Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday December 23

• Intel's margins are being buoyed by rising prices for custom chips for cloud computing: Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything,” Ms. Bryant said. “The name of the game is customization.” Indeed. Amazon has gone so far as to change around the 50 megawatt power substations that power its bunkers of computers. Deep in Google, former company executives say, the company has changed the way Internet packets of data work, to optimize how quickly they flow through Google. Facebook, which has by far the world’s largest public repository of pictures, might want a certain number of chips that can render images well, or rapidly process the steps for image recognition. That could affect the number of processing cores it wants on a chip. When eBay installed a hyper-efficient cooling system, it asked Intel for chips that had a greater thermal tolerance (they can be worked harder that way.) The difference appears to be showing up in Intel’s results. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent. But the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent, compared with the same period in 2013.

• After its Bluekai acquisition in February, Oracle is close by buying Datalogix, another audience-data major; Purchase likely exceeds $500 million Datalogix, whose clients include PepsiCo and HauteLook, helps brands measure media purchases against in-store sales. Datalogix has been an important partner to Facebook as the latter has attempted to show marketers that it can connect the dots between its social ads and offline purchases. Adexchanger reported that Facebook was one of Datalogix's suitors, along with Nielsen and Adobe. But Oracle ultimately nabbed Datalogix, which makes its new Redwood City, Calif.-based parent a more formidable marketing cloud player for clients like General Motors. The company will be able to boast a wealth of online and offline data to compete against rivals Adobe and Salesforce. The Datalogix price tag probably well exceeded $500 million. "Oracle is purchasing Datalogix for an amount we expect will be in the high hundreds of millions of dollars," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group, in an email. Wieser added that Datalogix "analyzes, segments and distributes data for use by marketers, and then analyzes data again post-campaign. While these functions are not unique to Datalogix, there is likely some experiential advantage that Datalogix has established in the processes it uses, and the Facebook relationship is a key one which is also relatively (although not entirely) unique."

• A summary of expedited delivery services from Amazon, Uber, eBay and Google: Amazon’s Prime Now (announced just last week) One-hour delivery for thousands of daily staples — paper towels, shampoo, books, batteries and more — is now available to Amazon Primers in certain parts of Manhattan. The catch? The delivery fee is $7.99. But if you can wait an extra hour, two-hour delivery is free. Amazon says that Prime Now will be available in additional cities in 2015. UberESSENTIALS the app-based ride provider is now dabbling in e-commerce, too. DC residents can now order “essential” items via the Uber app and receive them in 10 minutes or less. No delivery fee, tip or minimum order required. The expense charges are most likely factored into the items’ cost, but Uber provides transparency with an inventory list and associated prices. These items range from wine glasses to a portable table-tennis set to candy to grooming products. Uber even has a New Year’s Eve section for those last-minute party essentials. According to the company, uberESSENTIALS is a limited time–only experiment, but if the service takes off, the program may expand. EBay Local: eBay shoppers in select cities can choose to have their purchases delivered through traditional means, same-day delivery or self-pickup at a nearby location. EBay has a similar program already in place in the UK and is now slowly rolling out its Local pilot program across the US. It’s currently available in New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Dallas and Chicago. Google Express: Google also offers same-day delivery and overnight delivery in San Francisco, San Jose, West Los Angeles, Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC. Consumers can purchase goods online from a number of well-known national retailers — Whole Foods, Staples, Costco and Walgreens — and have the order on their doorstep within the day. Although a Google Express membership is required, new customers can try it for free for three months.