A much-debated tax on internet advertising in France took a big step toward approval on Monday, December 13, only to be withdrawn two days later—and big US companies breathed a sigh of relief.

This blog post is only available to eMarketer Total Access clients. To learn more about becoming an eMarketer client, click here.

It’s certainly a big piece. Barcode scanners are not widely adopted in the US – yet – but consumer awareness is rising fast. The popularity of the RedLaser iPhone app, which topped five million downloads earlier this month, is a sign of what’s to come. To keep pace, Amazon just added scanning capability to its iPhone app.

As my colleague Jeff Grau noted in his June 2010 “Mobile Shopping from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer” report (full version available here to Total Access clients only), shoppers who scan barcodes to compare prices, locate product reviews and create wish lists are still in the minority. Not surprisingly, Generation Y shoppers, who were raised on the internet and view their mobile devices as an extension of themselves, are the early adopters. They are the ones pushing retailers to offer a more interactive in-store shopping experience.

But clearly, they aren’t the only ones. According to the September 2010 “ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report” from Scanbuy, a provider of mobile barcode solutions, traffic generated from scans has climbed 700% since January 2010.

Price comparison is a key driver of this increase in scanning. In a survey conducted by BuzzBack Market Research for NCR, 43% of consumers in nine major markets, including the US, said they view barcode scanning to find the best prices as an important way to give them more control over the shopping experience.

With its competitive pricing, efficient service and extremely well optimized product catalog, Amazon benefits directly from the steep increase in barcode scanning activity. Adding the capability to its own app only increases Amazon’s competitive advantage, not just over brick-and-mortar retailers but other online merchants as well. As ReadWriteWeb put it succinctly:

With Amazon’s new barcode-scanning technology, it’s not so much of a global price comparison engine but one that answers the simple question: “I wonder if this is cheaper on Amazon?”

Integrating the scanning capability is a smart move for Amazon because it removes friction from the buying process and enables interested consumers to pull the trigger on a purchase right from within the app.

The takeaway: barcode scanning is slowly transforming the in-store shopping experience. But if Amazon has anything to say about it, barcode scanning will make the shopping and buying experience more mobile than ever.

We all knew this day would come but it arrived sooner than some of us had expected. On July 19, Amazon announced it had sold more e-books than hardcover books over the past three months. Further, the growth rate in e-books accelerated during that time. In the month leading up to the announcement, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, compared with a ratio of 143-to-100 during the three-month span.

Amazon also said unit sales of its Kindle reader devices had accelerated every month during the second quarter, both on a year-over-year basis and on a sequential basis. The company further noted that growth in Kindle unit sales had tripled since Amazon cut the price of the device to $189 from $259 on June 21, 2010.

There’s a lot that these numbers don’t tell us, starting with the raw numbers of Kindle and e-book units or the revenue associated with those product lines. Growth rates can be dodgy without broader context, particularly if the trend curve starts at a low point.

What we can glean from Amazon’s update is that the e-book business is a vibrant and fast-growing segment of the digital content universe. Analyst Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, predicted that, within a decade, fewer than 25% of books sold would be print versions.

The Amazon figures also suggest that predictions of a head-to-head battle between the Kindle and the Apple iPad may have been overstated. When the iPad launched earlier this year, The New York Times said Apple was on “on a direct collision course with the Kindle.”

However, in the second quarter, Apple sold 3.27 million iPad units, according to the company’s latest earnings report. While there’s no data on how many consumers own both devices, I’d be willing to bet that the overlap is significant.

Jefferies & Company managing director Youssef Squali suggested as much when he said Amazon’s announcement was “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement.”

Mike Egan of ComputerWorld elaborated on this point by summing up 13 reasons why iPad owners still need Kindles. The main takeaway from Mr. Egan’s commentary is that the iPad does exactly what the Kindle doesn’t, and vice-versa. As long as this remains the case, there should be room for both items in consumer’s gadget wish lists.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia

Japanese businesses have been trailblazers when it comes to the use of internet and mobile technology. Two leaders in particular are eying overseas expansion in the face of domestic economic stagnation. Softbank and Rakuten, two very different yet equally ambitious Japanese firms, have been arranging foreign e-commerce partnerships at an astounding pace. And it could mean serious competition for Amazon.

