Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 31

• Few Computers Are Powerful Enough to Support Virtual Reality: VR headsets are almost ready to hit stores, but less than 1 percent of PCs will be capable of running them. Virtual reality has a very real problem. With several technology giants preparing splashy introductions for the first VR headsets in 2016, few people own hardware capable of fully supporting Facebook’s Oculus Rift or other systems. Just 13 million PCs worldwide next year will have the graphics capabilities needed to run VR, according to an estimate by Nvidia, the largest maker of computer graphics chips. Those ultra-high-end machines account for less than 1 percent of the 1.43 billion PCs expected to be in use globally in 2016, according to research firm Gartner. VR headsets, which create immersive 3D environments the wearer can interact with and explore, are poised to be a star of CES 2016. The massive consumer electronics trade show, which kicks off in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, will have more than 40 exhibitors demonstrating VR products, a 77 percent increase from 2015. Taiwanese gadget maker HTC is expected to show off a new version of its Vive headset at CES before releasing it in stores in April. Facebook is still on track to sell its first VR product to consumers by the end of March, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey tweeted on Dec. 22. “I think the technology has significant potential, but I also think we have to be realistic about how strongly it will be adopted in the short term,” Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst for researcher IHS, wrote in an e-mail. “The hype is somewhat understandable considering the investment some big technology companies are making in VR. However, VR headsets come to market with a number of specific challenges.” IHS estimates that 7 million VR headsets will be in use by the end of 2016. The Consumer Technology Association, which organizes CES, forecasts VR headset sales of 1.2 million units in 2016. While that's a sixfold increase from last year with total revenue of $540 million, that’s a ways short of covering the $2 billion Facebook paid for Oculus VR in 2014. There’s a very good reason why VR demands such processing power: Anything less, and you might hurl. Early VR prototypes caused many testers to suffer from motion sickness due to slight delays in the screen’s responses to the user’s movements. A standard PC game runs at 30 frames per second. But to deliver the fluid, natural motion our brains need to be convinced an image is real, VR needs to achieve 90 frames per second on two video projections (one for each eye). Right now, that means a $1,500 laptop.

• App differentiates a baby's crying sounds: Why's this baby crying? Well, there's an app that can tell us. It's called the 'Infant Cries Translator'. It was developed at Taiwan's National Yunlin University of Science and Technology by a team led by Chang Chuan-Yu. "The Infant Cries Translator can differentiate four different statuses of sounds of a baby's cry, including hunger, a wet diaper, sleepiness, and pain." An audio recording of the baby crying is uploaded to a Cloud Drive. It's then analyzed in a database of around 200,000 crying sounds Chang and his colleagues collected over two years. And moments later, the results are in......This baby's hungry. Chang warns the app is not foolproof yet. But the results, he says, are promising. So far, according to our user feedback, the APP's accuracy can reach to 92 percent for the babies under two weeks. As for the babies under one to two months, the APP's accuracy can also reach up to 84 to 85 percent. Even for a four-month-old baby, the accuracy can reach up to 77 percent." The accuracy rating varies because over time the baby adapts to new conditions. But for new parents, the app can be a valuable resource. 

• With Car-Sharing Service Via, Sharing More Than Just a Ride: The back seat of a Via functions as Joanne Gamel’s mobile office. It is where Ms. Gamel, a New York real estate agent, checks email, calls clients and gets listings, all while being chauffeured to appointments in Manhattan. But the best part of a shared car service like Via is the business she does with fellow brokers who are also in the back doing the same thing. “I’ve gotten at least 15 different business cards from other agents,” said Ms. Gamel, 35. “It’s great for networking, especially if they share their listings or refer a client. I love getting in the car with another agent. And if he has a nice smile, even better.” Inside an UberPool car last month, Tanner Wells met the woman of his dreams. He was riding from a Brooklyn party back to his apartment in Manhattan when she hopped in. “We flirted on the way back to the city,” said Mr. Wells, 37. “She was telling me about some guy she was going to visit. We were talking about goofy stuff. When we got to her stop, she said, ‘It was nice meeting you,’ and got out. The driver turned to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you get her number?’” The next day Mr. Wells created a “missed connections” post on Craigslist in the hope she would find him. (So far, no answer.) Within the last year, ride-sharing services like Via, Lyft Line and UberPool have exploded onto New York streets as an alternative to pricey taxi rides and unreliable public transportation. Their fleet of S.U.V.s has created a new vision of car-pooling that is luxurious, cost-effective and timesaving. Executives are taking them to work. Parents are taking them on school runs. Packs of young professionals are taking them home after happy hour. Compared with taxis, where rides are on the decline, the price of a shared ride is worth the middle seat and constant pickups. A Via ride costs just over $5 for any two points throughout Manhattan south of 110th Street. But convenience aside, these shared cars are also prime breeding grounds for scandalous, titillating exchanges, where New Yorkers sandwiched together are networking, flirting and sparring in a seemingly consequence-free environment where nearly anything goes.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 30

• Instacart’s crazy-growth days may be coming to an end: the $2 Billion Grocery Delivery Startup, Lays Off 12 In-House Recruiters:  The grocery delivery startup, which investors valued at $2 billion last year, laid off 12 in-house recruiters earlier this month, according to multiple sources. A spokeswoman confirmed the layoffs, but did not disclose how many recruiters the company still employs. In a statement, CEO Apoorva Mehta attributed the job cuts to the company’s plans to be less aggressive in hiring in 2016 than it was in 2015, when its staff tripled, from just under 100 employees to a little more than 300. A person familiar with the move, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company likely should have employed fewer full-time recruiters and more contractors since it was unlikely that last year’s pace of hiring would continue indefinitely. Those affected by the cuts will be paid through the end of January, this person said. Instacart delivers groceries in 18 American cities from big chains like Whole Foods, Costco and Target and smaller grocers like Fairway and Zabar’s in New York City. Customers place orders through Instacart’s website or app, and the goods are whisked from local stores to customer doors, usually within an hour. A substantial portion of Instacart’s revenue originally came from marking up the in-store price of a given item, but the company now often charges the same price as the grocer, but takes a cut of the sales from the store. Earlier this year, Instacart finally began being transparent about when it was charging higher prices than its partner grocers.

• First Look at New Foldable Google Glass for the Workplace: The division of Google responsible for wearable technology, Project Aura, has been hard at work on numerous iterations based on the original Glass headset. Now we’ve got a glimpse at what one of those devices may look like. In FCC filings published today, a version of Glass designed for the workplace shows a familiar-looking device with a glass prism, but equipped with a hinge so that it can be folded and placed in pockets like a standard pair of glasses.

• Sidecar Squeezed Out by Uber and Lyft, Will Shut Down on Dec. 31: Sidecar, the third-biggest U.S. car-hailing service, said it will end its ride and delivery operations as the company is squeezed out by better-known competitors Uber and Lyft. One of the pioneers of the ride-sharing concept, Sidecar will end its service on Dec. 31, co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a blog post. The move will help pave the way for the "next big adventure in 2016," according to the letter. Founded four years ago, Sidecar created one of the first apps to try ride-destination tracking, discounted carpooling and deliveries that placed people and packages on the same route, according to its founders. The closely held San Francisco-based company shifted from transporting passengers to goods after struggling to compete with Uber and Lyft, according to CB Insights. "They’re competing with very heavily funded companies, and they didn’t have the same pull with drivers that these other companies might have," said Nikhil Krishnan, a technology analyst at CB Insights. "Even when it pivoted to transporting goods, it still had to compete with Postmates, and even Uber is transporting goods." Sidecar has raised about $35 million, according to Margaret Ryan, a company spokeswoman. That number pales in comparison to venture capital raised by Uber and Lyft. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Uber is seeking $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion. Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing service, is currently seeking to raise $500 million, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg last month. Sidecar’s investors include Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, and Richard Branson.

