forthcoming Protect). Speaking at CEDIA Expo 2013, Tony Fadell, the company’s co-founder and CEO, just detailed an API that’s aimed at developers looking to integrate the Learning Thermostat within their ecosystem. Want one app to control your smart lighting, fan, security system and climate control? This API could be the missing link to a truly smart home.

The CEDIA Expo trade show is the perfect venue for this announcement. The show is headlined by the large home automation companies. Control4, AMX, Creston are the big draws, and attendees flock to the CEDIA Expo to learn about the latest in home automation. And now, with Nest, developers and installers can incorporate the swanky (and smart) thermostat into high-end home automation installs.

But Nest foresees a bigger draw for this API than just home automation companies.

“We not looking for just large companies,” said Greg Hu, Nest Senior Product Manager, adding “companies not historically in the home automation space. This is for any company or product helping to drive comfort in the home.”

He added that with this API, companies making web-connected home lighting or fans could incorporate control of the Learning Thermostat.

“Since we launched in 2011, there’s been steady demand from the developer community for Nest to create an API,” said Matt Rogers, Nest founder and vice president of engineering. “While we’ve always wanted to create a Nest Developer Program, our first priority was to build a great product, customer experience and team. We’ve defined what the Nest experience should be. And now we’re getting ready to open our doors.”

This API is Nest’s answer to the Learning Thermostat’s lack of Z-Wave or ZigBee wireless communication. Nest came under fire from the CEDIA crowd when the Learning Thermostat launched since it wouldn’t work within even $100k home automation systems. The thermostat wasn’t friendly with others. It wouldn’t talk to other home automation products using the legacy home automation protocols. This API could change everything.

In theory, with this API, the Nest Learning Thermostat could become just another step in a home theater macro or security system profile. Click “Watch a Movie on a Control4 remote (or Control4 iPad app) and the lights will dim, the projector will blink to life, the receiver will click to the correct input, and, for some reason, if the person wanted, the Nest Learning Thermostat could drop the temperature a few degrees to encourage cuddling while watching the movie.

“We’ve been working with Nest to bring our customers and installers a level of integration that previously hasn’t been available with the Nest Learning Thermostat,” said Eric Anderson, senior vice president, products at Control4. “For customers, the partnership means they’ll be able to control their Nest thermostats through any Control4 interface such as a remote, touch screen or mobile app.”

With long time Apple veteran Tony Fadell at the helm, it should not come as a surprise that Nest is following Apple’s game plan. The company released its first shiny object, improved upon it and released a second generation — all the while ignoring the outside noise. Now, some two years after the first generation hit, the company is opening up the device to developers in an attempt to create a thriving ecosystem.

The API will be released to the public in early 2014. Fadell failed to announce the Protect or indicate if this API will work with that product at launch.

Apple is leveraging the Bluetooth LE technology that it has been building into every iPhone since the iPhone 4S to enable automatic setup of an Apple TV 3G. Just touch a device running iOS 7 to a newer Apple set-top box to have it automatically set up Wi-Fi networks, region settings and Apple Store accounts.

This essentially means — as far as we can tell — that Apple is using technology similar to the kind it describes as ‘iBeacon‘, a Bluetooth LE device that broadcasts a data payload to any compatible BT device in the area. This can enable complex interaction without having to be on the same Wi-Fi network or even paired with a target device. But it also may use the iPod Accessory Protocol, also supported by BLE.

The ‘one touch’ setup was discovered by TUAW reader Aaron G and noted in an article earlier today. The Apple help document related to the new setup feature gives us some clues that point to BlueTooth LE being the technology driving the interaction. A technology that Apple uses in its iBeacon protocol.

From what we understand, this is not turning the Apple TV into an iBeacon in Apple’s consumer sense of the word, but it uses similar technology.

To make it work, you enable Bluetooth on your iPhone 4S, iPad 3G, iPad mini or iPod touch 5G and newer. Then, you tap it to an Apple TV 3G that’s sitting on the setup screen. Your devices will enter an out-of-band pairing and you’ll be prompted to enter your Apple ID on your iOS device. You can then choose to have it remember that data for purchases on your Apple TV if you wish.