Softbank, which combines solid financials based on its mobile, broadband and fixed-telecom businesses, has been increasingly investing in their internet service offerings. According to their latest company reports, mobile services remained the core business, with net sales of ¥1,701.4 billion ($18.2 billion) and 1,243,700 subscriber additions in FY2009 (April 2009-March 2010).

Like AT&T in the US, Softbank Mobile is the sole provider of the iPhone and iPad in Japan, providing a huge boost to average revenue per user. Internet services, including advertising, services and e-commerce, accounted for over ¥520 billion ($5.6 billion) in net sales during FY2009, an increase of ¥7.8 billion ($83.5 million) over FY2008.

Rakuten, on the other hand, operates on a significantly smaller scale but is showing tremendous growth. According to their FY2009 results, net sales amounted to ¥298.2 billion ($3.2 billion), a 19.4% increase over the previous year. In Q1 2010, Rakuten is off to a strong start with net sales of ¥79.2 billion ($848.0 million), up 19.3% verse Q1 2009. Sales are focused within Internet services (e-commerce, travel, portals and online media) and online financial services (credit card, banking and securities).

Both of these companies, along with Amazon Japan, are vying for dominance in the same space: Japan’s Internet, mobile and e-commerce markets. eMarketer estimated Japan had 93.4 million Internet users in 2010, ranked third in the world, and the International Telecommunications Union estimated Japan had nearly 115 million mobile subscribers in 2009. According to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, e-commerce (including travel) in Japan reached totals of ¥2.93 trillion ($31 billion) in 2008, an increase of 14.8% year-over-year, as reported in Rakuten’s Q1 report.

Marsh Research found that 96.3% of Internet users in Japan purchased goods online in March 2010, suggesting a mature and sophisticated consumer market. The same study showed that 68.9% of online buyers in Japan purchased items at Rakuten, followed by Amazon at 38.1% and Yahoo! Shopping (a subsidiary of Softbank) at 34.3%.

The combination of domestic saturation and high rates of mobile and online spending has led these two companies to amass serious amounts of cash. With that cash in hand they are ready to capitalize on opportunities in foreign markets, despite a weakening yen.

Rakuten was the first to make a move in 2010, as TechCrunch reported a joint venture with Baidu to build an online B2B2C shopping mall in China based on Rakuten’s Japanese site. According to Rakuten’s quarterly statement, the site is scheduled to go live sometime in the second half of 2010.

Softbank has been silently investing in Internet companies in China for years, but in May 2010 Marbridge Consulting reported a new partnership between Yahoo Japan and Chinese e-commerce firm Taobao that will allow cross-border linking of sales and inventory data. Taobao is the largest e-commerce site in China and part of the Alibaba Group, which Softbank has been an investor in since 2000.

The two firms are salivating at the potential access to a huge and growing market of online buyers in China, estimated at 108 million in December 2009 by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

Not satisfied to dominate Japan and enter the rest of Asia, Rakuten is also looking further afield. Setting their sights across the Pacific, the company purchased Buy.com for $250 million to bolster their US and European reach. Moving fast in the month of May, Rakuten also announced a partnership with Indonesia’s largest media firm, PT Global Mediacom Tbk. This partnership will bring Rakuten’s online marketplace to approximately 20 million Internet users in the country, according to the ITU.

Two weeks ago, Rakuten made another move in Europe, acquiring the French e-commerce website PriceMinister for €200 million ($280 million). In an interview with LeJournalduNet, Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO and founder of Rakuten, said that they intend to use PriceMinister as their European platform and want to expand the site into Germany and Spain as well. He also stated that there are no immediate acquisitions on Rakuten’s radar at the moment, but that could change very quickly.