• Foodpanda India to sack about 330 employees: Foodpanda India is laying off one in seven staffers, continuing its clean-up drive after allegations of operational irregularities rattled the Rocket Internet-owned food ordering marketplace. The company said on Tuesday it will sack 15 per cent of its employees, or 330 people, as increased automation of 98 per cent in order processing has reduced the need for staffers. Foodpanda joins a raft of food-tech startups such as Zomato and TinyOwl in laying off employees amid a tightening in fund flow from investors due to high cash burn and growing profitability concerns. Before the job cuts, Foodpanda had 2,200 employees on its rolls. The company said it will provide affected employees due remuneration and help them explore job options.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 29

• Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future:  Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges — and elite institutions in particular — have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs’ lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges — and elite institutions in particular — have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs’ lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Some of that spirit was on display at Rice in October. In an engineering department design lab, teams of students in the university’s global health technologies program were working on assignments to develop products for real clients — many of them for hospitals in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, seeking low-cost medical devices.

• LinkedIn Rival Viadeo Exits China: Viadeo, the French rival to LinkedIn, is to exit China in order to focus on becoming a profitable business. In a further cost-cutting move, it will also shutter its data center in California and migrate to the cloud. The company moved into China eight years when it acquired local professional social network Tianji.com, but that site will cease to exist on December 31. Viadeo claims that Tianji has 25 million users, but it has struggled to attract the “very considerable development resources” necessary to drive it forward in “China’s fiercely competitive market”. Viadeo had planned to use one-third of the proceeds from its 2014 IPO to develop Tianji.com, but the listing didn’t raise enough capital and the firm wasn’t able to pull in money from private investors. Post-China, Viadeo said it will refocus on its home market of France and other French-speaking countries, while putting great emphasis on its B2B sales model. Viadeo’s foray into China was a fascinating one, since it doubled down on the country in 2011, a time when Twitter and Facebook were heavily linked with opening local operations there. The company two-sided play — having a global site (Viadeo.com) and a China-only one (Tianji.com) — was a model that both of the U.S. social networks had reportedly shown interest in. In contrast to Viadeo’s troubles in China, LinkedIn seems to be finding some success there. The U.S. social network opened a joint-venture with Sequoia China last year. LinkedIn China isn’t a totally separate site, but it does block some content from China based on the country’s web censorship regulations.

• Facebook Pitches Free Basics to India as Net Neutrality Activists Clash With Facebook: Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers for the country to allow a free Internet service that has stirred controversy and invited questions from regulators. Facebook’s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care, and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Yet activists say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites. The backlash in India centers on net neutrality, the principle that all Internet websites should be equally accessible. Critics accused the world’s largest social networking company of favoring a limited swath of the Internet and excluding rival services. And Facebook’s broader Internet.org initiative, including Free Basics, is seen as an effective way to draw more users onto a social network already used by over a billion people. Zuckerberg’s Facebook is spending billions of dollars on Internet.org, including projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. The billionaire co-founder has said Facebook or its partners will not make money off this initiative and that the goal is to bring Internet access to the developing world and alleviate poverty. “This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics,” Zuckerberg wrote in an opinion piece in the Times of India. “If people lose access to free basic services they will simply lose access to the opportunities offered by the Internet today.” This month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India asked in a “consultation paper” whether telecommunications service providers should be allowed to charge different pricing for data usage on websites, applications and platforms. The initial comment period for the Indian consultation paper ends Dec. 30. Activists have argued that Free Basics is a “land grab on government property” and that with data rates in India already being low, eventually “everybody will be on the full and open Internet.”

• TVF and AIB, Stars of India’s Online Video Scene Struggle to Make a Living: It’s not just the streaming video services that are struggling to make a profit in India. Even the country’s most popular YouTube stars have trouble making a living from digital video. The Viral Fever, a troupe of actors that creates TV-style episodic comedies, has one of the country’s most popular channels on YouTube, with about 1.3 million subscribers. Its most recent series, “Pitchers,” focused on a group of young tech workers trying to decide whether to form their own start-up. But the ad revenue from YouTube is so low that the group, known as T.V.F., has turned to sponsors like Kingfisher beer and Pond’s cold cream for funding to create its shows. T.V.F. also makes corporate videos and does live comedy shows at Indian colleges to help pay the bills. All India Bakchod, a four-man comedy troupe, has had similar challenges. The group has produced videos making fun of topics like Bollywood, Indian weddings and politics and has nearly 1.5 million followers on its YouTube channel. About two months ago, A.I.B. finally hit the big time, when Star India, a group of television channels owned by 21st Century Fox, began airing a weekly news satire show starring the group on its Hotstar app and on TV. Mr. Joshi said that A.I.B. essentially breaks even on video production costs and makes extra income from branded content it creates for Red Bull, Xbox and Quiksilver.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 28

• Apple Pay Seeks Growth in Asia, Europe After Slow U.S. Adoption:  After a sluggish start in the U.S. since its debut more than a year ago, Apple Pay is ramping up in markets where people are more comfortable with so- called contactless payments. The service, which lets consumers pay in an app or by tapping their iPhone on store terminals, will be introduced next year in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain. Apple is counting on its brand recognition as it enters markets that are further along than the U.S. in all things mobile payments, particularly in advanced technologies needed to accept them in retail outlets. Still, it won’t be easy. The iPhone maker will compete with local banks and Internet companies that already offer the service -- not to mention Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s leader in smartphones. The mobile-payment service, which only works with Apple devices, is a way for the company to make products more appealing and spur customer loyalty. After Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook called 2015 the “year of Apple Pay” in January, the service has been slow to take off domestically, partly because of a lack of promotion and a limited number of store terminals able to accept it. China: Apple said its service will be rolled out as soon as early 2016.   Last week, Apple teamed up with Chinese bank-card association UnionPay, which will make Apple’s market entry “a lot easier,” said James Wester, an analyst at researcher IDC. Still, Apple Pay will compete with services like Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay that control more than 75 percent of the mobile-payments market. And Apple should be prepared to race with Samsung, which also announced a partnership with UnionPay and plans to bring Samsung Pay to China as soon as early 2016.

• Jet.com’s Strategy: Low Prices, Fast Delivery, Happy Workers: You can’t accuse Jet.com of timidity. Jet has had some bumps and turns since last summer, when it began selling products as varied as cans of chili, exercise bikes and WowWee personal robots. It changed its business model, dropping a membership fee. It is burning through cash as it continues to scale up, now with more than 900 employees. When it went out to raise more money in the fall, it encountered skepticism. A week before Christmas, it told some customers they would not get their orders in time. Jet said only about 500 shipments out of a million were affected, but such admissions never look good. Yet Marc Lore, Jet’s founder and chief executive, says he is not worried. What will separate Jet from Fab and every other failed company, he says, is happiness. In particular, employee happiness. “I’m constantly asking people at Jet if they’re happy,” he said. “It’s really important for me to know that they love working here and think this is the best place they’ve ever worked.” Jet supplies its employees with typical start-up perks like free food (weekly lunches, plus Red Bull in the refrigerator and protein powder in the kitchen cabinet), four months of paid parental leave, unlimited vacation and an ownership stake that could one day be worth a lot. But it also has some decidedly less common policies, like standardized, no-negotiation pay packages and worker-friendly employment agreements. Employees can see, every day, how the business is doing. “Transparency” is a big word with Mr. Lore. So is “fairness.” Make people feel good, he says, and they will do their best. Trust them and they will reward you. As the holiday shopping season was beginning in late November, Mr. Lore convened his top executives in Jet’s Hoboken, N.J., headquarters for their regular weekly meeting. Here are some of the things that were not on the agenda: warehouse logistics, customer concerns, fine-tuning prices, potential shipping bottlenecks, supplier issues or any of a dozen other topics that could have bedeviled Jet’s first December. Instead, the executives discussed the mood and well-being of Jet’s employees. The preliminary results of Jet’s first “Happiness Pulse” were in. More than 500 employees responded to the survey, which means basically everyone who had been at Jet for at least a month. Two-thirds of them said they viewed Jet favorably. Only 4 percent had a negative opinion. “So only 25 people are basically unhappy,” Mr. Lore said. In an interview a few weeks after Jet’s official debut in July, Mr. Lore pulled out his phone and opened an app. It showed that Jet sold $667,200 in gross merchandise value in one day, up 89 percent in a month. Jet had 6,100 first-time buyers the previous day, and 7,800 orders. The company had $153 million in cash. The app is bulging with data, and it is available to investors and the salaried — but not the hourly — employees. Some information is available even to casual visitors. Dominating one wall in the reception area in Hoboken is a board posting constant updates of the day’s sales by number and dollar volume. For technology companies, this is radical openness. Also radical is a practice to keep salaries the same for jobs grouped together, a process called “leveling.” This is meant to rule out the common ploy “I got a job offer, can you match it?” Extroverts who promote themselves and introverts who keep their heads down are paid the same for jobs of the same value to the company.

