Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday December 11

• Coverage here, here, here and everywhere that Instagram is now bigger than Twitter, will launch verified accounts: Instagram announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million monthly active users, up 50 percent in just nine months. That makes the service, a photo- and video-sharing app owned by Facebook, more popular than Twitter, which had 284 million monthly active users as of the third quarter. More than 70 percent of Instagram’s users are outside the United States, the company said Instagram users are highly engaged with the service, with users interacting with posts at 18 times the rate they do with Facebook posts, according to a report issued last month by the research firm L2. Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, said in a statement that the service was also going to begin verifying the Instagram accounts of celebrities, athletes and brands. Verified accounts will be identified with a badge so that fans know that they are really what they say they are. Instagram is also cracking down on spam accounts, deleting them from the service instead of just deactivating them.

• Twitter slipping: behind Instagram in users, behind Yahoo in 2015 mobile revenues, out of Glassdoor's top 50 best employers list: “Instagram is adding an average of 360k new active users per day; For comparison Twitter is adding 160k new users per day,” Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W Baird & Co., said today in a tweet. Twitter declined to comment on Instagram’s announcement. San Francisco-based Twitter has recently been on a campaign to promote its prospects after several quarters of slowing user growth and questions about whether it can ever reach the scale of Facebook, which has about 1.3 billion members. Monthly active user count at Twitter rose 23 percent in the third quarter, down from 24 percent growth the prior quarter.

• Reliance Capital is set to sell its 16% in Yatra.com for INR 500 Crore; Yatra valuation ~ USD 500 Million: per cent stake in travel portal Yatra.com for an estimated Rs 500 crore ($80 million) and is in talks with two-three international investors. The deal would mark an over 12x appreciation for this investment by Reliance Capital, the financial services arm of Anil Ambani-led business conglomerate Reliance Group, which had acquired a 16 per cent stake in the online travel company for Rs 40 crore in 2006. While the spokesperson did not give further details, sources said Reliance Cap aims to close the transaction in four-six weeks and the deal would put the total valuation of Yatra.com at around $500 million (Rs 3,000 crore). In the fast-growing Indian online travel business, Yatra.com competes with NASDAQ-listed MakeMyTrip, which commands a market value of $1.2 billion. During the last fiscal 2013-14, MakeMyTrip is estimated to have clocked total transaction value of $1.38 billion on its platforms, as against $763 million by Yatra. The operating income of MakeMyTrip and Yatra stood at $116 million and $51 million, respectively, for the year.

• eBay might cut 10% of its workforce, primarily in marketing, and increases its (small) investment in Indonesia: Ebay is considering eliminating almost 10 percent of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, the WSJ cited one source as saying. The cuts are expected to be localized in the company'smarketplace division, the report said. Separately, US-based ecommerce giant eBay plans to increase its ownership in Indonesia’s MetraPlasa from 40 percent to 49 percent, local media outlet Berita Satu reports. “Ebay can increase to 49 percent and they can also have the option to become the majority shareholder. There are stages for them to get there and they want to do it quickly. But I can not disclose anything more,” said Telkom’s acting president director Indra Utoyo in Jakarta on Monday. Ebay remains a strategic partner for Telkom as it will allow for future cross-border trading, and for products on the Blanja site to eventually be sold overseas. Blanja claims to have one million products on its site from only 600 sellers. It recieves a mere 50,000 visitors per day. “Currently, the revenue contribution of ecommerce to our business remains small,” says Utoyo. “But we estimate the contribution could reach 10 percent within two to three years.”

• Coupang, Korea's Amazon" raises USD 300M, valuation > USD 1B, GMV runrate USD 2.2B: Coupang, a fast-growing e-commerce company in South Korea, has raised $300 million of additional financing to aid its expansion plans. While Bom Kim, the chief executive, declined to disclose the company’s valuation, he said it was higher than the roughly $1 billion price tag the company achieved in its previous financing round. He also said the company now had about $500 million of cash in the bank. Coupang, based in Seoul, calls itself the Amazon of Korea. In addition to selling its own inventory, the company allows third-party merchants to sell through its site. While it competes in Korea with eBay and a site called 11th Street, Coupang says its competitive edge stems from its focus on ordering through mobile devices and from its delivery network. Like Amazon, Coupang has built its own warehouses, called fulfillment centers. But it has gone a step beyond Amazon by also employing its own delivery workers, whom it calls “Coupang men.” (Mr. Kim said the fleet includes some women as well.) These workers, who try to build relationships with customers by doing things like leaving handwritten notes, can often deliver packages on the day they are ordered. Mr. Kim, 36, who started Coupang in late 2010 after dropping out of Harvard Business School, said the company was now generating gross sales — the total value of goods passing through the site — of $2.2 billion on an annualized basis. He said roughly one in three people in South Korea had downloaded the company’s app.