Daily Tech Snippet: Friday February 27

• Google story#1: Finally, Google will test ads on the Google Play Store: More coverage here and here : Google Inc. plans to show search ads targeting customers who use its application and media store for Android devices under a pilot program, as the company looks for new ways to generate revenue from mobile devices. In the next few weeks, Google will let application developers buy advertising spots that consumers can see when they search for software in the Google Play store, Michael Siliski, a product management director, said in a blog post Thursday. So, a query for coupon or travel options in the marketplace may show a sponsored result at the top of the query page, the Mountain View, California-based company said. Google, grappling with competition from Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., is looking for new ways to boost interest from businesses in advertising on wireless devices, where prices for promotions often are less than they are on desktops. The company’s share of the mobile ad market dropped to 41 percent last year from 46 percent in 2013, according to recent research by EMarketer Inc. “We’ve seen how search ads shown next to organic search results on Google.com can significantly improve content discovery for users and advertisers, both large and small,” Siliski said. “Search ads on Google Play will enable developers to drive more awareness of their apps and provide consumers new ways to discover apps that they otherwise might have missed.” Google, the world’s biggest Internet services company, is looking to expand its mobile ad presence as users favor applications such as those from Priceline Group Inc.’s Kayak on handheld devices, which bypass browser-based ads. The new service aims to bolster its appeal to developers that are looking for new ways to attract new consumers. Smartphones using Android dominate the global market with more than 80 percent of the share in 2014, according to IDC. Separately, the company also announced today it has paid out more than $7 billion to developers of games and apps on Google Play in the past year.

• Quantity and value of data is an overlooked benefit to delaying an IPO: It’s taking longer for startups to get to IPO, but that’s not necessarily bad news for investors in private companies. Why? Because startups today aren’t just valuable for their future exit potential, but for the proprietary data they produce while still private. Market statistics clearly show companies are staying private longer. The average time to IPO has doubled to nine years today from four in 1999, and the median amount raised prior to IPO has increased steadily from $48 million in 2008 to $101 million in 2013. Of the 100 largest VC rounds in history, 90 have occurred in the last five years. There are several reasons startups are staying private longer, including volatile public markets, healthy secondary markets, and a preference by some for mega-M&As. Whatever the reason startups don’t seek IPOs early, there is a real and often overlooked benefit to investors when startups stay private longer – the value of their data.

• Google story#2: Google moifies Search algorithm to increase weight of mobile-friendliness, expand indexing of app deep links: Google today announced two notable changes that will affect the rankings of search results for users accessing Google search on mobile devices. It will now take into consideration a site’s mobile-friendliness as one of its ranking signals, and information from indexed mobile applications will also begin to influence ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed on their smartphone. “As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” explains Google in its announcement. The changes follow a number of previous efforts Google has made to improve its search results for mobile users. In 2013, for example, it rolled out ranking changes that would affect sites that were misconfigured for smartphone users, including those frustrating situations where a specific URL would redirect all smartphone users to the website’s mobile homepage instead of their preferred destination. This was common among news sites, in particular, as users would often click a link to read a certain story and would end up landing on the site’s main webpage, the story nowhere to be found. Last summer, meanwhile, Google began flagging sites that wouldn’t display on mobile devices due to the technology they used – like those built with Adobe Flash, which meant they wouldn’t display on iOS devices or Android 4.1 and higher. And in November, Google began adding a “mobile-friendly” label to its search results accessed on mobile devices to indicate they would display well on your smartphone’s small screen, after first testing “warning labels” earlier in the year. It noted at the time it was also testing the use of the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal. In a blog post detailing the changes, the company points website owners to a number of resources that can help them prepare for this shift, including its guide to mobile-friendly sites, its Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, and its Mobile Usability Report. In addition, the company also said it will begin taking advantage of its efforts with deep-linking technology to begin to surface information from mobile apps higher in its search results. Deep links, for those unfamiliar, point to specific pages within mobile applications themselves. That means developers who implement these links in their apps allow Google to index their apps in a similar way as it does websites today.