• Common Stock Ownership Spreads Among Start-Up Investors: When institutional investors put money into companies backed by venture capital, they typically end up owning a type of stock called preferred shares. Now, institutional investors are also becoming owners of a different class of start-up stock: common shares. The competition among investors to get into hot start-ups has been so fierce that many hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and others have been unable to participate when the up-and-coming companies sold preferred shares, a kind of stock that generally comes with many protections. So to make sure they got a stake in private companies like Palantir Technologies, Dropbox and One Kings Lane, the institutional investors instead began buying common stock — generally owned by employees of start-ups — often from workers directly or from platforms that sell employee shares. In doing so, the investors chose to forgo the protections that come with preferred shares. Common stock usually comes with no guarantees and is paid out only after the preferred shareholders get their money. The spreading of common stock may have some unintended consequences, especially as the air begins to come out of the Silicon Valley boom and some companies get sold for modest amounts of money. For one, institutional investors who own common stock could take home much less than other investors in the same company who have preferred shares. That gap, in turn, could lead to more litigation between investors.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 24, 2015

• Indian Regulators Suspend Facebook’s Free Basic Services:  Telecommunications regulators in India have ordered the suspension of Facebook’s controversial program to bring free basic Internet services to mobile phone users in the country. Facebook’s program, called Free Basics, is one of the signature projects of Internet.org, the company’s ambitious plan to bring the Internet to the billions of people around the world who do not have it. Under the initiative, the company works in partnership with local telephone carriers in 35 countries to offer free access to a text-only version of the Facebook social network as well as to certain news, health, job and other services. The idea is to give novices a taste of the Internet and encourage them to buy paid data services when they want to explore the Internet more widely. But critics say that by offering a free package of handpicked services, Facebook and its partners are discouraging people from using competing services and violating the principle of net neutrality, which calls for telecommunications carriers to treat all Internet services equally. In India, for example, the program offers free web searches using Microsoft’s Bing service but Google searches incur a charge. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has been particularly keen to expand Free Basics in India, which already has more Facebook users than any other country except the United States. Facebook has waged an aggressive advertising campaign in newspapers and on its own social network to build support for the program. But Facebook has encountered a series of setbacks, including intense opposition from net neutrality advocates, the poor marketing efforts and weak network of its Indian phone partner, and skepticism from regulators. One of those regulators, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, has now told Reliance Communications, Facebook’s partner in India, to stop offering Free Basics. The order — which was quietly issued about two weeks ago but leaked to the Indian news media this week — came after Reliance failed to turn over information about the terms and conditions of the service, which it had planned to expand across the country beginning last month.

• When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt:  On Sept. 4, employees of Good Technology, a mobile security start-up in Sunnyvale, Calif., awoke to discover that their company was being sold to BlackBerry, the mobile device and software maker. Some workers immediately began trying to figure out what it meant for Good to abandon its long-anticipated plan to go public — a move that would have potentially turned their shares in the start-up into gold. They didn’t get firm answers that day, but the prospects did not look great. In an investor document about the sale that was distributed to shareholders, employees discovered their Good stock was valued at 44 cents a share, down from $4.32 a year earlier. In contrast, preferred stock owned by Good’s venture capitalists was worth almost seven times as much, more than $3 a share. The paperwork also showed that Good’s board had turned down an $825 million cash offer just six months earlier, in March. For some employees, it meant that their shares were practically worthless. Even worse, they had paid taxes on the stock based on the higher value. A few nights after the investor document went around, a glass conference room wall at Good’s headquarters was broken, according to an incident report. At a subsequent company meeting, Ms. Wyatt told employees that counselors were available to talk to people who needed to vent. “Many employees may not recover what they’ve lost,” said Matthew Parks, Good’s director of cloud products, who has worked at the company since 2006. His Good shares are now worth a fraction of the six-figure tax bill that he paid for the stock allotted to him before the company was sold. What Good’s employees experienced is an example of who loses out when a company backed by venture capital goes south. While plenty of people — including founders, top executives and investors — are involved in the rise of a start-up, those hit the hardest during a company’s fall are the rank-and-file employees. Investors and executives generally get protections in a start-up that employees do not. Many investors have preferred stock, a class of shares that can come with a guaranteed payout. Executives frequently get special bonuses so they will not leave during deal talks. In Good’s case, the six investors on the board had preferred shares worth a combined $125 million. After the sale to BlackBerry, Ms. Wyatt, who has since left the company, took home $4 million, as well as a $1.9 million severance payment, according to investor documents. In contrast, start-up employees generally own common stock, whose payout comes only after those who hold preferred shares get their money. In Good’s case, the board’s preferred stock was worth almost the same as all 227 million common shares outstanding. Missing out on the upside of the sale was bad enough, but that wasn’t the half of it. Some Good employees actually lost money when BlackBerry bought the company. Good was a unicorn, that is, a private company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. The high valuation increased the paper value of employee shares — and thus the income tax bills levied on their stock when they received the stock grants, or when they bought and sold shares. To pay those taxes, some employees emptied savings accounts and borrowed money. Some of Good’s common shareholders have sued most of the board for a breach of fiduciary duty, asserting that directors looked after the interests of only preferred shareholders.

• Palantir Technologies raises $880 million from investors: Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and security company that helps government agencies track down terrorists and uncover financial fraud, said on Wednesday it has raised $880 million in its latest financing round. Founded in 2004, Palantir, which is considered Silicon Valley's most secretive company, does highly confidential work for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Its data mining system, which uses algorithms to search for patterns and connections, helped the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The company's large staff of consultants also work with large businesses, police departments, banks and branches of the U.S. military. Palantir has raised close to $2 billion from investors. Its valuation earlier this month reached $20 billion, up from $15 billion in late 2014, making it the fourth-highest-valued, venture-backed private tech company in the world. The company has bucked growing skepticism among late-stage investors about plowing millions into highly valuable companies. Other "unicorns," or venture-backed companies ostensibly worth $1 billion or more, have watched their valuations come under heightened scrutiny. Palantir's strong government ties and an annual revenue estimated by some at more about $1 billion likely set it apart from other cash-burning startups. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, two of Silicon Valley's more influential investors and entrepreneurs.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 23

• Elon Musk's SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket After Launch of Satellites Into Orbit: People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing. “It really felt like it was right on top of us,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX for short, said during a telephone news conference afterward. For SpaceX, the 8:29 p.m. liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was a threefold success. First, it marked the company’s return to flight after half a year. In SpaceX’s last launch attempt, a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station disintegrated. Second, SpaceX’s upgraded design for its Falcon 9 rocket worked flawlessly. The liquid oxygen was chilled to minus 340 degrees Fahrenheit, about 40 degrees colder than on earlier flights, and the kerosene fuel was cooled to 20 degrees instead of 70 degrees. Most significant to SpaceX’s ambitions, however, is that after the second stage of the rocket with the satellites continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around, back to Cape Canaveral. Currently, most rockets are launched just once, the boosters falling back to Earth as expensive junk. Making spaceflight more like air travel, with rockets capable of being refueled and sent up again, is essential for SpaceX’s long-term goal of sending people to Mars. “It’s all the difference in the world,” Mr. Musk said, “absolutely fundamental.”

