Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 1

• Amazon unveiled a WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. Coverage here, here, here, here, and here: Amazon.com on Tuesday unveiled its latest effort to bring more speed and convenience to online shopping: A WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. The adhesive buttons are meant to be hung in convenient places around the home — so, for example, you might stick the Tide-branded button on the washing machine or the Huggies button in the nursery. When it's time to restock that item, you push the button, and Amazon will soon ship it to your doorstep. At launch, the Dash button is only available for a limited number of household staples, such as Cottonelle toilet paper, Bounty paper towels and Glad trash bags. Using the Amazon smartphone app, consumers will configure the button to order exactly what they want — such as a four-pack of Gillette razors or a 12-pack. Dash buttons are free and are available now to Amazon Prime customers on an invitation-only basis. Amazon has been packing more and more perks into its Prime memberships, including same-day or even one-hour delivery and the ability to stream its exclusive TV programming. All of these efforts are aimed at more deeply entwining Amazon with its customers’ everyday lives, and in turn, boosting Amazon’s sales. Amazon has set up the Dash Button system so that it’s difficult to, say, end up with a shipment of 20 bottles of laundry detergent if your toddler discovers the bright orange Tide button and finds it really fun to press. Once a Dash Button is pressed one time, it won’t be able to accept another order until the first one has been delivered. You can also opt to receive notifications of Dash Button orders on your phone and can quickly cancel them, if necessary. The Dash button is a powered by the same technology as Amazon's new Dash Replenishment Service. Appliance and device manufacturers can incorporate DRS technology into their products so that an Internet-connected coffee maker is able to order more beans, or a water filtration pitcher can order more filters. Gadget-makers can use DRS in two different ways: They can make it so that their products include a button that allows the consumer to choose when to place an order, or they can set it up so that orders are filled automatically when something is running low. The first DRS-powered devices will hit stores this fall.

• Jack Ma is in India again and met the Indian PM: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s Chairman Jack Ma today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as he came on a visit to India for the second time in just about four months. In his meeting with Modi here today, Ma discussed how Alibaba can help empower small businesses in India, the ecommerce major said without elaborating further. “Had a very good meeting with Jack Ma,” Modi tweeted.

• Snapdeal buys RupeePower, a financial services marketplace, for an undisclosed sum: Snapdeal.com, has acquired a majority stake in Gurgaon-based digital financial products distribution startup RupeePower for an undisclosed amount, the company said in a statement. Post the acquisition, Snapdeal will offer its customers a financial services marketplace. The marketplace will include a wide range of financial services like personal loans, educational loans, credit cards, auto loans, home loans and extended warranties, etc. Financial services companies will be able to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach across more than 5,000 towns and cities. Founded in 2011, RupeePower matches borrowers and lenders in the retail loans space for products like credit cards, personal loans, home loans, auto loans, and consumer loans. Customers are shown the best loan and card offers for comparison and matched with the bank’s criteria. The service is free for customers and the company gets paid by the financial institution upon loan disbursal. The company claims to have enabled Rs 1,500 crore of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial year. Snapdeal.com is on a buying spree. Earlier this month, the company bought a minority stake in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the GoJavas brand. GoJavas was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet. Before that, it had acquired Indian designer wear and accessories e-tailer Exclusively.com (formerly Exclusively.in) for an undisclosed amount. In January 2015, Snapdeal picked up a stake in Smartprix Web Pvt Ltd, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix. The e-commerce firm is also expected to close the acquisition of online mobile recharge platform Freecharge for $450 million (Rs 2,800 crore). This is being regarded as the biggest deal in India’s consumer internet industry.

