Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 17

• Apple Pay continues to gain traction: On Tuesday, Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups to adopt Apple Pay, the company’s new e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone. The new companies that recently agreed to work with the service include SunTrust, Barclaycard and USAA. Ten more banks, including TD Bank North America and Commerce Bank, will back the new form of payment on Tuesday. With the new additions, Apple says it supports the cards that represent about 90 percent of the credit card purchase volume in the United States. While Apple Pay still accounts for a tiny fraction of total transactions, the new additions suggest that Apple has generated more traction for the service than any competing service. Others giant companies like Google, Verizon and AT&T have offered similar takes on a smartphone-based e-commerce product, though to little avail.

• Facebook Starts Auto-Enhancing Photos on the same day that Instagram launches its first new filters since 2012: Rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me it will now auto-enhance newly uploaded photos starting today on iOS and soon on Android. You’ll be able to adjust a slider to control just how enhanced you want the light, shadow, and clarity, or revert back to your original shot. Facebook and the other social apps are locked in a battle for photo sharing. To the winner goes tons of engagement. That’s why Twitter just revamped its filtering interface, Snapchat started letting you dual-filter with color filters and its geo-filter titles, and Instagram today added five new filters. Google+ added a similar auto-enhance feature a year ago. Photos are automatically enhanced, but you can quickly tone the effect up or down. I found the auto-enhancements to be a touch overzealous in some of my experiments, but it’s typically in the ballpark of how I’d want to edit a photo, plus it requires no work on my part.

• Amazon India launches jewelry sales; separately an auto-repricing bug drops some prices on Amazon UK to a penny, shocking some sellers: A groups of British Amazon.co.uk sellers were shocked last week to find their goods had gotten an unexpected and drastic price cut -- to just a penny. Although Amazon and other retailers do occasionally run promotions where things only cost one cent, this glitch was the fault of non-Amazon software from RepricerExpress, which automatically reprices items online. The problem only lasted for about an hour, but it came during peak shopping time ahead of Christmas, at a time when many customers are looking to online shopping to get last-minute gifts to their destinations on time. And, according to Britain's Sky News, some retailers say the glitch cost them tens of thousands of dollars, and may even put some of them out of business. Repricing software is commonly used by retailers and individuals who regularly sell items on Amazon and other online marketplaces. These automated tools are used by sellers across the globe to send prices down (or up) depending on market demand. The company, which claims to support over 2,000 sellers on Amazon and Raukten.com, has apologized for the error and said it's looking to "put measures in place" to keep the mistake from happening again. As of Monday, the company said, systems were running normally. Most affected orders were canceled. In a statement, Amazon said it's working to remedy the few orders that were processed and will be reaching out to sellers on its own.

• Xiaomi India ban on Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S lifted; Redmi Note remains fully banned: Delhi HC partially lifts the ban on Chinese handset maker Xiaomi for importing & selling smartphones in India. Today’s ruling allows Xiaomi to sell only Qualcomm-powered smartphones in India, and only until January 8, 2015. This allows Xiaomi to sell three of the four models it had launched in India – the Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S. The MediaTek-powered Redmi Note remains fully banned. The Delhi High Court has now permitted the company to sell and import Qualcomm chipset-based (a licensee of Ericsson) handsets in the country till Jan 8, 2015, according to a tweet by PTI. A Mint report further mentions that Xiaomi has also been told to deposit Rs 100 for every device it has sold in India or sells till January 5. Last month, Jun Lei, co-founder and CEO, Xiaomi, had said that India is becoming its largest overseas market for Xiaomi. According to the company, it has already sold over 500,000 smartphones in the country in less than four months of operations. It is now also considering setting up a manufacturing base in the country.

• Google is in danger of losing mobile advertising to Facebook, reports Amir Efrati at The Information. Google still does more than twice as much revenue as Facebook on mobile advertising overall, thanks to search. But when it comes to graphical and video ads on mobile devices, their positions are reversed: Facebook does three times as much revenue as Google there. Worse, Google’s share of these kinds of ads is falling. Google’s biggest problem is its inability to track ads across devices, meaning it has a harder time proving that a sale is made after a user sees one of its mobile ads. Facebook’s ad platform is more integrated. The company is able to tell if someone sees an app on Facebook’s mobile ad and then buys that product on their laptop. It uses cookies — identifiers that match a user’s web browser to their smartphone — to collect data on users. Google collects cookies too, but it doesn’t share them across its ad products. Google’s search engine data is never mixed with Google DoubleClick data, which tracks Google’s ads on non-Google sites. Google also doesn’t have a way of knowing whether or not a user has already bought the product they’re seeing an ad for.