Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 19

• Snapdeal.com partners with Hero MotoCorp to sell two-wheelers through its platform: Snapdeal claims that it saw 700 two-wheelers being sold within 72 hours of launching the new category a week ago. The vehicles are priced as same as offline dealerships. For Snapdeal, automobile is one of the most promising categories, and it expects it to reach Rs 1,000 crores in GMV in the near term.

• Google's launches "Store Visits", making it easier to figure out if online ads drove in-store traffic: The tech giant is rolling out a new tool today called "store visits" that gives marketers some insight into which types of search ads—which include local inventory and product listings ads—motivate people to go to a store. Google's store visits tool uses an algorithm to estimate how many people went into a store as a result of seeing an ad within 30 days. In turn, advertisers are given anonymous data (meaning that it doesn't pinpoint specific users) that is collected from smartphone owners who have turned on their location history. To qualify for the new tool, Google advertisers need to verify their location with the search giant and set up location extensions in an AdWords account. Store visit info is only available to U.S. advertisers and will gradually be rolled out within the next few months.

• Credit derivatives traders helping RadioShack stay alive: RadioShack is finding an unlikely ally in its efforts to stay out of bankruptcy: credit derivatives traders who amassed more than $25 billion of trades speculating how much longer it can keep paying its bills. When the retailer’s biggest shareholder arranged $585 million of funding in October to help it survive the holidays, much of the money came from hedge funds wagering on the company to avoid default, said people with knowledge of the trading. By injecting the 93-year-old electronics retailer with new money, swaps traders, more often blamed for pushing companies toward bankruptcy, have been preserving big payoffs if they can delay or prevent a default. “The sellers of the protection built up quite a large war chest, and it took a relatively small amount of money to keep the company going,” said Peter Tchir, a former credit-swaps trader who is now head of macro strategy at Brean Capital LLC in New York. “They have huge incentives to keep the company alive to not trigger the swaps.”

• IBM says its cloud business is having a 'breakthrough year': IBM aims to expand the number of data centers it offers clients around the world by 25 percent to meet fast-rising demand for internet-based services, after what a company executive said has been a "breakthrough year" in 2014 for its cloud computing business. IBM has quadrupled the number of cloud data facilities it offers around the world to 49 in the past 18 months, responding in part to laws requiring the local retention of data following revelations over U.S. government Web surveillance as well as increased corporate compliance rules. IBM's cloud revenue amounted to $4.4 billion in 2013 and was up by 50 percent in the first nine months of this year, it reported in October, making it one of IBM's fastest-growing businesses IBM has announced multi-year deals in recent weeks worth a total of more than $4 billion that are fuelling the company's expansion in data centers. The company's cloud computing services let companies mix classic computing jobs with new ways of working, a twist on the largely consumer-facing cloud services made popular by Amazon's Web Services, Google and Microsoft. IBM, along with rivals Hewlett-Packard and EMC's VMware, offer “hybrid cloud” services that let customers run key business data on private, internal networks along with consumer-facing public cloud systems.

• Zomato expands in Italy by acquiring Cibando: After recently adding a presence in Central and Eastern Europe by means of two local acquisitions, the New Delhi-headquartered company, which now boasts a presence in 20 countries, has gobbled up Italy’s Cibando. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, though Zomato says all of Cibando’s team will be joining the company and will now lead its efforts to build out the service in Italy. This will include integrating Cibando into Zomato, thus transitioning its user base and traffic. It also plans to scale up its teams in Rome and Milan to 30-40 full-time employees over the next three months, up from Cibando’s current headcount of 10. Even longer term, Zomato says it will invest $6 million in its newly-acquired Italian operations over the next 2 years, growing the team to 150-200 people across the country’s top six cities. That planned increase in headcount is probably a reflection of Zomato’s relatively labor-intensive business model, at least compared to other pure Internet plays. To power part of its restaurant search and discovery engine, the company collects menus from restaurants and scans them using OCR. Its menu data is then re-checked in person by Zomato’s team every three months to ensure it stays relatively fresh, and it’s this “feet on the street” approach that attempts to differentiate the company from competitors, such as Yelp, IAC-owned Urbanspoon, Priceline-acquired OpenTable, and TripAdvisor. Discussing today’s acquisition, Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah tells me that Cibando is one of the largest restaurant search services in Italy and lists 82,000 restaurants across various cities. In November, the company closed a further $60 million in funding, giving it a post-money valuation of $660 million, and taking total funding to over $113 million.