TECHNOLOGY, Apple Opens Hong Kong Retail Store

With Apple generally recognized as the world's number one brand, it was only a matter of time until it opened a flagship store in a city obsessed with brands and brand-culture: Hong Kong. The media were permitted a quick peek inside the silicon emporium (officially dubbed the "Apple Store ifc mall") before its grand opening this Saturday. The iconic logo, a monochromatic silhouette of a stylized piece of fruit, now faces shoppers browsing Hong Kong's iconic mall -- IFC One -- while an outward-facing twin faces the famed Hong Kong skyline and a reclamation site soon to house Hong Kong Government offices.
Apple Store ifc mall Source: Apple
In keeping with other Apple stores, including the one in Beijing, high ceilings, big windows and natural wood dominates. A massive spiral staircase connects the two stories of the Hong Kong Apple store, while tables bristle with Apple's extensive line of consumer electronic products, with young and eager staff in blue T-shirts standing by to explain the goodies to nascent digerati.
"Apple's first store in Hong Kong ... will open Saturday, September 24 at 9 a.m. in the heart of Central, Hong Kong's premier shopping district," said Apple in a statement. "With more than 300 passionate employees, customers can get help and learn everything they need to know about Apple products. The store's highly trained team includes accomplished musicians, filmmakers and photographers from Hong Kong and around the world."
Although Apple claims its Hong Kong store "offers one of the world's largest areas for Personal Setup, Apple's popular free service that helps customers get up and running with their new [Apple device] before they leave the store," an Apple spokesperson declined to divulge the store's floor area. Of greater interest for would-be musicians, filmmakers or photographers, "personal training through Apple's One to One membership...[which] includes face-to-face training and creative inspiration is available for a fee," said Apple.
"The Apple Store ifc mall is one of two Apple retail stores opening in Greater China this week," said Apple. :The Apple Store Nanjing East, located on Shanghai's well-known pedestrian shopping street, will open Friday, September 23 at 9 a.m."

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TECHNOLOGY, Apple Opens New Store in Shanghai

Apple is opening this week stores in Shanghai and Hong Kong, taking the total number of its stores in China to six.
The tech giant plans to open its first retail store in Hong Kong on Saturday, a day after it opened a store in Shanghai. The company already has two stores in Shanghai, and another two in Beijing.
Demand for Apple's products in China has soared since the company launched its iPhone 4 product in the country last September. For the first three months of 2011, iPhone sales in China saw a year-on-year increase of almost 250 percent, according to previous statements from Apple's now CEO Tim Cook.
Apple's iPad has also dominated China's tablet market, with a 74 percent share, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.
Demand for the products has been so high that unauthorized resellers in China have created fake Apple stores by using the company's logos to decorate their shops. Authorities in one city have responded by cracking down on the fake stores.
Apple has said previously it would open 25 stores in China over a two year period. But the pace of store openings so far has been much slower and focused on China's largest cities. Apple's newest store in Shanghai will be the company's largest in the country.

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TECHNOLOGY, Spotify Music Service Opens to All; Gains Facebook Streaming

Online music sharing service Spotify dropped its invite-only status in the United States, opening the doors of the service to everyone.
Music listeners who sign up for the service will receive unlimited access to its library of more than 15 million tunes for six months. After that, the standard limits on a free subscription will kick in: 10 hours of listening per month, and during that period no one song can be listened to more than five times.
Spotify music serviceThe service also has two paid plans. For $4.99, it has no time limits and no advertising. For $9.99, you have the added benefit of being able to download the songs in your online playlists to a mobile device and play them offline.
The free part of the service is by far the most popular. In Europe, for example, where Spotify has some 50 million subscribers, only 1 million subscribe to one of the paid plans.
Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek leaked the news of the move to TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis at the Facebook F8 developer's conference.
Dismantling of the invite-only system will take some time, Ek told Tsotsis, but people can obtain immediate access to the offer by registering for Spotify through Facebook.
Spotify's partnership with Facebook was announced yesterday at F8. Ek, writing in a company blog, explained why Facebook integration was a natural for the service. "We knew that the service had to be free to draw people away from piracy," he wrote. "To do that, we also knew that the service would have to be inherently social. There couldn’t be a better place to do this than Facebook."
What Facebook users will start seeing in their news feeds are Spotify music posts from their friends. Click on the post, and a song will play. Other Spotify Facebook features include a music dashboard and a real-time ticker to see the trending music tastes of your Facebook buddies.
There are some questions, though, about just how integrated Spotify is with Facebook. PCWorld's Mark Sullivan made this observation after viewing a one-on-one demo of Spotify working within Facebook: "When the Facebook guy giving the demo clicked on a song that one of his friends was listening to on Spotify ... the desktop Spotify app popped up to play the music."
"He told me," Sullivan continued, "that there is no 'canvas app' for Spotify, which, he explained, means that there’s no Spotify app that runs entirely inside Facebook, as Farmville [does]. That means you have to have both the Spotify desktop app and Facebook running to achieve the cool music sharing/syncing tricks shown at F8 today."
In his blog post, Ek suggested that bringing Spotify to Facebook could revive the music industry. "Social discovery on Facebook means that we’re bringing people back to paying for music again," he wrote. "And that's how the brilliant artists who create this music can continue creating it for us to enjoy."
We wonder if Ek is aware of the irony in that statement. One of Facebook's founders is Sean Parker, who, with the release of Napster, started the precipitous spiral the music industry is in now. How ironic it would be if a company connected to Parker could be a savior of the industry he helped destabilize.

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