• After a spectacular start, Apple Pay is beset with problems; survey finds 2/3 of users reported problems: Apple Inc.’s new mobile-payment system is failing to capture all of its potential business, according to a survey, with two-thirds of users reporting problems using the service at the checkout counter.While 66 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners surveyed had signed up for Apple Pay, repeat usage is being hurt, the study by Phoenix Marketing International said. Almost half of users visited a store listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to find they couldn’t use the service because the location wasn’t actually accepting the system or wasn’t ready to do so, according to the survey, which drew about 3,000 respondents. “They’ve created demand, but it can’t be fulfilled,” Greg Weed, Phoenix’s director of card research, said in an interview. “To make it more difficult to use or to create any uncertainty in your customer base as to whether it’s going to work is just going to slow it down.” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is relying on the new system to help expand Apple’s reach by offering new services for iPhone users. The biggest U.S. banks and credit-card networks are using Apple Pay to help accelerate U.S. adoption of mobile payments and keep in control of their transactions. At stake is a market that’s likely to process $67 billion worth of sales this year, according to Forrester Research. Apple declined to comment on the survey, which was conducted at the end of February, four months after Apple Pay was introduced. Apple Pay, which uses short-range wireless signals known as near-field communication, essentially turns an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus into a digital wallet. The system works only at stores that have upgraded their cash registers to accept chip-embedded credit cards. It’s now supported by 2,500 banks in the U.S. and about 700,000 locations accept it, Cook said this month. “It’s gotten off to the most amazing start,” Cook said at an event to unveil features of the company’s Apple Watch. Samsung Electronics Co. earlier this month unveiled its own mobile-transaction system, Samsung Pay, which will be available in the third quarter in the U.S. and South Korea. The technology works at checkout terminals that use older, magnetic-stripe technology, as well as NFC. Google Inc., which already has a mobile wallet, has also said it plans to expand in the business and is working on a new service called Android Pay. The average Apple Pay user made 2.6 in-store transactions using the system in its first four months, the survey by Rhinebeck, New York-based Phoenix found. Almost half used it to purchase something inside an Apple store, while almost a third used it at Macy’s Inc. Thirty-six percent of Apple Pay customers used it at McDonald’s Corp. The majority of people who used Apple Pay said they did so because it was faster than a traditional credit card. Almost 60 percent they were using it because “it’s new, stylish or cool,” while 58 percent said they thought it was safer than a normal credit card. About half of users said it was good for medium-sized purchases. Of the problems that occurred at merchants, 48 percent of those surveyed said it took too long to record the transaction, while 42 percent said the cashier was unfamiliar with Apple Pay and unable to help. Other complaints included transactions that incorrectly posted, or were counted twice. The complaints are just some of the challenges Apple faces as it brings out a new payment system. Apple Pay has also been hit by fraud. Some banks have made changes in how they activate customers’ credit-card accounts after reports that criminals were typing stolen credit-card numbers into Apple Pay and trying to make purchases with their iPhones. Some issuers have found that up to 8 percent of Apple Pay transactions were fraudulent, compared with 0.1 percent on traditional payments cards, said Julie Conroy, an analyst at Aite Group.

• Ubiquity of Malware: Google Says 5% Of Visitors To Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed: According to a study Google conducted with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 5 percent of people visiting Google’s sites and services now have at least one ad injector installed. When it comes to malware, ad injectors may seem relatively benevolent at first. They put an ad on your Google Search page that didn’t belong there, for example. That’s annoying, but doesn’t seem dangerous. But ad injection was pretty much what Lenovo’s Superfish was doing and that created plenty of security issues for users. Indeed, the research, which is based on the analysis of 100 million pageviews across Google’s sites from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, classified about a third of these injectors as “outright malware.” Given that these kinds of ad injectors are often bundles with legitimate software — and desktop developers and download sites often see them as a relatively easy way to make a bit of extra money with their installers and download wrappers — it’s easy enough to install one of them inadvertently. Google and the Berkeley researchers found that ad injectors are now available on all major platforms and browsers. Out of those 5 percent of users that have at least one installed, one-third actually had four of them running simultaneously and half were running two. Clearly, there is a group of users that is a bit more prone to catching one of these than others Google says it has already banned 192 Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users based on this research and it is now using the same techniques the researchers used to scan all new and updated extensions in the Chrome Web Store. Google’s advertising and browser extension policies pretty much ban deceptive ad injectors — as do most other ad networks — but most of the companies that build them aren’t exactly about following the rules. It’s also worth noting that ad networks often also don’t know that their ads are being used in this way. Unless Google and other browser and advertising vendors find a technical solution to this problem, chances are it’ll never fully go away.