The Apple TV will then auto-configure itself, bypassing the super awkward process of entering your Apple ID and Wi-Fi information using Apple’s stick of gum remote. The Apple TV has to be on version 6.0 or later and iOS devices on 7.0 or later.

The fact that the help doc tells you that you must turn on Bluetooth is a dead giveaway that this is based on the tech that Apple has been building into its devices for longer than it has needed it. Apple built support for Bluetooth LE into its devices for a while and iBeacon support into the latest iOS and Apple TV software.

We tried out the new setup method and it worked as advertised. We did discover however that physical contact was not required, as the Apple TV paired with our device up to 8 inches out. We were able to tap it and get it to work, but also simply moving it within a foot or so seemed to work. This is consistent with a part of the iBeacon process called ranging. The instruction to ‘tap’ the device to the Apple TV is likely just to ensure proximity.

So, while this isn’t ‘iBeacon’ yet, it’s definitely a process that will feel familiar once those start showing up in the wild.

For more on iBeacons, you can check out our writeup of Estimote, a hardware device that uses Bluetooth LE to help retailers communicate with consumers based on in-store location and more.

This article has been clarified to note that this is not an iBeacon, but uses similar technology.

Y Combinator alum Vastrm has been pretty busy lately. In addition to locking up another $1 million in seed funding from A16z, SV Angels, Ignition Partners, and Will Smith (to name a few), the startup redesigned its website slightly modified its sense of purpose. The team has always been about giving its customers the perfect fitting polo, but now they’re working to make the process even more personal.

The process is largely unchanged from when Billy checked it out last year, but the biggest recent addition was the launch of a try-at-home option. In exchange for a $20 deposit, you’ll get a trio of shirts in sizes of your choosing so you can try to pin down your perfect polo. Vastrm toyed with the idea for a long while and tested it with a slew of early beta users (CEO Jonathan Tang said 55 percent of testers tried the feature), but the full-on launch took place fairly recently.

But how well does it really work?

I recently gave that home try-on service for a spin and so far it seems like a much-needed addition to the mix (don’t worry, I won’t subject you to photos of me wearing them). After all, for a startup that’s focused on crafting custom fitted polos for its customers, it only makes sense that they embrace a Warby Parkeresque model to ensure that ideal fit.

It’s not so much meant to help you figure out if you’re a small, medium, or large. Instead, you’re supposed to figure out, say, what kind of medium you are. Different brands have different conceptions of what “medium” means after all, so Vastrm has introduced subtypes like slim, sport, and relaxed (for the portly polo-wearers out there) to give customers a more granular grasp on what suits them best.

To my surprise, I fell in between a small sport and a medium slim. I’ve never been able to squeeze into a small before and I’m not exactly what I’d consider “slim”, so it’s unlikely I would ever even bother trying on those sorts of shirts in a store.

Those subtypes, along with any other tweaks you want to make (think sleeve length, waist width, chest changes) are folded into your so-called FitID, a persisting recipe of preferences that can be saved and applied to all your future orders. All in all, it was a dead simple experience and one that should serve Vastrm’s early customers very well… as long as they’re fine with the ultimate asking price. While some seemingly similar bespoke clothing companies like Indochino can compete on price — $449 for a fitted suit isn’t too shabby — $95 for a simple fitted polo means Vastrm’s wares aren’t going to be for everyone.

So what’s next for Vastrm? I had to ask Tang if focusing purely on bespoke polo shirts is, well, problematic. After all, isn’t there some sort of upper limit to the number of expensive polo shirts a person can feasibly own? While Tang doesn’t necessarily agree, he did concede that the Vastrm formula and the structure the team built around it could easily be rejiggered to churn out other custom garments.

“The whole backend is really solid,” he said, adding that he wanted to expand the assortment to include long sleeve polos and hoodies. The team ran a Crowdtilt campaign to test the hoodie concept — within a week they sold about $40k of hoodies, but only time will tell when they’ll officially try to disrupt other aspects of your wardrobe.

What would a Wednesday afternoon be without the TechCrunch Droidcast? Don’t answer that.

