In the partnership with Wired, Target will offer “a custom-curated assortment of consumer electronics and gadgets” endorsed by Wired editors. The selections fall into four categories: Digital music, digital photos, productivity and body. Eleven of the products — including the Square credit card reader and Belkin WeMo switch — will appear in Wired-branded displays in Target’s 1,800 stores, and an expanded selection, including Fitbit products (see disclosure), is online at target.com/wired.

Wired gets a small percentage of sales revenue from the products, according to AdWeek, and the promotion will last for 12 weeks. ”We’re trying to push Wired out and beyond the four conventional walls of how it’s been defined its first twenty years,” Howard Mittman, VP and publisher of Wired, told AdWeek. “The ability to cross-pollinate opens [Target] up to affluent young men, and we get the opportunity to tap into their scale.”

Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent. (Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.)

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The WSJ notes that “the chain shut an average of about 15 stores a year in the past decade, but until 2009 it also was opening 30 or more a year,” with a peak of 726 stores in 2008. Klipper may have chosen to talk to the WSJ to show investors that the company has a plan. He said that fewer than 20 of the chain’s retail stores are unprofitable, and “we’re going to be around a long time” because consumers read both print and ebooks (this is a point that the company has been pressing for awhile, based on its own research).

Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating noticed that the chain’s store closure plan hasn’t changed and said, “It should be noted that in 2012, Barnes & Noble opened two new prototype stores and in 2013 plans to test several other prototypes, as well. Barnes & Noble has great real estate in prime locations and the company’s management is fully committed to the retail concept for the long term.”

Barnes & Noble is threatened by the shift to online book shopping at Amazon. The company has rolled out a host of Nook e-readers and tablets that face stiff competition in a market dominated by Kindle e-readers and saturated with cheap tablets from Amazon, Google, Apple and others. Barnes & Noble just delivered a terrible holiday earnings report, showing Nook, BN.com and retail sales all down, with a particularly large decline in Nook device sales. The company plans to spin off the Nook and college stores into a separate unit called Nook Media, with Microsoft and Pearson both holding stakes.

When Borders, then the nation’s second-largest bookstore chain, went bankrupt and liquidated all its stores in 2011, it seemed as if it could be good news for Barnes & Noble, which would have a chance to grab former Borders customers. But it appears that former Borders customers largely switched their book buying over to Amazon.

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Will domestic and global mobile operators like AT&T, Vodafone, Telefónica and others “play ball” with Apple? Many in the U.S. were surprised six years ago when AT&T capitulated to Apple’s terms to become the first carrier to offer the iPhone six years ago. Conventional wisdom is that the struggling operators compromises, not a leading operator like AT&T. But Apple makes everyone “think different.”

And in hindsight, the first iPhone deal was a brilliant strategy that has continued to pay huge dividends to AT&T. In the last quarter just reported, four out of five smartphones AT&T sold were iPhones.

Apple changed the formula of the relationship between operator and handset vendor, with Apple having more bargaining power than the operator for the first time in mobile history. And that’s the point.

Apple will make an offer carriers can’t refuse

Today, mobile operators would have a hard time saying “no” to the world’s largest and fastest growing company, which builds the devices everyone wants. Apple tends to have its way with operators. Any reluctance on the carrier’s part to offer Apple a sweetheart wholesale deal would be outweighed by the huge business opportunity presented. It’s a classic case of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The carrier’s biggest fear is that if it says “no”, the business and growth would go to a competing carrier and it would be kicked the curb.

It’s no secret that Apple has been thinking about this strategy for some time. Apple filed a patent for “Dynamic Carrier Selection” on October 10, 2006, just a few months before Apple announced the first iPhone. The diagram in the patent application portrayed Apple as the wireless service provider connecting to multiple carriers. This would allow Apple to make wholesale cellular agreements with and connect to multiple carriers so it could offer its customers choices in carriers, plans and services. Apple has clearly put a lot of thought into its dynamic carrier selection architecture.  And lest anyone think Apple isn’t serious about this, last June Apple extended the filing in what many considered confirmation of its plans.

Adding further fuel to the fire, Apple recently has been fighting with other handset vendors, including Nokia, over a new, smaller-sized SIM card for GSM and LTE handsets. According to some, such a SIM would allow Apple to bypass carriers entirely, and activate a new customer through the iTunes Store. Whether it uses the NanoSIM, virtual SIM or other variant, Apple could have the ability to activate and sell voice, data, messaging and roaming subscription plans before the ink dries on a carrier wholesale agreement.