• Google, Ford in talks on self-driving car partnership: source: Google and Ford Motor Co are in talks about forming a partnership to develop autonomous car technology, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. The extent of a partnership between the second-largest U.S. automaker and search engine giant Alphabet Inc remains under discussion and the precise framework of any effort is unclear but it could include jointly building and developing cars. The two sides have been talking for months, the source said. A partnership between a major automaker and Google could speed the introduction of self-driving vehicles by giving the car company access to Google's wealth of software development while Google would benefit from the industrial and automotive know-how of a firm such as Ford. Fully autonomous cars could eventually prevent thousands of crashes, deaths and injuries, reduce oil use through better traffic management and extend personal mobility to people unable to drive.

• Jet.com Misses Last-Minute Christmas Sales and Shows Downside of Its Model: The heavily funded e-commerce startup began notifying customers 10 days before Christmas that it could not guarantee delivery by the holiday, citing “nationwide shipping delays that have affected many of our shipping partners.” On December 16, Jet.com added an alert to the top of its homepage. The company has still been guaranteeing two-day delivery for items it ships out of its own warehouses, but those are mostly household goods like toilet paper, detergent and packaged groceries that are typically not bought as gifts.While Jet.com is less than six months old, the incident highlights one big downside of its current model compared to Amazon’s. Jet’s pitch is that its large network of warehousing partners helps it choose the most efficient way to fulfill an order, thus stripping out excess costs and passing along discounts of 5 percent to 10 percent to shoppers if they order multiple items at once. But the model also means Jet doesn’t currently have as much control over the experience shoppers have after they complete a purchase for a large number of orders. Some items on Amazon also come from someone else’s warehouse. But Amazon can still guarantee two-day shipping on more than 20 million items through Amazon Prime, thanks to its huge Fulfillment by Amazon program that lets merchants store goods with Amazon for a fee.

• Google Calls Its New Ad Option for App Developers 'an Install-Seeking Machine' Google says developers running "universal app campaigns" across its network are finding them to be more cost-effective than ads run than other digital platforms. The Adwords-based campaign option, which Google introduced in September, allows developers to run a campaign across Google search, YouTube, Google Play store and the Google Display network. A developer designates a target cost per install and budget, and then Google automates where across its platforms the promos should go."Basically, think of it as an install-seeking machine," Anthony Chavez, Google's product management director for mobile ads and Universal App Campaigns, told Adweek. As an example, Google pointed to Sparkpeople, which has 15 million users in the U.S. and Canada for its fitness and dieting apps and has been testing the sytem. Joe Robb, the digital marketing director for the company, said that while the cost per install has been slightly higher than he expected, his team is still spending between 30 and 50 percent less than they do on Facebook. The campaign is also now driving about 20 percent of the company's total downloads.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 22

• Cisco reviews code after Juniper code backdoor found; more scrutiny expected: Networking equipment maker Cisco said on Monday it has launched a product review to look for tampering after rival Juniper Networks's disclosure found code in firewall software that made it vulnerable to cyber attacks. Juniper warned customers on Thursday that it had uncovered "unauthorized code" in its firewall software, saying it could be exploited to allow an attacker to unscramble encrypted communications that travel through the security devices. That prompted the code review by Cisco. Security experts said they expect other technology companies to conduct similar investigations after last week's unprecedented news from Juniper. It was the first time a major technology firm discovered the addition of an unauthorized 'back door," or code that could be exploited to facilitate cyber attacks, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was investigating how the Juniper "back door" might impact government networks.

• Toshiba Plans to Cut 7,800 Jobs as It Warns of Huge Loss:  Toshiba warned on Monday that it would incur its largest net loss ever as it tries to restructure a stable of unprofitable businesses. The Japanese company, whose financial struggles were laid bare this year in a $1.2 billion accounting scandal, said it would eliminate 7,800 jobs, mostly in its slumping consumer electronics division. That brings the number of job cuts announced this year to more than 10,000 total, or roughly 5 percent of its work force. Shedding workers is expensive in Japan, where the majority of employees enjoy legal protection from layoffs. Toshiba will have to negotiate voluntary buyouts instead, a process it said would contribute to a loss of 550 billion yen, or $4.5 billion, in the financial year ending in March. The bookkeeping scandal has been an embarrassment for corporate Japan. Though wrongdoing by businesses is hardly unheard-of here, Toshiba was among the bluest of blue-chip companies, featuring on a prominent index of businesses believed to combine profitability with clean, modern corporate governance. Instead, it turned out that the company had been massaging its earnings since the global financial crisis took hold in 2008. A committee of investigators hired by the company concluded in the summer that it had engaged in a “systematic cover-up.” The committee found problems in virtually all corners of Toshiba’s business, which encompasses products as various as refrigerators and nuclear power plants. Half the company’s board of directors stepped down. The more than 150 billion yen in profit overstatement discovered by the committee was equal to about a third of the pretax profits that Toshiba reported during the seven-year period under scrutiny.

• Ericsson signs patent deal with Apple, shares soar: Swedish mobile telecom gear maker Ericsson said it had signed a patent license deal with Apple Inc over technology that helps smartphones and tablets connect to mobile networks, sending its shares up much as 8 percent. The deal ends a year-long dispute with Apple, one of the biggest legal battles in mobile technology and Ericson said it would pave the way for cooperation between the companies on future technologies. Ericsson had said in its filing to a U.S. district court in January that Apple's license to use the technology developed by the Swedish firm had expired, and that two years of negotiations had not led to a new deal. Ericsson on Monday estimated overall revenue from intellectual property rights in 2015 would hit 13 to 14 billion crowns ($1.52-$1.64 billion) up from 9.9 billion in 2014 as a result of the agreement.

• Uber's Rival Lyft Plans to Raise Up to $1 Billion in New Funds: Ride-hailing company Lyft plans to raise as much as $1 billion in new funds, according to a Delaware state filing, in a round of financing analysts said could sharply boost the valuation of Uber’s largest U.S. rival. Lyft didn’t indicate in the Friday evening filing how much had been raised, who was investing in the round or list a valuation. Sven Weber, a financial filings expert, pegged the pre-money valuation at about $4.5 billion while Justin Byers at VC Experts estimates it closer to $3.9 billion. Lyft was valued at $2.5 billion when it announced a previous funding round in March. The latest fundraising round contained some downside protection for new investors, including the provision of extra shares should Lyft go public at a lower valuation. Lyft is competing aggressively with Uber, which recently filed to raise $2.1 billion at a $62.5 billion valuation. The discrepancies in the valuations reflect Uber’s pole position in the U.S. and its global ambitions. On Dec. 3, Lyft said it was teaming up with Uber’s biggest rivals in Asia, including China’s Didi Kuaidi, Singapore’s GrabTaxi, India’s Ola, to form a global alliance that will make their apps cross-compatible for travelers. Lyft lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg. It said last month it has gained market share in key markets such as San Francisco, and has a gross revenue “run rate” of $1 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 21

• Amazon in talks to lease Boeing jets to launch air-cargo business: report: Amazon.com is negotiating to lease 20 Boeing Co (BA.N) 767 jets to start its own air-delivery service next month, seeking to avoid delays from third-party carriers, the Seattle Times reported, citing cargo-industry executives. Amazon has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up the planes, the newspaper reported on Friday, citing a senior aircraft-leasing company executive familiar with matter.

