Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday January 6

• Facebook buys a voice recognition platform that simplifies making a voice-enabled Facebook app; part of a bet on a "Build-Grow-Monetize" loop for app developers: Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it seem that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop where they get help building apps, but eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads. As part of Facebook, Wit.ai could help the company offer voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform, aid with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s understanding of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app you can navigate through speech. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in speech recognition and voice control. Without it, developers would need the expertise, time and resources to build a whole voice-recognition system themselves.

• Start-ups, giants rush to break down ‘Deep-Linking’ walls between Apps and Web: Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them. Say you want a hotel for a weekend stay. You could Google for deals or go to a travel site. But wherever you go on the web, you will not find the rooms on HotelTonight, an app that offers steep discounts for last-minute bookings. The only way to get those listings is to use the app. And if you find a few hotels on HotelTonight, you cannot email them to your spouse, because there are no links to send. As people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines. In tech speak, the problem is known as “deep linking,” the technological hurdle of giving apps some sort of links — those identifying lines of letters, dots and slashes that make up a web address or URL. Though deep linking is a worry for large tech firms, it is a big opportunity for start-ups looking to unseat them. For web giants, deep linking is a way to protect their businesses by creating mobile versions of things they do on the web. Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising. Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages. Twitter has Twitter Cards, which make it possible to go from the Twitter app to another app in the user’s phone, rather than from the Twitter app to the web. If the user does not have the app he or she wants installed on a phone, Twitter will ask if the user wants to install it immediately. Facebook is trying to create an open standard of deep links to help apps connect to one another, so, for instance, someone could go from listening to a band in the Spotify app to finding information about the band’s live appearances in the Songkick app.

• "Unbundling" is causing US eCommerce order values to fall, as consumers spread purchases across multiple transactions: While sales were up overall this year, order value was down 8 percent from 2013, with the average order costing $119.33. Experts say these offers can prompt shoppers to "unbundle" their orders, meaning that shoppers may spread out their purchases over several transactions instead of scooping up slippers for Mom and "Frozen" pajamas for the kids in one order. According to data released Monday by IBM, sales on mobile devices rose by 27 percent in November and December over the same period last year. And yet sales made through smartphones and tablets still only accounted for about 23 percent of online sales overall, with a whopping 77 percent of sales coming from desktops and laptops. IBM also studied how social sites Facebook and Pinterest drive retail sales. The analysis found that shoppers who came to retailer's Web site through a Facebook post spent an average of $101.38 per order, while those who came from Pinterest spent $105.75. Henderson said a key difference might be that Facebook included a mix of sponsored ads and posts from friends, while Pinterest did not contain ads, a sign that perhaps the more curated, trusted content from friends was more effective at driving sales. (Pinterest began selling ads on Jan. 1, so that could sour some users' experience with the site in the future.) IBM found that total online sales were up a healthy 13.8 percent this holiday season compared to 2013, an uptick that was about in line with the 15 percent growth IBM had predicted. This year's increase was significantly larger than the 8.5 percent online sales increase recorded by IBM last year.

• Snapdeal invests in comparison site Smartprix - follows investments in recommendation engine Wishpicker, discovery platform Doozton: Snapdeal, has quietly picked a stake in Smartprix Web Private Limited, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix, sources privy to the development told Techcircle.in. This comes as yet another strategic move for Snapdeal in acquiring or getting an exposure to third-party e-commerce enabling ventures over the last year or so. It had recently acquired gifting recommendation venture Wishpicker besides snapping fashion products discovery platform Doozton around a year ago. It is learnt that Snapdeal had initially acquired 10 per cent stake in Smartprix in FY14 with the understanding to acquire a majority stake eventually. “Snapdeal’s VP engineering Amitabh Misra had joined the board of Smartprix as one of the directors,” said one of the sources. Smartprix was founded in May 2011 by then IIT-Delhi students Choudhary and Khandelwal who have dual degree in computer science and engineering. Smartprix.com is an online comparison shopping that helps users compare different products and choose the best product according to their needs. It also presents the pricing information of the product on different online stores and provides review, ranking and recommendations. Its product categories include mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras personal care appliances, accessories and books. The firm also features deals on all kinds of products and plans to introduce newer categories. The firm earns commission from the affiliates for every sale. To date, it has tied up with over 50 online stores. Snapdeal is not the first firm to eye a piece of a product price comparison engine. Amazon already runs a India specific price comparison site called Junglee.com There are several startups in the price comparison space, many of whom have managed to grab VC attention. Among these, Zopper.com raised $5 million led by Tiger Global Management LLC, PriceBag.com raised $2 million from angel investors, MySmartPrice raised $1 million from Accel and Helion, YouTellMe.com recently raised $100,000 from Dutch early-stage fund Bright Ventures, among others.

• Why did Amazon send 405 reps to CES 2014? Why did Apple send just 4? The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of largest trade shows around: Amazon.com, the third-biggest consumer-electronics retailer in the U.S., sent 405 representatives to CES 2014. Apple, the fourth-biggest, sent four, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the conference.Back in 2009, when Amazon was only eighth among U.S. electronics retailers, it sent 69 reps to the annual nerd festival. Apple, then the third-largest electronics retailer, also sent 69 that year. Apple hasn’t introduced a product at the dog and pony show in more than a decade—after debuting a series of flops there in the 1990s, including a video-game console and the Newton—but it had steadily increased its number of reps at CES from 2009 to 2011 as the company grew its retail operations. While Apple Stores mostly sell the company’s brand-name products, it does carry accessories from other hardware makers. U.S. electronics sales at Apple Stores last year rose to more than $11 billion, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. But for some reason, Apple cut its badge count to four in 2012, where it’s remained ever since. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Amazon, which also didn’t respond to a request for comment, sent more employees last year than Best Buy and Wal-Mart Stores, the top two gadget retailers. Amazon sells its own products, too, but it’s a retailer first and foremost. If CES’s influence in waning, nobody told Jeff Bezos.