Apple has all of the pieces necessary to offer wireless service directly to customers. They have the world’s leading brand, a loyal following who will pay a premium for Apple’s products and services, and 363 retail stores around the world, growing to 400 by the end of the year. And with iTunes, it has the digital content and billing platform to offer service with one-click simplicity. The infrastructure is in place today, with the patented architecture ready for Apple’s next big move.

iPhone customers typically spend as much as twice or more the U.S. national average monthly wireless bill, which was about $44 in the last year. So these are high value customers. And they buy apps and content – music, videos, TV shows and movies – through Apple today. By offering mobile service with iPhones and iPads, the company could provide the full Apple experience to its users.

How likely is this to happen? Given the patent filing more than five years ago, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple is already talking to mobile operators, nor would I be surprised if the mobile operators initiated the conversation.

And what about Google?

Might Google offer mobile service directly to its customers, for the rumored Google Android Tablet or any Android smartphone? With Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, it, too, will be able to manufacture handsets to its own specifications. But it won’t be nearly as easy for Google to follow Apple’s likely path. While Google has a great brand — number two in the world and second only to Apple — it doesn’t have the retail stores, the experience with subscription services, and the customer care that Apple offers. Nor does it have the elegant ecosystem that enables single-click app and content purchasing that Apple has through its iTunes Store.

Whitey Bluestein, a 25-year telecom veteran, is a strategic advisor and corporate development specialist focused on prepaid, applications, payments and services. For more information, go to http://whiteybluestein.com

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While announcing its first quarter earnings on Thursday, Clearwire said it has identified the first 5,000 WiMAX cell sites it will upgrade to time-division-LTE (TD-LTE), a variant of LTE that uses the same frequencies for the uplink and downlink rather than splitting them into separate channels. It’s targeted 8,000 sites in total for the first stage of its build out, though it hasn’t announced any plans to expand beyond its WiMAX footprint yet.

Clearwire won’t be offering a complete network in those cities. Instead the hot zones will be used to augment its wholesale customers’ existing mobile broadband networks. That means Clearwire will become even more reliant on its wholesale business, a direction it has long been heading. Though it has largely shut down its own retail stores, Clearwire still sells Clear-branded modems and hotspots through Best Buy and other resellers, as well as its online portal. Still, of the 11 million subscribers it had at the end of March, only 1.3 million were retail. The rest connected through Sprint and its other wholesale partners.

There are also some signs that its wholesale business may be flagging as well. Engadget reported on Thursday (and AllThingsD confirmed) that Best Buy is canning its Connect mobile broadband service in June after only selling 11,000 subscriptions. Connect has been utilizing the WiMAX service last year and was expected to be another major source of revenue for Clearwire beyond Sprint.

Clearwire did add 586,000 new connections in the first quarter, but the vast majority of them were Sprint 4G smartphones, a font that will soon dry up as well. Sprint has begun phasing out its WiMAX phones – though it continues to support and sell older devices – in preparation for its own LTE launch this summer. Eventually Sprint plans to tap into Clearwire’s new TD-LTE network, but that won’t be for at least a year. Luckily for the 4G operator, Sprint has decided to shift its Clearwire business to prepaid and will start selling Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile WiMAX devices next quarter.

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If you buy this argument that many types of public spaces are converging on this coffee-shop-like future, then perhaps the latest development in the evolution of coworking won’t surprise you. If both work spaces and shopping spaces are becoming more like coffee shops, why not have them occupy the same space?

That’s what a handful of design and home furnishing stores are doing, inviting coworkers into their tastefully designed showrooms to work. Konzepp, a concept store in Hong Kong, combines the functions of boutique, events space, cafe and coworking space, while in Texas District Workplace coworking has set up shop in Austin Business Furniture. In Hawaii, The Box Jelly coworking makes its home in furnishings store fishcake.

The concept, as Shareable’s Beth Buczynski points out, is clearly an effort by furniture sellers to understand and market themselves to the growing coworking movement. Buczynski writes:

Every work space, whether it’s a large coworking facility or a home office, needs chairs, desks, tables, lamps, file cabinets, and various other tools of the trade. Office furniture companies want to meet those needs, and several have discovered that coworking is a great way to gain exposure among the independent workforce.

“Over the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with most of the major furniture providers: Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase,” said Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of LiquidSpace. “They are all quite aware of the coworking movement, so no surprise to see them dipping their toes into the water. It’s a natural thing for them to do as they observe changes in the work behaviors of their major corporate clients (eg steady shift toward mobility) and seek to apply their knowledge of what makes for a great/productive/healthy/high performance space to the new places where work happens.”