• GoDaddy Said to Price I.P.O. Above Expected Range: Nearly four years ago, GoDaddy was an Internet registration company with a history of risqué advertising. Now, as it prepares for new life on the public stock markets, the company is eager to let everyone know that it does a lot more than register website addresses — and doesn’t rely on racy commercials with scantily clad spokeswomen, either. That new vision of GoDaddy appeared to resonate with investors. The company raised $440 million after pricing its initial public offering at $20 a share late Tuesday, above its expected range of $17 to $19 a share, according to a person close to the transaction. At that price, the company has a market value of just more than $3 billion. Under the ownership of the investment firms that bought the company in 2011 for about $2.25 billion — Silver Lake, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Technology Crossover Ventures — GoDaddy has sought to transcend its long-established roots and promote itself as the guide to the Internet for small business. That is a much bigger vision than the one the company had when it was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons as a way for customers to register domain names and host websites. Eventually, it became the biggest Internet registrar, thanks in large part to Mr. Parsons’s unabashedly attention-seeking advertising, which frequently revolved around spokeswomen like the racecar driver Danica Patrick. Among GoDaddy’s most familiar tactics was creating versions of Super Bowl commercials that would never be shown on broadcast television. After the company’s new owners took over, the business tried to change its tone along with its business model. The private equity firms brought in Blake Irving, a former chief product officer at Yahoo, to help transform GoDaddy into what it described in its I.P.O. prospectus as “a leading technology provider to small businesses.” Internet site registration remains GoDaddy’s biggest source of revenue, accounting for just more than half of its sales last year. According to the prospectus, the company now oversees 59 million domains, or about 21 percent of those worldwide. Website hosting services and tools, a natural complement to the domain business, made up 39 percent of its bookings last year. The company believes it still has room to grow in its main market. A study it commissioned found that more than 50 percent of American small businesses did not have a website as of early 2013. But GoDaddy has also become one of the biggest resellers of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity and email services, with that operation making up about 10 percent of its sales last year. GoDaddy has also expanded abroad, going from one English-language website to an array of offerings in 37 countries and 17 languages. About one-quarter of its revenue now comes from international business. Over all, the company’s sales have climbed consistently in the last three years, up to nearly $1.4 billion in 2014. It lost $143.3 million during that period, according to generally accepted accounting principles, though the company points to what it calls adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, which strips out certain accounting charges. Using that measurement, GoDaddy earned $271.5 million.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 31

• Alibaba Signs Distribution Deal With BMG, Its First Music Partner Outside Of Asia: (more here) In a bid to increase its online entertainment offerings, Alibaba has struck an agreement with music publisher BMG, which gives it access to over 2.5 million tracks. The partnership is notable because it represents the first time Alibaba’s digital entertainment unit has signed with a music partner outside of Asia. The business already has agreements with Taiwanese music companies Rock Records and HIM International Music. The deal gives Alibaba access to BMG’s catalog, which includes tracks from Bruno Mars, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Kylie Minogue. Music will be made available to consumers through streaming apps Xiami and TTPod, both of which are operated by Alibaba’s digital entertainment business. It’s important to remember that Alibaba is more than just an e-commerce company. It is also one of China’s biggest mobile Internet players, competing head-to-head with Tencent, which has already struck similar arrangements with Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Alibaba’s growth plans include selling other online services to the huge user base it has grown by operating China’s top e-commerce platforms and online payment service Alipay. Streaming music is a potential growth market for Chinese Internet companies, but only if they succeed in dealing with piracy. According to the Financial Times, China accounted for less than one percent of the $15 billion in global revenues made in 2013 by record companies, in part because pirated tracks are easy to obtain. The government, however, has begun to crackdown on copyright infringement, and deals like the ones Alibaba and Tencent have struck with BMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment give music publishers more power over their IP in China. In a statement, Alibaba said “the agreement will not only significantly boost earnings by BMG artists and writers from the world’s most populous nation, but also give them a powerful ally in hleping grow the legitimate music market in China.” This means that Alibaba will help BMG keep an eye on pirated music and work with them to take legal action against services that are using tracks that violate BMG’s copyright.