Sadly, I couldn’t be around to take part in this glorious meeting of the minds (I was checking out startups here, in case you were curious) but our very own Matt Burns and Anthony Ha stepped up this time around and the results were… interesting. You should probably just listen for yourself.

In any case, we’ve got a doozy for you this week. Samsung outed a golden flagship smartphone just days after its rival did the same, and the company’s Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Gear smartwatch are finally stepping out into the real world. Meanwhile, Amazon pulled back the curtain on some surprisingly impressive new Kindle Fire HDX tablets overnight and our trio can’t help but dig into the finer points of Microsoft’s new Surface tablets and their favorite pies.

We invite you to enjoy weekly Android podcasts every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our weekly Gadgets podcast at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the TechCrunch Droidcast in iTunes, too, if that’s your fancy.

Intro music by Kris Keyser.

As Amazon’s online business continues to cut into traditional retailers’ revenues, Target today makes a move to fight back. The Minneapolis-headquartered retailer has just launched a pilot program for subscription-based commerce called Target Subscriptions. Initially, the service is focused on new parents, with various products related to baby-care, including diapers, wipes, training pants, and other essentials.

At launch there are about 150 items that can be ordered on a subscription basis, including some of Target’s larger bulk-sized offerings. Customers can choose to have these items delivered in regular four to 12-week installments, and Target will send out reminder emails at least 10 days ahead of shipments to allow customers to make adjustments if need be.

The free program includes a variety of products from a dozen well-known baby care brands, including Huggies, Pampers, Seventh Generation, Enfamil, Similac and others, which users can browse now on Target.com where they can filter products by category, brand, price, rating, or associated deals. Shoppers can pay for the items using the credit or debit card of their own choosing or, of course, can opt to pay with their Target card or Target VISA to save an additional 5 percent.

The subscription-based service is clearly Target’s answer to Amazon.com’s own “Subscribe and Save” program, which also lets shoppers subscribe to regularly used items. With Amazon’s program, customers receive free shipping, and discounts of up to 15 percent when they have five or more subscriptions arriving monthly. Target Subscriptions, meanwhile, also offers free shipping, but isn’t currently touting any particular deals beyond its usual “price cuts” on select items. (At launch, there are just two deals available – both on baby wipes.)

Amazon is a serious competitor in the subscription-based commerce space, given its scale. Not only does it offer the Amazon Subscribe and Save service, it also offers shipping discounts through Prime, and subscriptions through its Quidsi-operated brands, like Diapers.com, which has featured autoship options since fall 2012, and reports 30 percent month-over-month growth in that sector. Plus, Amazon has a program focused on the new parent/budget-shopper demographic specifically with Amazon Mom, whose members receive various savings in addition to the Subscribe and Save discount.

A number of startups have also tried their hand at subscription commerce in recent years, with ideas ranging from the sample box – such as Birchbox’s monthly shipment of beauty items  – to those focused on everyday needs, like Dollar Shave Club’s razors. Even Walmart has experimented in this space, with its snack box subscriptions service, Goodies.co. So if anything, Target is late to hop on the subscription bandwagon.

But taking the longer view, it’s fair to say the market is still a new one, and remains somewhat unproven at least in some verticals. (Watch as all the “Birchbox for X” startups begin to fold, for example.) But online shopping overall is a large and growing industry, and consumers are becoming more comfortable with the idea of subscriptions, thanks to other services, like Prime, but also content subscriptions for things like movies from Netflix or music from Spotify, for example.

Target previously tested the service among employees ahead of today’s public debut. And given its “pilot” designation, the company isn’t talking in terms of expected revenues at this point. The retailer won’t confirm plans to expand beyond baby-care for now, but says it will take the learnings from this pilot program into account to help it shape future plans, and will share those details when they become available. The company also declined to discuss whether or not it would consider other new e-commerce services, like grocery delivery or same-day delivery, another area seeing a lot of activity recently.