Steelcase has taken a number of experimental steps to understand this new world. They’ve operated Workspring in Chicago for 2+ years (not a coworking space, but an incredibly cool collaborative workspace that can be booked for off-site collaborative meetings) and also operate the 654 Crowswell coworking space in Grand Rapids Michigan

Unsurprisingly given the communitarian leanings of Shareable (the hint is in the title), Buzcsynski advocates welcoming retailers to the coworking fold. “Are businesses advancing their own agenda by offering space to coworkers at no charge? Absolutely. But the onus is on the coworking movement to respond in the spirit of collaboration and community. These values minimize competition and nurture the health of small businesses and local economies. If non-coworking businesses understand those goals and want to lend a hand in their own unique way, why exclude them?” she concludes.

But others in the movement are more skeptical about the interest from retailers, suggesting that their participation in the scene could dilute the spirit of community support that coworking strives for. “It is pretty clear that coworking is the afterthought not the focus,” Liz Elam, founder of Link Coworking in Austin and producer of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, says of these retailers-slash-space providers. “It’s like people working in hotel lobbies. It’s not the primary business and I think you would always feel like a squatter,” she says.

Should coworking fans welcome retailers with open arms or regard them with suspicion?

Image courtesy of Flickr user yutaka-f.

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Credit: ifoAppleStore.com

As Apple has added to its collection of retail stores around the world, it has also been upping the ante on the stores’ design and architectural flourishes, from the 5th Avenue “cube” store in New York City to the Shanghai store with the clear glass cylinder.

Apple is getting even fancier for its proposed new flagship store in Aix en Provence, France, set to open in late 2012 or early 2013: It is doing away with walls almost entirely and going for an all-glass structure (as seen in the rendering above), with the exception of a rear wall for offices and inventory. IfoAppleStore.com reports that the glass will be “enabled by new technology developed by Apple’s glass suppliers.”

The newest store is clearly an eye-popping and accurate expression of Apple as a company in one way: It shows its love of and appreciation for design. But the design analogy of almost total transparency? Not so much.

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Apple will pay $60 per square foot for the 23,000 square-foot space. It’s apparently the best lease held among all other retail stores open for business in the transportation center. According to the Post:

Critics likewise note that Apple’s $60-a-square-foot lease is well below what many other tenants are paying — including a future Shake Shack burger joint that will be shelling out more than $200 a square foot, according to the leases, copies of which have been obtained by The Post.

That’s a sign that Apple drove a hard bargain with the MTA — despite the fact that the public agency’s budget squeezes are pushing up fares for subway straphangers and suburban commuters across the region.

Apple will also not be required to share any of its profits with the MTA, which differs with the lease agreements of every other Grand Central tenant with the exception of a Chase bank ATM, according to the report.

To give an idea of how much extra Apple will be able to keep under this arrangement, consider that Apple does about $400 million in sales in its other flagship NYC store on 5th Avenue, which is 10,000 square feet and open 24 hours a day. With the standard arrangement in place to pay a certain amount in proceeds to its landlord for that store, Apple has paid $15 million on that $400 million. The Grand Central store will have more than twice the square footage of the 5th Avenue location.

This is sort of like how wealthy celebrities are the ones constantly being given a bunch of free stuff: Even though they can afford to buy what’s being given away, brands want to give them stuff because the allure of a famous person using your product can bring other benefits to the brand. The MTA is saying it’s happy with the deal, because it will “generate significant new traffic” for other retailers when shoppers wander in to find the Apple Store.

But it’s also yet another way to gauge the kind of power and influence Apple wields in retail. In 10 years Apple stores have gone from being predicted to fail to bringing in more revenue per square foot than any other major retailer, and being the must-have store for major retail complexes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ceiling

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If you’ve got a child who’s between the ages of 8 and 12, they’re eligible learn about digital photography, and making movies, music or presentations. Follow this link to sign your little one(s) up for a 3-hour session at the retail location of your choice. They’re operating on a first come, first served basis, so hurry over if you’re interested. Apple does ask that you only sign a child up for a maximum of two sessions, to allow space for others to attend, but otherwise, there’s no restrictions, and they’re free.

You’ll also need to be present for the duration of the class — but that’s not so bad is it? Worst case, maybe you pick up a tip or trick you weren’t aware of before. Equipment in the store will be available for use, but you’re encouraged to bring your own machines and media if you or your child have personal projects they’d rather work on. I’m thinking this is a great opportunity for them to bring in a ‘What I did this summer’ video or slide show, which has been the first back-to-school assignment since time immemorial.

Clearly this is a great way to establish brand buy-in from the next generation of consumers at an early age. But it’s also a fantastic way to help them learn some skills that they may find they would like to pursue as a career well down the road. Either way, if you’ve got a small geek at home (as I do), hurry and sign them up now!

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