Daily Tech Snippet: Monday December 29

• Snapdeal ties up with Hungama for a co-marketing deal, similar to its Saavn tie-up from last month: Snapdeal, and Mumbai’s Hungama Digital Media Entertainment have joined hands to roll out bundled offerings such as premium music videos with every purchase on the e-tailer’s mobile app. To begin with, Hungama.com is currently offering shoppers on Snapdeal a free access to its premium PRO service which consists of HD quality music videos with lyrics of songs for nine weeks. Hungama PRO, is an ad-free paid subscription service whose content can be accessed offline as well. After this offer, customers will be charged Rs 120 per month for the service. Early this month Hungama had also come out with a similar offer for subscribers to Aircel. The PRO services was launched six months ago with a free one month trial. Last month Saavn had sealed a similar co-marketing deal with free two months subscription to its premium service to Snapdeal shoppers on Android

• Qualcomm earns billions each year from its patent licensing, drawing Chinese telecom regulatory scrutiny: The settlement of China's anti-trust probe into Qualcomm Inc is likely to intensify global scrutiny of the firm's highly profitable patent licensing business, and may even call into question its worldwide contracts with smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung. Qualcomm is the top patent holder for cellphone technology, including many that form industry standards like CDMA and LTE. Charging royalties based on the cellphones' selling prices, even those made with competitors' chips, provided more than half of its $8 billion net income in 2014. As growth tapers in developed markets, the smartphone industry has turned to China, where the rollout of LTE technology is driving demand, and where the majority of the world's smartphones are also manufactured. The NDRC, one of China's anti-trust regulators, has said it suspects Qualcomm of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards. Qualcomm is expected by industry sources to agree to changes in how it charges royalties on cellphones sold in China, which will hurt its bottom line in its fastest-growing and most significant market. Qualcomm earned about half of its global revenue of $26.5 billion in China for the fiscal year ended Sept. 28. An agreement to lower royalty rates charged by Qualcomm on phones sold in China could affect its contractual relationships not just with local manufacturers such as Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE and Xiaomi Inc, but also with bigger global players that make and sell phones in China, such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics, said patent lawyers consulted by Reuters.

• Pinterest expands Promoted Pins to all advertisers after a successful beta: The firm announced today that its Promoted Pins program, which it made available in beta to certain brands eight months ago, has performed “just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” and it will make the program available to all advertisers on January 1. Pinterest claims that brands who participated in the Promoted Pins beta program saw a 30 percent increase in “earned media” — or the amount of people who save a Promoted Pin to one of the boards. Promoted Pins are repinned an average of 11 times, the same as a normal pin made by one of the site’s users. Furthermore, Promoted Pins continued to get more pins in the month after a campaign, or a 5 percent increase in earned media. Once the Promoted Pins program rolls out, Pinterest says advertisers will have access to more ad formats and advanced targeting. In addition, it’s also launched the Pinstitute, a twee name for a program that will show advertisers how to leverage Promoted Pins through workshops and webinars. The Pinstitute follows the launch of Pinterest’s analytic dashboard in August, which lets advertisers track how their pins performed and how much content is being pinned from their sites through Pinterest’s Pin It buttons. Pinterest has been focused on monetizing its site since raising an impressive $225 million Series E in October 2013, which valued the company at $3.8 billion. At that time, Pinterest said one of the key uses of the capital would be to continue development of monetization, which it first began testing around the same time it closed its Series E, into a global program.

• Oracle's purchase of Datalogix highlights the rising importance of attribution: This week, Oracle showed just how important attribution services have become: It agreed to buy Datalogix, one of the leading players in the attribution, for what the analyst Brian Wieser estimated was in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. (Neither Oracle nor Datalogix would disclose the deal terms.) With their services in high demand, the attribution companies are a rare bright spot in an otherwise brutally competitive market among companies that provide the technical services for digital advertising. Even though you’ve probably never heard of Datalogix, it’s almost certainly heard of you. It buys purchase data from supermarket loyalty cards and other retail channels and also tracks what people do online. That data is vital to digital platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, which are trying to prove to marketers that ads on their services lead to sales in the store. Using a complex system that anonymously matches Datalogix’s profiles with Facebook or Twitter IDs and aggregates that data, the social networks can show that, say, a three-month ad campaign on Facebook for MegaRed krill oil actually prompted more people to buy the health supplement. How Datalogix does the matching is a bit of a black box, but brands and publishers believe that it works, with Datalogix boasting about 650 customers. The company’s biggest competitor, a partnership between Nielsen and Catalina Marketing, is more oriented towards measuring the impact of television ads on purchases, while Datalogix is more focused on digital platforms, according to Mr. Wieser.

• Amazon.com Inc said on Friday it drew more than 10 million new members to Prime shipping and digital content service over the holidays and intends to offer one-hour shipping to more cities in 2015. Amazon considers its $99-a-year Prime membership, which confers free two-day shipping and streaming of select movies and songs, essential to driving its growth and margins. It was unclear, however, how many of the 10 million new members were just taking advantage of a standing 30-day free trial offer. The Internet retailer has never disclosed the precise number of Prime subscribers, except to say it is in the tens of millions. Analysts estimate it is growing at a rapid clip, and the company continues to try and spice it up with new content. The company's shares climbed 2.07 percent to $309.31 in midday Nasdaq trading. Amazon said customers ordered more than 10 times as many items via same-day delivery this holiday season, compared with a year earlier.

• Top 10 Pricing Mistakes, e-Commerce companies make, according to TechCrunch: 1: Basing prices on costs, not customers’ perceptions of value. 2: Companies base their prices on “the marketplace.” 3: Same profit margin across different product lines. 4: Companies fail to segment their customers. 5: Companies hold prices at the same level for too long. 6: Salespeople incentivized strictly on revenue. 7: Changing prices without forecasting competitors’ reactions. 8: Companies spend insufficient resources managing their pricing practices. 9: Companies fail to establish internal procedures to optimize prices. 10: Companies rely on salespeople and other customer-facing staff for pricing intelligence.