Last year, TechCrunch speculated that Rakuten could be Amazon’s biggest competition that no one had heard about. While that article may have jumped the gun, it proved prophetic. Recent partnerships and acquisitions suggest that Rakuten has emerged as a real threat to Amazon and other dominant e-commerce players in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Softbank is a unique company that has successfully integrated a steady and profitable telecommunications industry with online services, a feat that has been elusive for US companies (see AOL). For now, they appear content with a more concrete expansion into the largest consumer population in the world, China. It will be interesting to see how the Yahoo! Japan-Taobao link plays out in the eyes of the government, if it will cross or coalesce the growing nationalistic protectionist sentiment among China’s ‘netizens’ and government.

Either way, competition for worldwide e-commerce supremacy just got much more fierce.

Note: all currency conversions made at annual 2009 average. Rakuten logo via Wikipedia.

We’ve been saying for quite some time that the arrival of Internet-connected TVs will catalyze a long-awaited breakthrough for online video. The day people can sit on their couches and reach for a single remote that can seamlessly access TV programming and web content, we’ll start to see online video scale to true mass-market dimensions. But that day, most people expect, would come gradually — not anytime soon.

Or will it? As Upfront Week rages on for the major television networks and TV advertisers, recent developments seem to show that TV-Web integration could be much closer to reaching a mass audience than previously believed.

We noted Tuesday that Google, Intel and Sony are collaborating on a “smart TV” platform which they plan to unveil soon, possibly as early as today at Google’s annual developers’ conference. The platform will reportedly be open to developers, and Google is said to be calling on the Android community to create apps for it.

A report from GigaOM Pro expects the global market for TV apps to explode in the next five years, from $10 million in 2010 to $1.9 billion in 2015. The report also says that, by 2015, 60% of all new TVs will have built-in network connectivity, and 70% of the connected sets ship with an embedded app platform and app store.

These are the kinds of stats that get the attention of companies like Google, Intel and Sony—not to mention other consumer electronics and content leaders such as Apple and Hulu. Apple has been trying for years to crack the TV market, so far with limited success despite having a set-top box (AppleTV), a popular content application (iTunes) and a hot new tablet (iPad).

Hulu has built a sizable business as a content portal for first-run episodic TV. So far, this content has been available on an ad-supported basis on Hulu.com, but there are indications that the company will launch a $9.95/month subscription plan. This price point would be comparable to a lower-tier Netflix subscription, which gives customers unlimited DVD rentals (one at a time) and free access to the company’s growing archive of streaming movies.

If Hulu follows through on its plans to at least partially transition from free to paid content, it will not be alone. The New York Times is one of several media companies planning a similar shift, and Apple has been rumored to be shopping a $30-month TV subscription service to networks and content owners.

Meanwhile, online TV directory Clicker.com is making its own push toward becoming a content hub. The company just launched clicker.tv, a Web-based application that helps users find—and stream—video content from varied sources, including Netflix, Amazon and network TV web sites. Clicker’s interface super clean and user-friendly, its streaming quality is outstanding and its content selection is extensive: 650,000 TV episodes, 30,000 movies and 80,000 music videos, according to a story in MediaBeat.

Clicker’s app runs on HTML5, the latest version of the standard language for web pages, which Google is supporting. Not to get into a technical digression, but most Web video had previously run on the nearly ubiquitous—and proprietary—Adobe Flash platform. But no longer. Recent reports say about two-thirds of Web video is encoded with H.264 (translation: HTML5-friendly). Hulu recently made a deliberate decision to stick with Flash instead of HTML5. Apple, on the other hand, has refused to license Flash for the iPhone or iPad, a decision that has blocked a wealth of video content from those devices. By using HTML5, Clicker is assuring itself that its content will be viewable on virtually any platform, from iPads to Android devices to web browsers.

With so many established and emerging players making moves to bridge the gap between the TV and online video universe, the market will get very crowded very soon. That should make networks very happy, because it could mean that online video advertising is about to become much more lucrative.