• Alibaba Heads Into 2016 Struggling With Knock-Off Reputation: Cash-strapped Star Wars fans can pick up Darth Vader figurines and light sabers for as little as $4.59. Tom Brady jerseys go for about a 10th of those on the National Football League’s store. A pair of red Beats Solo headphones can be had for just $107 -- about half its official price. It’s bargains galore at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao: the EBay-like bazaar where buyers meet up with sellers. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma is struggling to shake the company’s reputation as a haven for cheap knock-offs and unauthorized merchandise, 21 months after calling counterfeits cancerous. He heads into 2016 after a bruising year that saw more than $50 billion wiped off its market value amid lawsuits and criticism from Chinese and U.S. regulators. Cleaning up its image next year is crucial to Alibaba’s goal of winning the trust of merchants and shoppers overseas, from where Jack Ma wants to get more than half the company’s revenue within a decade. A cooling Chinese economy makes that effort even more pressing. At home, JD.com Inc. is winning customers partly because it holds the inventory itself and sells directly to consumers, similar to Amazon, a business model easier to police and regulate, said Michelle Ma, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “By now, management should have eliminated this problem,” said Cyrus Mewawalla, managing director of London-based CM Research. “The fact that they haven’t is a worrying sign forinvestors.”

• Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation: Last year, as the deadly and highly contagious Ebola virus threatened to spread around the globe, Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up, was scrambling to find a test that could quickly detect if a person was infected. This was exactly the sort of thing the company was supposed to do. Its fundamental promise was to revolutionize laboratory testing by offering hundreds of different blood tests that could be done through a simple finger stick for a fraction of the cost of typical lab blood work. More than that, Elizabeth Holmes, who started the company in 2003, had a higher-minded purpose. She also wanted to defeat epidemics. The company devoted significant resources to the Ebola effort. “We stopped everything for Ebola — for the world,” says Richard Kovacevich, the former chief executive of Wells Fargo, who joined Theranos as a director in 2013. And then, nothing. Even as other companies received approval from regulators, Theranos watched from the sidelines. “I have no doubt we would have” gotten the green light for the tests, Mr. Kovacevich said. But the crisis ebbed, and the company says getting approval for that test is no longer a priority. Now, after a surprise inspection last summer, the Food and Drug Administration is requiring that Theranos’s equipment and individual tests go through the regulatory process and get approval. This will determine whether its foundational technology is a reality — or, like that Ebola test, an unfulfilled grand promise. While Theranos says it has conducted millions of tests, largely through a partnership with Walgreens, the drugstore chain, no one from outside Theranos has ever verified the technology. Institutions whose names were often linked with Theranos, like the Cleveland Clinic, insist they have not yet had a chance to use the technology. It has struggled to forge business relationships with other potential partners, like Safeway.

• Twitter Stock Closes at an All-Time Low: Twitter stock fell 4 percent Thursday, finishing the session at $23.31, the lowest the stock has ever closed. Yahoo Finance lists the stock’s 52-week low at $21.01, but that was during intra-day trading back in August (the stock closed at $25.17 that day). The stock market was crummy in general on Thursday. But it has also been a tough quarter for Twitter, which has dropped 11 percent since Jack Dorsey was named CEO back in early October. Twitter announced last week that it would finally start showing ads to its logged-out audience, which created a nice stock spike, but it’s clear that investors are looking for more.

• Waze Could Be Google’s Ace in the Hole in a Self-Driving Car War With Uber: It’s 2025. You’re in a big city and have somewhere to be. Fire up an app and an autonomous car — with a driver at the wheel or maybe without one — picks you up. Odds are good the company behind that car will be Uber or Google. The two are set to vie for the reigning position as the transit service platform of the future. Uber has advantages — for one, its name is becoming the verb for ride-hailing, the way Google’s has for search. But Google has the mobile platform, the lead in self-driving tech and deeper pockets. It has another edge: Deep ties with local governments, critical players in making autonomous vehicles a reality. This proximity is thanks to Waze, the mapping startup Google bought in 2013, which has invested heavily in building data-sharing agreements with cities around the world. If autonomous cars are going to work, there needs to be tight coordination of transit data between governments and private companies. Before you can hail a self-driving car, there’ll likely need to be a host of things (designated lanes, re-zonings, ordinances) that let it drive itself. Then there is the planning to ensure they drive effectively. That’s why Google has cut data deals with its flagship mapping product, and why Uber is scrambling to build similar programs. Waze is, from what we can tell, ahead. In its program, called the Connected Citizens Program, Waze hands over info reported by its users, like accidents and road closures, to urban governments free of charge. It has cut deals with 51 cities worldwide; they get fresh data from the app’s users every two minutes. For cities, the program gives them timely, unprecedented data that helps manage traffic flows, safety and (ideally) costs. In Boston, a city not known for its sober traffic design, officials are using Waze data to measure the impact of their planning changes. “We heard that traffic improved anecdotally,” said Connor McKay, a data scientist for the city. “Now we can say that, quantitatively, traffic has improved.” In return, cities give Waze their own traffic data. (This is why you may see some Uber drivers using Waze to get around.) Accurate road information is critical to making self-driving cars work — hence, Uber hurriedly pouring its investor stockpile into a mapping operation. The ballooning ride-hailing startup has had less success currying favor with city officials. It has proved it can get its way in cities, but usually after some messy standoffs. This summer, Waze rolled out its first flirtation with Uber’s turf: A trial in Tel Aviv that lets Waze users pick up passengers along their commute routes. It has since expanded to a few suburbs around the city. A Waze rep would only share that the Google unit is “quite pleased with the results.” Waze also insists that its trial is not like Uber — drivers aren’t making money, and the program is framed as a way for cities to tackle congestion problems. It’s a key framing. When governments begin to approach autonomy, they are likely to turn to tech partners they know best.

• How Intelligent Lighting Is Ushering In The Internet Of Buildings:  The LED revolution is over. To no one’s surprise, LEDs have won. Solid-state lighting is changing how we light the world, successfully displacing traditional illumination sources across every part of the global lighting market. Over the next few years, billions of sockets will be in play. This transition has kicked off a new phase of LED adoption — the race to connect every socket. The stakes are high for consumers and vendors alike. A trifecta of qualities — ubiquity, network connectivity and access to power — make intelligent lights a perfect platform on which the promise of the Internet of Things can start to come to life. Behind the scenes, this race to own sockets is really a contest to see who will control the infrastructure of the IoT across our built environment. These intelligent, networked, sensor-laden lights of the near future will form the central nervous system of every smart building. Beyond simple illumination, this “Internet of Buildings” built on top of next-generation lighting systems will forever change the way we interact with the spaces in which we live. In your kids’ elementary school, biometric sensors will track students’ alertness, subtly shifting spectrum to automatically boost their focus any time it starts to wane. Around the corner at the grocery store, beacons embedded in connected fixtures will track every movement you (or your mobile phone) make — from produce to dairy — beaming coupons at you along the way. Even the lights around your home will be intelligent, learning from and responding to the steady stream of data generated by your wearable devices — using light to help de-stress you after a long day or to perk you up on a cold, dark winter morning. Consumer-facing tech giants — Apple, Google, Amazon — see residential lighting as a key step toward the connected home. Why settle for one or two thermostats or smart toasters when you can gather data from dozens of sensor-enabled lights scattered throughout every house and apartment? For networking companies — Cisco, Qualcomm and their ilk — intelligent lighting is an infrastructure play. Billions of connected lights will need new routing fabric, if only to handle the massive amount of new data traffic they will produce. Even the largest building management systems companies — Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, Johnson Controls — see the threat posed to their core businesses in HVAC and physical security as the next generation of intelligent buildings are built on top of new lighting networks. Of course, the traditional lighting players — Acuity, Philips, GE — are deeply engaged in this shift, too. But their success is far from guaranteed. The land grab is on. Who will win?