• US Health Regulator FDA 'Taking a Very Light Touch' on Regulating the Apple Watch: Bakul Patel, who oversees the new wave of consumer-focused health products at the Food and Drug Administration, said most wearable gadgets such as the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch and health-focused applications for smartphones have a way to go before warranting close scrutiny from the agency. "We are taking a very light touch, an almost hands-off approach," Patel, the FDA's associate director for digital health, said in an interview. "If you have technology that's going to motivate a person to stay healthy, that's not something we want to be engaged in." The FDA is mapping out its role at a time when health care and consumer technology are blending. Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. and other companies are building products loaded with sensors that have the potential to eventually gather all sorts of information about blood pressure, body temperature, glucose levels, hydration, oxygen levels and outside air conditions. Software algorithms are being developed that gather different information about a person's health to provide a diagnosis of potential illness that backers say may eventually be more accurate than a doctor. Some products raised flags with regulators after they've reached the market. In February, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on some smartphone apps for dubiously claiming to diagnose melanoma based on an uploaded picture. Meanwhile, the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights is responsible for oversight of the security of patient-health data collected by electronic devices, a separate issue that is being closely watched by privacy advocates. "I worry that there are going to be companies that are skirting the rules," Gandhi said. "We have to see the enforcement, otherwise it creates a very uneven playing field between companies that are acting ethically and those that aren't." Patel said Apple and Google Inc. and other corporations should play a role in screening applications to be sure health-software developers aren't over-promising the benefits of their products. Both companies have visited FDA headquarters in Maryland to discuss their health initiatives, he said.

• India Startup Action: 5 startups pass out of Target’s accelerator in India; include a visual search engine, in-store location targeting plays: Five startups have just completed a four-month incubation program at US-based retailer Target’s accelerator in Bangalore. This is the second batch to graduate from the accelerator, which focuses on new ideas in retail. This batch of startups had innovators in omnichannel, data, digital marketing, mobile, and supply chain. Here’s a quick look at the five fresh Target graduates: Wazzat: Wazzat is a visual search engine. Its widget has both mobile and web APIs which ecommerce sites can easily integrate. The widget helps find visually similar products. During the incubation, it tested its “find similar” tool with apparel and shoes on the Target site. Whodat: Whodat makes mobile augmented reality apps for brands to help customers visualize their products. For example, it piloted an app at the accelerator for people to see how Target’s dinnerware would look in their homes. Visarity: Visarity enables interactive 3D experiences on both mobile and web, for apps as well as ads. It has wide applications in product demos, navigation maps, and gaming. Target used the Visarity platform to build a game experience for its media network. Torch: Torch is a wireless sensor built by Antarix Labs to monitor smartphone activity inside a store. In this way, it aims to provide offline retailers with the kind of analytics on customers that online retailers now take for granted. Synapse: This is another offline play. The Synapse app recognizes customers when they walk into a store and sends context-aware notifications to the lockscreens of their mobile phones. At Target, it piloted relevant push offers for customers on Android lockscreens.

• Snapchat's ad offerings present a conundrum for marketers: enormous engagement, but little data, targeting: Brands salivating over Snapchat as an engaging influencer marketing tool are all too often put off by costly campaigns and inconclusive results. But given the messaging app is insanely popular with millennials, agencies and brands are creating workarounds, or at the very least complementing Snapchat campaigns much as they did in the early days of Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. Snapchat hosts compilation videos shared from special events and locations via its Our, Live and Local Stories channels. There also are Discover channels with media companies like Vice and Comedy Central posting content. The app splits revenue with the media companies for ads on Discover channels, and those sponsorships can cost as much as $75,000 a day, say marketing execs. In other cases, brands like McDonald's cough up as much as $750,000 for daily official sponsorships. The content and ads disappear within 24 hours, ready for fresh material. That element vexes a number of marketers. Moreover, marketers remain skeptical of Snapchat given there's no way to accurately direct ads to specific audiences and no easy way to figure out whether they actually worked. One digital ad executive who recently saw Snapchat's sales pitch said, "It was not impressive because there's no way to target ads." "Snapchat is very limited as far as the data it makes available," said Justin Rezvani, CEO of theAmplify, an Instagram-focused shop that recently branched out with Snapchat. "Our focus is to track sentiment and conversations on alternative platforms, like Instagram." Rezvani said it's hard to measure basics like whether users are watching Snapchat videos all the way through. However, most signs point to Snapchat users being super engaged with the content. The Stories channels have attracted more than 1 billion views on active days, according to social shops contacted and figures reported by Snapchat. The content is so transitive that consumers cherish it more, Cicero said. "There's nothing to compare it to, so in general advertisers are hesitant," he said. "But the ones that take advantage now obviously will be more successful. They understand the mindset shift."

