Technology

Lime is the hot new thing in San Francisco, but will it work in other countries The company just launched its electric scooter service in Paris.

This isn&t the first European city as Lime is also operating in Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt and Zurich. But ita significant launch as alternative mobility solutions have all been trying to grab some market share in Paris.

Yesterday, you could see 200 scooters in the South East of Paris ready to be deployed. Lime plans to expand its fleet over time. Every day, the company will collect all the scooters at 9 PM to recharge them and put them back on the streets at 5 AM.

Between October and January, four bike-sharing services launched in Paris — GoBee Bike, Obike, Ofo and Mobike. GoBee Bike has left the market since then because it was underfunded and suffering from too much competition.

But Mobike and Ofo seem to be doing really well, especially if you compare it to the docked bikes — Vélib is more or less broken right now. Vélib started in 2007, years before cities like New York and London adopted a bike-sharing system. Thatwhy Parisians have had enough time to get familiar with the idea of sharing a bike with other members.

And then, there is Cityscoot and Coup, two electric scooter services (motorcycles, not standing scooters). They&re more expensive but quite popular, especially for longer distances.

It leaves Lime in an awkward position. I tried a Lime earlier today and wasn&t convinced it was the right solution for Paris. First, itquite expensive. You pay €1 to unlock it and then €0.15 per minute. A 20-minute ride costs €4 for instance. This is more expensive than 20 minutes on a Cityscoot, and less expensive than 20 minutes using Coup.

But itway more expensive than 20 minutes on an Ofo bike, which costs €0.50. I&m not convinced people are willing to pay eight times as much for everyday rides. Public transport options are also much more efficient in Paris than in San Francisco.

Paris is also much more difficult to navigate on a Lime scooter than San Francisco. There are speed bumps made out of paving stones and narrow streets. In addition to that, you can&t brake abruptly because you&re just standing on a scooter. I had to brake constantly in order to overcome those obstacles.

And yet, cities will need many different options to replace cars. There won&t be just one thing. People will use a multitude of transportation methods, from bikes to Lime scooters to electric motorcycle scooters. Now letsee if Lime scooters won&t end up in the Seine.

Five and half years after it launched, one of the more popular apps for kids& reading and entertainment has finally arrived on the iOS. Amazon FreeTime Unlimited, the e-commerce giantsubscription service for children 3-12 that gives unlimited access to 10,000 books, movies and TV shows starting at $2.99 for one user per month for Prime members, and going up to $9.99 per month for non-Prime members for a family plan of up to four users across tablets, phones, e-readers, and smart speakers, is now available on the App Store.

Apple is promoting the new app at the moment on the home page of the App Store, where a reader saw it and flagged it to us. Prime members get a discount to $6.99 per month for the family plan, but you&d need to buy that via Amazonsite, not iTunes.

&We launch new products and features as they&re ready,& an Amazon spokesperson said. &We&re excited to bring theFreeTimeUnlimited experience to iOS devices, including iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.&

FreeTime Unlimited is already available on Amazon devices and onAndroid. Now, when users sign up for a subscription on any one platform, they can use it across all of them — whether it be a Fire tablet, a Fire Kids Edition tablet, compatible Android phones and tablets, or compatible Echo devices.

The move is a significant one both for Apple and Amazon. At a time when other media companies are launching kid-friendly versions of their services that bring in more parental controls and better filters to help block out content that is inappropriate for young ones, FreeTime Unlimited has proven to be one of the most popular kids-focused entertainment apps of them all — content includes video from Disney, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, PBS Kids, National Geographic and Amazon Originals for Kids — and yet it wasn&t available on one of the most popular (and well reviewed) tablets used by children.

While Amazon initially kept it as an Amazon-only product for its early years — as a way of driving more sales to its own hardware — last year it finally launched a version for Android devices, but ittaken over a year more to finally bring it to iPhone and iPad devices.