Incidentally, the announcement of Target Subscriptions comes on the same day that Target launches another tech-led initiative, Target Ticket. As we previously reported, the TV and movies on demand service is Target’s response to Walmart’s Vudu, Netflix, and iTunes. Though unrelated to the e-commerce service, it’s another example of how the retailer is taking steps to face down competition from various tech companies and other industry players.

Apple and EA are both categorically denying a report that surfaced late yesterday that money exchanged hands to keep Popcap hit Plants Vs. Zombies 2 an exclusive to iOS. Reached for comment on the matter, both EA and Apple told us that “it’s simply not true.”

The report, from gaming site Giant Bomb, had quoted EA Labels head Frank Gibeau as telling employees at a closed meeting that “Apple gave us a truckload of money to delay the Android version [of Plants vs Zombies 2].”

Since the meeting was a closed session, EA would not comment on what was said there, but our sources are telling us that Gibeau did indeed make a statement similar to that. But we’re also hearing that it was intended as an off-the-cuff joke of sorts, and was taken out of context by either the report or the source used for the quote.

But both EA and Apple absolutely denied that any payments were made to EA by Apple in exchange for iOS exclusivity on PvZ 2.

Since the game is not out for Android devices outside of China and launched on iOS several weeks ago, the reports were quick to garner attention and credibility. But whatever Gibeau said in the meeting, both companies are flat out saying that there was no agreement to pay EA.

Here’s the major catch to most of these arguments about Apple and exclusivity: It really does not need to pay developers cash to launch on iOS first, they do it anyway. The marketing power of the App Store is tremendous, and on a per-customer basis, iOS users spend more money and buy more apps than Android users. That’s also true on the whole for now, but could change as the sheer volume of Android devices neutralizes the smaller ‘per-device’ spend on the platform.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some effort by Apple to make sure that its platform is the most welcoming for marquee titles. Apple has a long history of working with publishers that it sees as doing good or high-profile work to promote their apps via large banners and editorial recommendations on the App Store. And I’m sure that the App Store division is doing its best to make sure that the top apps and games land on iOS first, if not only. If you want to call offers of promotion and praise in the App Store incentive to hold off releasing for Android, that’s fine. But it’s still not cash, and it’s not clear if that happened in this case, regardless.

Those recommendations are worth big money to many developers, but they’re also not limited to big-name companies. We’ve seen one or two-man operations featured by Apple in many sections, including the big valuable top banners in its App Stores on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

In the games industry — and this is where it becomes easier to see why the gaming press would see this as reasonable — it’s all too common for platforms to pay publishers for exclusivity. Both Microsoft and Sony have their own studios that produce games, but also draft agreements with external publishers to juice the desirability of their consoles by paying to keep games exclusive for a period of time.

But we’ve yet to hear any confirmed reports of Apple doing the same for the App Store. As Android grows in addressable market, perhaps it will ‘go there’ at some point. But in this case, both companies deny anything like that is taking place.

Google+ started supporting hashtags in May, and today the company announced that Google Search will now allow you to search for Google+ posts by using these hashtags. Given that there’s a little bit of Google+ in every Google product now, it’s no surprise that these Google+ hashtags are now finding their way into other Google products.

This new search feature is now live for English language users in the U.S. and Canada on google.com and google.ca.

In Google Search, users will now be able to search for hashtags like #AmericasCup and get a list of relevant Google+ posts in the right sidebar. Google won’t highlight posts from Twitter or Facebook in the sidebar, but it has put links to Twitter and Facebook right underneath the Google+ posts so users can search for these terms on those social networks, as well.

The links in these Google+ posts are all active and you can see how many +1s and comments a given post received. You can’t, however, interact with the post right on the search results page as there is no way to follow, +1 or comment on these search results without going to Google+ first.

It remains to be seen how popular this feature will be. Most users, I think, would probably prefer to see this feature work for Twitter hashtags. It’s doubtful that all that many Google users were clamoring for a better way to search for Google+ hashtags on Google Search, but maybe this will give this feature a bit more visibility.

For content owners, however, this feature definitely gives them an incentive to use hashtags in their Google+ posts (and to use Google+ in the first place). The top-right corner of the search results page, after all, is prime real estate, and getting your link to show up there could drive significant traffic for popular hashtags.