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 30

• To Grow in the Data Center Market, Intel Is Said to Be in Talks to Acquire Chipmaker Altera: Intel Corp. is in talks to acquire Altera Corp., people with knowledge of the matter said, as the world’s largest chipmaker searches for growth beyond a moribund personal-computer market. The people asked not to be identified discussing private information. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the discussions. Altera shares jumped 28 percent to $44.39 at the close in New York, giving the company a valuation of about $13.4 billion. Intel rose 6.4 percent to $32. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Santa Clara, California-based Intel, and Sue Martenson, a spokeswoman for San Jose, California-based Altera, declined to comment. Intel is on the hunt for growth as it faces a slowdown in the market for PCs that forced a $1 billion cut in its first-quarter sales forecast earlier this month. Sales in the worldwide PC market will shrink 4.9 percent this year, IDC said, as consumers around the world spend more on mobile devices typically based on processors using designs from Intel rivals such as Qualcomm Inc. That decline comes on top of heavy losses in Intel’s mobile division. The group reported an operating loss of $4.21 billion for 2014. A bright spot for Intel is the data-center group, where profits soared to $7.28 billion on sales of $14.4 billion in 2014. The company benefited from a boom in the amount of data being generated and held in computing centers around the world. Altera makes a broad range of low-power programmable semiconductors, which are used in small embedded devices and computer servers for big data centers. In buying Altera, Intel could expand into markets for automotive, industrial and communication applications, while cementing its lead in data centers, said Betsy Van Hees, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. Hees has a neutral rating on the stock. “This would be a significant move for Intel, it would be a significant change in strategy,” she said. “They need diversification beyond the PC market. Data center has been a tremendous source of strength. Mobile has been a tremendous financial drain. Intel and Altera announced a manufacturing partnership in February 2013, agreeing that Altera chips would be made in Intel’s cutting-edge plants. That deal was extended in March last year when the companies agreed to do more detailed work together on chip packaging and design. An acquisition of Altera would help Intel make further inroads into corporate data centers and reduce its dependence on a PC market pressured by the rise of mobile computing, according to Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who has the equivalent of a sell rating on Intel’s stock. “It makes sense that they would potentially be looking for other opportunities to grow the other part of the business,” Rasgon said. “There are synergies, say, in Intel’s data-center business.” Intel could use Altera’s technology to create new processors that pair its traditional products with low-power communications chips, wrote Jefferies Group LLC in a note circulated after the market close on Friday. That would let the company “offer cloud-service providers like Google, Amazon and Facebook the ability to pull communication processing from expensive networking equipment into much lower-cost server blades, effectively enabling Intel to take share in the data-center networking-equipment market,” Jefferies wrote. Altera reported operating income of $543.4 million on sales of $1.93 billion in 2014, compared with Intel’s full-year revenue of $55.9 billion.

• GitHub has been battling a DoS attack for days - alleged source of attack: China: U.S. coding site GitHub said on Sunday that it was deflecting most of the traffic from a days-long cyber attack that had caused intermittent outages for the social coding site, with the Wall Street Journal citing China as the source of the attack. "Eighty-seven hours in, our mitigation is deflecting most attack traffic. We're aware of intermittent issues and continue to adapt our response," a tweet from the GitHub Status account said. The attack took the form of a flood of traffic, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. Those kinds of attacks are among the most common on the Internet. The Wall Street Journal reported that the flood of Internet traffic to GitHub came from Chinese search engine Baidu Inc, targeting two GitHub pages that linked to copies of sites that are banned in China. On its blog, GitHub said that the attack began early on Thursday "and involves a wide combination of attack vectors." "These include every vector we've seen in previous attacks as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic," the blog post continued. "Based on reports we've received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content." GitHub supplies social coding tools for developers and calls itself the world's largest code host. A Beijing-based Baidu spokesman said the company had conducted a thorough investigation and found that it was neither a security problem on Baidu's side nor a hacking attack. "We have notified other security organizations and are working to get to the bottom of this," the spokesman said.