• The future of health care is a dongle attached to your smartphone: app-based diagnostics are taking off The latest development in this new direct-to-consumer health model is a new breakthrough from a team of biomedical engineering researchers at Columbia University in New York City that makes it possible to test for both HIV and syphilis in 15 minutes after hooking a plastic dongle into your smartphone’s headphone jack. You simply insert a pinprick of blood onto a disposable plastic collector, connect the plastic collector to a microfluidic chip used to analyze the sample and insert the chip with the blood sample into the dongle. Once you’ve logged into an app, your smartphone can start to determine the presence of HIV or syphilis in your blood and display the results on your smartphone’s screen 15 minutes later. More than its ease of use, the cost factor of the dongle is what makes it possible to speculate that this type of smartphone diagnostics could one day lead to a new direct-to-consumer model for health care. The equipment needed to perform a laboratory-quality HIV test can cost upwards of $18,450 apiece. Contrast that to the cost of a cheap plastic dongle, which costs an estimated $34 to make. That makes it possible to imagine a future where tests are faster, simpler and cheaper than anything available today. What makes the lab-on-a-smartphone so innovative is that, even though you’re significantly reducing cost, you’re not sacrificing power. The results delivered by the new device suggest that a full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory. Moreover, in a small field study in Rwanda, the team of researchers found that patient preference for the dongle was 97 percent compared to laboratory-based test

• Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability: Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection. In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege, according to The Cost of Connectivity, a report published Thursday by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The report compares Internet access in big American cities with access in Europe and Asia. Some surprising smaller American cities — Chattanooga, Tenn.; Kansas City (in both Kansas and Missouri); Lafayette, La.; and Bristol, Va. — tied for speed with the biggest cities abroad. In each, the high-speed Internet provider is not one of the big cable or phone companies that provide Internet to most of the United States, but a city-run network or start-up service. The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem — the lack of competition in the broadband industry. “It’s just very simple economics,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust and communications and was an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission. “The average market has one or two serious Internet providers, and they set their prices at monopoly or duopoly pricing.”

• India Startup Action: Five startups showcased at Techcircle E-commerce Forum 2015: Pumpkart.com: It is an online store for agricultural and domestic pumps. It offers a variety of pumps that include basement toilet pumps, booster pumps, car cleaning pumps, drainage pumps, hydropneumatic pumps, borewell pumps, rainwater pumps, waste water pumps, monoblock pumps, high pressure pumps, solar pumps etc. Crunch Commerce: It extends a layer of m-commerce tools to traditional e-commerce backend. Its flagship product is Crunch Adaptive, a mobile-web platform which works across mobile devices and brings an app like experience in mobile web browser. NGA Technologies Pvt Ltd: It has developed AUTOnCAB, an Android/iOS based mobile application which provides on demand one tap hailing of autorickshaws. The app also calculates distance/fare for a ride. It has the ability to monitor all drivers and rides in real time. Voconow Enterprises: Voconow’s mobile ad-tech product makes static print ads interactive and transactional and transforms them into a sales channel and a revenue centre. It connects the offline print media to the online digital media. In that sense, it operates at the intersection of print and digital. Retail Labs: It has developed Getnow.at which seeks to change how people shop in India by bringing local shopping online. Consumers can order products from stores in their city with guaranteed delivery in six hours. Local stores list their products on our marketplace and the firm handles distribution for them.

• Google story#3: Google Acquires Mobile Startup That Manages Facebook Ads: Google Inc. agreed to acquire Red Hot Labs Inc., a mobile startup that helps companies manage advertising on rival Facebook Inc., bolstering its marketing tools on wireless devices. Red Hot Labs, which provides the Toro service for application developers, will join the mobile ads team at Google, the search giant said, declining to disclose terms of the deal. San Francisco-based Red Hot Labs helps software makers boost their user numbers through Facebook, owner of the world’s largest social-networking service. “With greater resources and distribution now available at our disposal, we’re excited to join Google and continue our mission of making the lives of app developers easier,” the start-up said on its website. Google, expanding beyond its desktop-based tools, is investing in new ways to help companies market on smartphones and tablets as users increasingly access digital services via wireless devices. The Mountain View, California-based company last month reported fourth-quarter sales and profit that missed estimates as its advertising business faced more competition on mobile gadgets.