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 18

• Big IPO, Tiny Payout for Many Startup Workers: Side deals and volatile shares make stock options a bigger gamble for startup employees.The frustrated expectations of early employees have become a common thread in the latest round of technology IPOs. It used to be “the get-rich story happened for people who joined in the early days,” says Saar Gur, general partner at Charles River Ventures. Now they can be among the few left behind. Many executives, early investors, and even later investors are able to cash out before the rank and file, or bargain for guarantees that help ensure a bonanza. Whatever happens with an IPO, executives tend to hang on to enough equity to guarantee huge payouts when they sell their shares. Most early investors get a chance to sell options on secondary markets before a company’s IPO. Later investors increasingly demand preferential treatment, including agreements that if an IPO underperforms the terms of their investment, they’ll be made whole with an equivalent amount of additional shares. Late-stage investors in both Box and Square had such so-called ratchet agreements in place, further devaluing locked-up employee equity. When those kinds of deals are in place, employees often find their payouts disappointing because they’re so diluted, says Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution Ventures. Box and Square declined to comment for this story. Ordinary employees are typically without meaningful financial protections or even a clear sense of what their equity stakes mean, says Chris Zaharis, who’s worked at startups for about 20 years and as a volunteer teaches people about their equity rights. Options grants often don’t come with information on strike prices (discounts on shares), preferential treatment, or even the total number of shares outstanding. “People on average overestimate what they are going to make by about 10X,” he says.

• Driverless Cars Have A Crash Rate Twice As High As Regular Cars - Because They Always Follow The Rules. They  The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. The glitch? They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google  and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble? “It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. Turns out, though, their accident rates are twice as high as for regular cars, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution. Last year, Rajkumar offered test drives to members of Congress in his lab’s self-driving Cadillac SRX sport utility vehicle. The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head toward the Pentagon. The car’s cameras and laser sensors detected traffic in a 360-degree view but didn’t know how to trust that drivers would make room in the ceaseless flow, so the human minder had to take control to complete the maneuver.

• Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service: A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered the lifting of a 48-hour suspension of the services in Brazil of Facebook Inc's WhatsApp phone-messaging application, overturning an order from a lower court. The ban, which went into effect at midnight Wednesday, lasted about 12 hours until an appeals court judge overturned it. The interruption of WhatsApp's text message and Internet telephone service caused outrage in Latin America's largest country, where the company estimates it has 100 million personal users, and led to angry exchanges on the floor of Congress. WhatsApp is installed on 92.5 percent of Android devices in Brazil, making it the most installed app in the country, according to SimilarWeb, an internet intelligence and marketing company. Rival messaging system Telegram said on Twitter that it received 1 million downloads in Brazil in one day due to the outage. Telegram was installed on 2.35 percent of android devices before the blackout and Facebook Messenger on 74 percent, SimilarWeb said. A judge in Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo, had ordered the suspension of WhatsApp's services from midnight on Wednesday (0200 GMT Thursday). The order was made after the California-based company, despite a fine, failed to comply with two judicial rulings to share information in a criminal case. 

• Apple names Jeff Williams COO, a job once held by Tim Cook: Apple Inc promoted longtime executive Jeff Williams to the role of chief operating officer, reinstating the title previously held by Chief Executive Tim Cook, as part of a series of changes to the company's leadership team. Williams, who joined Apple in 1998, previously served as senior vice president of operations and oversaw development of the Apple Watch, the company's first new product since the iPad. "Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I've ever worked with," Cook said in a statement. While it was unclear if the appointment meant Apple was grooming Williams to be Cook's successor, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source, that the move did not necessarily signal that.

• Yelp, OpenTable part ways amid heightened competition: Review site Yelp Inc and restaurant reservation service OpenTable have quietly ended a long-running partnership, the companies confirmed on Thursday, as the one-time allies increasingly eye each other's businesses. The companies parted ways in April under mounting competition, with OpenTable facing new rivals to its reservation business and Yelp dogged with questions about stalling growth. Both companies are trying to take charge of the entire customer experience, said an analyst. "If they have to share that customer with someone else, it threatens their long-term viability," he said. The companies halted a deal that since 2010 had allowed users to make OpenTable reservations through Yelp, home to a trove of reviews from diners.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 17

• Fed Raises Key Interest Rate for First Time in Almost a Decade: The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, a vote of confidence in the American economy. Policy makers have waited a long time for this moment: Since December 2008 the Fed has held the benchmark rate near zero, the centerpiece of its campaign to revive economic growth and reduce unemployment from the recession. Fed officials predicted that they would raise interest rates by about one percentage point a year over the next three years — an indication that they would be taking a slow-and-steady approach to economic expansion. The cost of borrowing is expected to rise, but only slightly, with variable effects on what banks charge for credit cards, home equity lines of credit, adjustable-rate mortgages, auto loans and some student loans. Remember, Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, has said the Fed will move cautiously in raising its benchmark rate. Financial markets were encouraged by the Fed’s announcement. Stocks rose, the dollar gained modestly and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose slightly. The Fed’s announcement came exactly seven years to the day after the central bank cut its benchmark rate nearly to zero.

• Facebook Messenger Lets You Book an Uber:  The feature will be made available in the U.S. to start. Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday. The new feature for Messenger, which has more than 700 million users globally, will allow users to tap on a street address in a message and summon a ride. After booking, the app will let Uber customers easily share their estimated arrival times or coordinate splitting the fare with friends through Messenger. The feature is expected to be made available in other countries outside the U.S. later. One place Facebook probably won't introduce the Uber button any time soon is in China, where the social network is blocked. The Chinese have had a similar feature in Tencent's WeChat, the dominant messaging platform in the country. That version works with Didi Kuaidi, however, a Tencent-backed ride-hailing service that is Uber's chief competitor there. Tencent has blocked Uber from using WeChat to recruit drivers or promote the company in China, says Uber. 

• Amazon Leads $23M Investment In India-Based Home Services Startup Housejoy: Amazon has led a $23 million investment in India-based Housejoy, a startup that — as the name not-so-subtly suggests — is much like Homejoy, the home services on-demand company that closed its doors this summer. The U.S. e-commerce giant was joined in the Series A round by existing investor Matrix Partners, and new backers Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. Unlike U.S.-based Homejoy — which had raised nearly $40 million and was the most visible player in an emerging category — Housejoy offers more than just home cleaning services. It caters to plumbing, electrical/appliance repairs, beauty, fitness, laundry and pest control and more. The startup is less than a year old, it previously raised $4 million, and is currently available in 11 cities across India. With this new funding, CEO Saran Chatterjee told TechCrunch that it plans to expand to cover 25 cities by the end of next year. The involvement of Amazon, which previously invested in India-based deals with financial comparison service BankBazaar and gift card startup QwikCilver, is interesting. Its founder Jeff Bezos hasn’t been shy in admitting that the company is very much focused on growing in India, where it launched two years ago and is rivaled by two home-grown unicorns: SoftBank-backed Flipkart and Alibaba-backed Snapdeal. Last year, Amazon invested $2 billion in its India business and results seem to be going its way after it recently claimed to have beaten its well-backed rivals on monthly traffic for the first time. Chatterjee stressed in an interview that Amazon hasn’t discussed acquiring Housejoy, and that its involvement in the round could unlock a lucrative partnership for the startup. Beyond its expansion, Housejoy plans to use the money to ramp its quality assurance protocols which evaluate and assess the ‘service providers’ who work for the company. In that way, it’s very much like Uber — a marketplace through which independent workers can find jobs. With some customers experiencing issues with the service — including one India-based writer at Tech In Asia — Chatterjee admits that it needs to raise its reliability from (probably) a seven out of ten score, to nine or ten. The company is also planning to spend a portion of its funding on strategic acquisitions. Chatterjee said that around 10 percent of the round — so roughly $2 million — could go towards buying up companies or acquihiring teams that “give us a position of strength in a city or category, or [add to the] team and talent.”