• India's capital markets regulator Sebi on listing norms for start-ups: SEBI is likely to put out a discussion paper on the listing norms for start-ups next week. Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) Chairman U K Sinha today met an eight-member team from start-up think-tank iSpirt Foundation here to discuss the way forward for start-ups to raise funds from the primary markets. “Sebi would put out a discussion paper next week suggesting a series of improvements. The first draft guidelines are expected by the end of June,” iSpirt Foundation co-founder and governing council member Sharad Sharma told PTI. The think-tank has been in touch with Sebi since mid-December to facilitate the rapidly burgeoning start-up space to go public and raise funds. “This will stop the exodus of start-ups that choose to list on international markets currently,” Sharma said. He, however, declined to comment on the contents of the discussion paper. At the last meeting with Sebi on December 19 last year, the industry had sought regulatory intervention in easing the existing regulations and guidelines which make it difficult for companies to get right investors and advisors. Another suggestion was to make the listing process faster and easier so that investors could exit. Minutes of the past meeting with Sebi posted on the thinktank’s website say the Sebi chairman had indicated that the regulator was exploring putting in place a framework for crowd-funding which will provide a much-needed new mode of financing for start-ups and SME sector and increase flow of credit to SMEs and other users in the real economy. In this mode, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups will be able to raise funds at a lower cost of capital without going through rigorous procedures.

• BlackBerry Reports $28 Million Profit in 4th Quarter - business no longer on brink of collapse, but future still unclear: John S. Chen, executive chairman of the ailing smartphone maker BlackBerry, was again asking for patience on Friday after the company produced a surprise, but slim, profit while also posting an unexpected drop in revenue. The $28 million profit in BlackBerry’s fourth quarter was mainly thanks to a patent sale and tax recovery. The company lost $106 million on an operating basis. For the entire year, the company lost $304 million on revenue of $3.3 billion. Despite the introduction of two new phones and a push by the company to sell software that allows businesses and governments to manage all of their employees’ mobile phones regardless of their brand, fourth-quarter revenue was $660 million, down from $793 million in the previous quarter. Analysts had expected revenue of about $792 million. The revenue drop suggests that the company has yet to revive its phone business, said Brian Colello, an analyst at the firm Morningstar. During the period, BlackBerry offered two new phones: the Classic, which restored features found on older BlackBerrys, and the Passport, which has an unusual square screen. They were aimed at BlackBerry’s traditional customers, like people in the financial industry. Neither has sold well. There was one bright spot. ITG Investment Research reported that retail data it collected in BlackBerry’s home market in Canada showed that BlackBerry sales at Rogers Communications, the country’s largest wireless carrier, rose by 27 percent in the final quarter of last year compared with the third quarter. Sales at Bell Canada were up 12 percent, but BlackBerry sales fell by 13 percent at Telus, the other large carrier in Canada. ITG added that “the solid quarterly trends seen at Canadian carriers may not be representative of global sales trends.” BlackBerry’s software business rose by 24 percent over the previous quarter and 20 percent over the same period a year earlier. But Mr. Chen told analysts that an older version of the company’s mobile device management software, which is more oriented toward BlackBerrys, was outselling the new version, which the company is promoting heavily. Although BlackBerry no longer appears to be on the brink of collapse, Mr. Colello said it was still unclear if Mr. Chen could now make his company grow while maintaining profitability. “The entire business is very uncertain at this point,” he said.