One of the reasons for this could be the ongoing struggle between Amazon and Apple. In some regards, the two are complementary companies: Amazon ships a lot of Apple products, and iOS is a very strong platform for Amazon in terms of online sales, for example.

But in others — such as in hardware, increasingly online entertainment and &owning& customers, and for talent to build its products — the two are rivals. Apple, for one, has not allowed apps on its iOS platform to enable Amazon book purchases directly from their apps, and Amazon doesn&t sell books and movies from its own app to avoid Applecut. So itnot surprising to see Amazon also delay certain content and features from the Apple platform in some kind of tit-for-tat.

I&m guessing those skirmishes will go on for a long time to come, but for now, iPad and iPhone users will have a little more Amazon than they did before on their devices. Why now It could be that Amazon felt that user growth was tailing off on the other platforms, so now is a good time to boost with new availability.

Italso likely influenced by Appleincreased attention to parental control features on iOS, which may have some parents feel like they have enough options to lock down their kids& devices while still allowing them access to more wholesome and educational content. That could limit the appeal for a subscription service like AmazonFreeTime Unlimited. But iOS 12 & which includes the new parental controls & doesn&t launch to the public until later this fall. That gives Amazon time to attract users to its own service in the meantime.

As with the existing version of FreeTime Unlimited, the app is divided into age groups and will have parental controls by way of the Amazon Parent Dashboard, as well as Discussion Cards that give them talking points about the work and summaries of what the kids are watching.

There may be variations based on geographies, but in the US the content will include films like Frozen, Moana, Star Wars, and Inside Out; TV shows likeSesame Street, Arthur, and Daniel TigerNeighborhood from PBS;Bubble Guppies, Team Umizoomi, and Dora the Explorer from Nickelodeon; Marvel comics includingSpider-man, the Avengers, and Captain America; andAmazon Originals such as Just Add Magic, The Kicks, Thunderbirds are Go, Creative Galaxy, and Tumble Leaf.

One drawback to the iOS implementation of FreeTime Unlimited is that, unlike on Amazonown tablets, you can&t configure FreeTime Unlimited to completely reskin the deviceuser interface to keep kids locked into the experience. Apple simply doesn&t allow third-party apps to have that level of control. Instead, FreeTime Unlimited works like any other app & you can launch it and exit at any time.

As with other apps, subscribing to FreeTime Unlimited will come via a useriTunes account (and thus Apple will get a cut) and will get automatically renewed until you turn off the auto-renewal 24 hours before the renewal date. There is also a free 30-day trial.

Updated with clarified pricing for individual, family and Prime family tiers.

Ithard to say precisely how Spheropivot to education is going in these early stages, but it recently got an infusion of funding and is already out acquiring new startups. The BB-8 maker announced this morning that itpicked up Specdrums​ — the fellow Boulder, Co-based startup is a Kickstarter success story that lets users create music with an app connected ring.

Ita strange fit at first glance, but Sphero clearly sees the companywearable technology as a strong addition to its newfound STEAM education focus.

&We firmly believe that play is a powerful teacher. With the addition of Specdrums, we are strengthening the ‘A& in STEAM in our product roadmap,& Sphero CEO Paul Berberian said in a press release tied to the news. &With Spheroinfrastructure and the groundwork that the Specdrums founders have already completed, we believe therea huge opportunity to continue to inspire curiosity in classrooms and beyond.&

How Specdrums will fit into the larger company remains to be seen, but for now, Sphero is promising a relaunch of the companyfirst music product the end of this year or the beginning of next. The initial Spedrums offering had been sold out after the closing of the company2017 crowdfunding campaign.

Sphero, for its part, kicked off the year on rough footing, laying off dozens of staffers after the companyglut of Disney-branded robotics toys failed to maintain its earlier Star Wars success. At the time, the company promised to double down on education, and is looking to fulfill that goal with a recent $12 million funding round.

Terms for this particular acquisition, however, have not been disclosed.