• Oracle profit forecast fails to impress; shares fall. Oracle Corp on Wednesday delivered a third-quarter profit forecast that did not quite meet analysts' expectations, and the company's shares fell about 1 percent in extended trading. Oracle forecast third-quarter profit of about 63-66 cents per share, with revenue flat or up 3 percent which translates to $9.33 billion-$9.61 billion. The company's shift from licensing software to cloud-based subscriptions has squeezed its margins. Oracle, like other established technology companies, has been moving its business to the cloud-based model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Up to Wednesday's close, Oracle's stock had fallen 13.5 percent this year.

• In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers: The Internet took off as a way to book travel because the human intermediaries were always a bit suspect — their expertise questionable, their methods opaque and their allegiances unclear. And at first, the machines seemed to improve everything. For uncomplicated trips, booking online is now much easier than in the past. Because we’ve replaced agents with computers whose sole purpose is to ferret out the best deal, and for lots of other reasons, airfares have plummeted over the last three decades. Yet as you suffer through another holiday travel season, you might pause to consider how much we’ve really gained — and lost — in ditching human agents for machines. And you might welcome an emerging trend on the Internet: start-ups that are trying to put human agents, whether in travel, home services or shopping, back at the center of how we make decisions. “A lot of companies pushed hard on the idea that technology will solve every problem, and that we shouldn’t use humans,” said Paul English, the co-founder of a new online company called Lola Travel. “We think humans add value, so we’re trying to design technology to facilitate the human-to-human connection.” Lola, which is currently open only in a limited prerelease version, has an unusual interface: When you’re looking to book a trip, you just send a text. Your request can be vague — “Hey, my family is thinking about going to Europe next summer” — because on the other end sits a human. The agent knows your general travel preferences and has access to many of the same tools you’d use to book a trip. But the agent also has something extra — experience and data to help make decisions about the kind of trip you should take.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 16

• The Future of Wearables Is Normal Clothes Made Smart: The current crop of wearables has mostly been constrained to your wrist in the form of clunky Apple Watches and Moto 360s. Attempt to vary the where in wearables, like Google Glass — the no-longer-in-production spectacles so nerdy only cast members from The Big Bang Theory dared to wear them out in public — have already been cast to the junk heap of history. When a gadget seemingly straight from the future couldn’t cut it, it speaks to the fact that we need our wearables to be stylish and practical. In the future wearables will most likely be simply known as just clothes. Companies like Intel are already working to make what seems like a far-off vision a reality. "The most exciting thing is going to be when the technology [becomes] so small and tiny that we'll be able to embed it into anything and everything," Aysegul Ildeniz, the vice president of Intel’s New Devices, tells us. "So we’re talking about potentially, one day, fabrics or the stuff we wear on us will be smart... we could put it in a hat, or shoe, or pants."

• Hudson’s Bay Is Said to Consider Buying Gilt Groupe for $250 Million: Gilt Groupe, a onetime darling of online fashion sales, is nearing a deal to sell itself — albeit at a steep discount to its once lofty valuation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue, is in advanced talks to buy the start-up for about $250 million, a person briefed on the matter said on Monday. That is down significantly from the $1 billion valuation that Gilt fetched more than three years ago. A deal could be announced early next year, though people briefed on the talks cautioned that negotiations were still underway and could still fall apart. Gilt is also speaking with a handful of other potential buyers in addition to Hudson’s Bay, according to another person briefed on the talks. Should the two sides reach an agreement, it would cap a long and volatile ride for Gilt, which shook up the fashion industry when it opened for business eight years ago. The company focused on so-called flash sales, in which consumers have a limited amount of time to buy clothes, accessories and furniture sold by the site. The business model was so popular that Gilt raised $138 million from investors like SoftBank of Japan and Goldman Sachs in 2011, even as it remained unprofitable. And the online retailer was regarded as a star in New York City’s start-up community. The company’s early success bolstered the reputations of its founders, including Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Kevin P. Ryan, the former chief executive of the online ad company DoubleClick, who also served as chief executive of Gilt. But flash sale sites, like Gilt, have lost their luster as consumers become increasingly desensitized to deals, analysts say.

• In Virtual Reality Headsets, Investors Glimpse the Future: Magic Leap, a secretive company making wearable technology for mixing digital imagery with the real world, is seeking to raise $827 million. Jaunt, maker of a 3-D camera for filming virtual reality video, has nabbed a total of $100 million, including $65 million in September. And 8i, which makes technology that lets people interact with video of humans as though they were in the same room, has raised nearly $15 million. None of these start-ups is a household name. Few members of the public have had an opportunity to interact with — much less buy — the virtual and augmented reality technology that these companies are developing.Yet investors and entrepreneurs believe that headsets made to immerse people in digital worlds are the next giant moneymakers in technology, setting off an investor frenzy rarely seen since the early days of the web and mobile markets. Virtual reality start-ups are multiplying, venture capital is pouring into them and the believers are expressing blue-sky thinking about how the new products could reshape entertainment, communications and work.

• Diagnosing Yahoo’s Ills: Ugly Math in Marissa Mayer’s Reign: Let’s do some basic math about Yahoosince Marissa Mayer took the helm over three years ago. She paid about $3 billion for acquisitions of companies you’ve mostly never heard of, like Aviate, Polyvore and Distill (and one company you may have heard of, Tumblr). She spent $9.4 billion on stock buybacks; over the last two years, when the stock was trading higher, the buybacks have been a $2.5 billion money-losing trade. About $365 million of compensation went to Ms. Mayer herself, assuming she stays for an additional year and a half. And $109 million to an executive she hired to be her chief operating officer, who was then summarily fired 15 months later. An estimated $450 million on free food for the staff. And, depending on whom you believe, double-digit millions of dollars on parties and events, including a “Great Gatsby”-themed holiday party several weeks ago that was held with no apparent irony. Many of those figures come from a devastating new presentation sent to Yahoo’s board over the weekend by Eric Jackson, who runs a small hedge fund called SpringOwl Asset Management and who has long railed about the company’s missteps.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 15

• Amazon overtakes Flipkart as most visited Indian e-com site: comScore: E-commerce giant Amazon Inc said on Monday it has become the most visited e-commerce site in India beating local rival Flipkart in the month of October citing comScore data. It said Amazon.in clocked 30 million unique visitors during the month ahead of Flipkart.com, Jabong.com and Snapdeal.com

• E-Commerce  Retailers in India Battle Devil They Spawned: Deep Discounts: Discounts and cashback offers helped India’s top e-commerce companies from Flipkart to Snapdeal sell a record $11 billion of goods this year online. As the freebies start to hurt, they are questioning a strategy they now find too hard to dump. While scrapping rebates may bring the focus back to profitability from valuations, it may be easier said than done for an industry built on a foundation of cut-price sales. The real dilemma faced by Narayanan and his peers is: Who will blink first? 

• China's Baidu says to develop self-driving buses within three years: China's top online search firm Baidu Inc said it aims to put self-driving buses on the road in three years and mass produce them within five years, after it set up a business unit to oversee all its efforts related to automobiles. The unit will also include its initiative in partnership with BMW AG to develop an autonomous passenger vehicle, which may also be put into mass production within five years, a spokesman told Reuters on Monday. Self-driving cars have emerged as a new battlefront for tech majors globally. Alibaba Group Holding says it will launch its first car in a partnership with China's SAIC Motor Corp, while U.S. tech heavyweights Google and Apple are also developing autonomous cars.

• Creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram Launches Free Version of Wolfram Language: For nearly three decades, Stephen Wolfram has built software technology that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations. Wolfram Alpha, his question-answer technology, is available on its own website and serves up many of the answers for Apple’s voice-controlled digital assistant, Siri. His approach to this artificial-intelligence challenge was both innovative and idiosyncratic, and characteristic of Mr. Wolfram, who earned his Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20 and soon after received a MacArthur “genius” award. Wolfram Alpha, he explains, is a “knowledge-based system,” which computes answers from its storehouse of knowledge rather than today’s prevailing technique of determining statistical probabilities from poring through vast amounts of data. His Wolfram Language is similarly a tool for what he calls “knowledge-based programming.” And Mr. Wolfram wants to make his technology and his software philosophy available to far more people, including newcomers to computing, like students and children. So he has decided to make a version of the Wolfram Language and development tools available as a free cloud service. To help, he also has published a book, “An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language,” which is free to read online. Wolfram Language is already one of the programming languages distributed with the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that can be plugged into a computer monitor or television and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. The most popular model is $35. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British charity founded in 2009 to further basic education in computing to young people of all income levels. Its nonprofit company, Raspberry Pi Trading, sells the inexpensive, general-purpose computers.

• Have iPhone Sales Finally Peaked? Analysts Predict a Slump Ahead: Is Apple’s iPhone finally reaching its peak? In the past few weeks, a slew of analysts have predicted that sales of Apple’s best-selling product may slump in 2016, based in part on supply chain issues and partly on weaker demand, especially from saturated developed markets. Apple’s growth is increasingly dependent on demand for iPhones, while iPad tablet sales decline and adoption of the Apple Watch remains modest. Morgan Stanley lowered its forecast for iPhone unit sales and now estimates a drop of 6 percent in fiscal 2016, according to a Dec. 13 note. The decline is due to higher prices in international markets, excluding China, and maturing smartphone penetration in developed countries. China is the only market with year-over-year iPhone demand growth in the December quarter, according to the report.

• Why Glass Is Critical to the Future of Tech: One material has emerged that is probably second only to the processor when it comes to the importance of delivering a great user experience in all types of devices, especially mobile ones. That material is the glass screens on billions of feature and smartphones in the market today. Putting glass screens on a table top and turning it into a huge interactive screen could change the way many people interact with their digital content. Making glass walls that can show off all types of video and content, and applications that can be touched to activate them, is exciting. Imagine a glass screen on your refrigerator, or a glass mirror in the bathroom that delivers a touch-based gateway to all of your digital “stuff,” and you begin to see the role glass will play in a much broader way in the near future.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 14

• Is Acqui-Hiring Dead? Tech Startups Long for the Days of Yahoo’s Binge Acquisitions: Under Marissa Mayer, Yahoo used to be the top company making “acqui-hires,” but such talent acquisitions have fallen out of favor throughout Silicon Valley this year. In 2013 and 2014, Yahoo was the top technology company conducting acqui-hires, an industry term for acquisitions done primarily for the talent, according to research firm CB Insights. Yahoo was tied for third in 2012, Mayer's first year at the company. In 2015, Yahoo has disappeared from the list entirely. When Mayer joined from Google, she was looking for an infusion of technical and entrepreneurial talent to improve the company's mobile and Web services. The fresh blood failed to revive the staid Internet portal, and now Yahoo is considering a spinoff of its core Web business to address investors' tax concerns. "They made acquisitions, and nothing came out of it," said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. "The focus has shifted over the last few quarters to integrate, rather than acquire." Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, declined to comment. The excitement surrounding talent acquisitions has dissipated throughout Silicon Valley, not just at Yahoo. Active acquirers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have started to pull back on buying for talent, CB Insights said. U.S. talent acquisitions have declined 48 percent this year from a peak in 2013, the firm's data show. CB Insights compiled the information from company reports, which wouldn't include undisclosed purchases or those not classified as talent acquisitions. Instead of pursuing costly acqui-hires, many companies have returned to old-fashioned recruitment, said Ben Narasin, a general partner at Canvas Ventures. "All of these top firms need more people, but are you really willing to pay a million-dollar cost of acquisition for a whole bunch of people?" he said. "I think acqui-hiring is dead."

• 2015 Was The Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009: With just 28 technology companies entering the U.S. public markets, 2015 was the worst year for IPOs since 2009, according to Dealogic. This compares to 62 last year and 48 the year before, with 131 “unicorns” opting to remain private longer. The performance of the tech IPOs has also been subpar. Half of the tech companies that have gone public this year are trading below their IPO price, including Etsy which fell 41%. And both Box and Square, went public at market caps that were beneath the valuation of their last private rounds. Companies which had strong fundamentals, like Atlassian, were able to hit the ground running. Fitbit is up 56% since its June IPO and GoDaddy, which is on the verge of profitability, has risen 68%. “2016 may see 2 types of companies go public,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. “One are the good companies with solid fundamentals. The other set of companies are those that get pushed into going public because the private markets close up on them.”

• Adidas’s ‘speedfactory’ hints at the future of shoe manufacturing:  Adidas announced this week that it is setting up what it calls a “speedfactory” in Ansbach, Germany, in an attempt to be at the forefront of manufacturing and offer individualized products that get in customers’ hands quicker. Its goal is to use the latest manufacturing innovations to produce a largely automated process. (From a business perspective, it’s not appealing to shift factories to areas with higher labor costs, unless the operation runs with minimal human labor.) By leveraging recent developments in robotics, Adidas may be able to better serve its customers. In the long run, the model could potentially expand beyond shoes to all goods. For example, after a big sporting event the conversation among sport fans in a given city might center around an athlete’s latest touchdown celebration dance, or a clever quip to reporters. If a company such as Adidas had a factory located near that city, it could rapidly produce and sell related merchandise before the conversation had cooled off.  The first step for Adidas is to produce 500 pairs of concept shoes in the first half of 2016. Those initial pairs will all be one type of running shoes. Down the line Adidas envisions custom-made shoes that might have a sole designed to fit an individual customer’s foot.

• Alibaba Buys Prominent And Vocal Hong Kong Newspaper For $266M In Bid To Influence Media: The Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet giant, is making an ambitious play to reshape media coverage of its home country, taking aim at what company executives call the “negative” portrayal of China in the Western media. As the backbone of this effort, Alibaba agreed on Friday to buy the media assets of the SCMP Group, including one of Hong Kong’s most influential English language daily newspapers, The South China Morning Post. Alibaba is acquiring an award-winning newspaper that for decades has reported aggressively on subjects that China’s state-run media outlets are forbidden to cover, like political scandals and human-rights cases.Alibaba said the deal was fueled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it calls the biased lens of Western news outlets. While Alibaba said the Chinese government had no role in its deal to buy the Hong Kong newspaper, the company’s position aligns closely with that of the Communist Party, which has grown increasingly critical of the way Western news organizations cover China. This coverage, the company said, influences how investors and others outside China regard Alibaba. The company said its shares, which are listed in New York, were being affected by all the negative reports about China. For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth $266 million, the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue. The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning The South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organization that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls. As speculation of a deal began in recent weeks, some critics in Hong Kong had already started to worry about whether Alibaba was seeking to tame the paper’s coverage in order to curry favor with the Chinese leadership. The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland like covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.