• Founder of mobile buying app Fetch: "Mobile Messaging Conjures A Commerce Platform" This week brought two announcements that reflect a seismic shift in the future of mobile messaging: 600 million users of Facebook Messenger will soon be able to order food, buy products and text directly with businesses; and meanwhile, Magic is raising an astonishing $12 million from Sequoia to allow you to order any on-demand service simply by sending a text message. America is finally discovering what Asia has known for years: mobile messaging is a commerce platform. These developments herald what Chris Messina recently described as a new trend towards “conversational commerce,” in which users will be able to shed the need for countless apps from different companies in favor a simple mobile messaging interface. “Conversational Commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare,” Messina says. Put more simply: we all text more than ever, so why not expand texting’s potential to sending payments, buying products, ordering on-demand services, paying bills, and more? Facebook and Sequoia are not alone in making a big bet that Conversational Commerce marks the next stage of texting’s evolution. We’re in the midst of a veritable messaging gold rush. Earlier this month, Alibaba poured $200 million into SnapChat, which now lets you send money to a friend or buy a product using their newly-launched SnapCash. This follows Alibaba’s $215 million investment in Tango last year. Rakuten recently snapped up Viber for $900 million with an eye towards integrating mobile commerce into the messaging app. Other start-ups in the “conversational commerce” space include Scratch and BRANDiD, which provide curated shopping recommendations; and Native, whose personal travel assistant service allows you to book flights and hotels by sending a text. Path Talk was the first messaging app to allow users to message directly with businesses, making restaurant reservations as easy as sending an SMS. The inevitable evolution of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and SnapChat into commerce platforms will change the way we think about mobile commerce. It won’t be long until you’ll be texting your food order to DoorDash, paying bills by SMS, or firing off a quick Facebook Message to send flowers to your loved one. Magic may not be able to be deliver on their promise of bringing a tiger to your front door, but it’s clear that mobile messaging is about to get a whole lot more powerful.

• For Hardware Makers, Sharing Their Secrets Is Now Part of the Business Plan: Facebook showed plans last week for drone aircraft that beam lasers conveying high-speed data to remote parts of the world. As powerful as that sounds, Facebook already has something that could be even more potent: a huge sharing of its once-proprietary information, the kind of thing that would bring a traditional Silicon Valley patent lawyer to tears. Facebook is not alone. Technology for big computers, electric cars and high-technology microcontrollers to operate things like power tools and engines is now given away. These ideas used to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. To the new generation of technologists, however, moving projects and data fast overrides the value of making everything in secret. “You now don’t need a lot of people or a lot of capital to manufacture a prototype,” said Jay Parikh, vice president for connectivity at Facebook. “The entire world is going to accelerate its technology development.” Facebook has already shared designs for data storage, computer servers and rack designs, among other hardware, Mr. Parikh said, and has seen rapid improvements as a result. Rather than just building and testing a handful of designs, Facebook gets to see dozens of variations that individuals and companies manufacture inexpensively. They often contract with prototype makers over marketplaces like the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, or they may even use three-dimensional printers. When companies do make hardware free, Mr. Dougherty said, it is not usually altruistic. “It can create competition for your enemy without spending money on a new product,” he said. He noted that IBM went into open-source software in the 1990s, and Microsoft suffered. Sometimes companies want to kick-start business. Facebook’s open designs have enabled commercial relationships that lower its supply costs as well as speed innovation.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 27

• KiranaNow: Amazon launches hyperlocal express delivery service linking neighbourhood kirana stores to consumers: Amazon, which runs an online marketplace in India, has launched an express delivery platform in partnership with mom-and-pop stores called ‘KiranaNow’. It has launched the service in Bangalore on a pilot run before taking it to other cities in the country. Notably this is an India-specific platform. In most other international markets, Amazon itself is the prime seller (though it also has other vendors) and operates like a conventional inventory-based e-com venture, a model it itself spread around the world. “With this service we want to provide to our customers an instant and convenient access to their ecosystem of stores for their everyday needs right from their mobile phone. And likewise empower the Kirana stores with tools and technology to transform their growth in the digital economy,” an Amazon India spokesperson told Techcircle.in. The deliveries will be done via Amazon’s own logistics unit Amazon Transportation Service Private Limited, besides delivery boys of kirana stores themselves as well as third party vendors. Last year, Amazon had also roped in kirana stores or neighbourhood mom-and-pop retail stores to serve as pick-up and delivery points for products for its customer orders. In the US, Amazon offers such pick-up options as an alternative to home delivery through lockers placed in public areas. Amazon spokesperson added that this independent pilot project it ran with kirana stores last year has since scaled to over 500 outlets across 20+ cities. Meanwhile, the KiranaNow service has been launched only on the mobile browser platform and claims to deliver orders within two-four hours. KiranaNow has been added to ‘Shop by Department’ on Amazon.in’s mobile browser version. When chosen, the user is led to a page with various categories like daily cooking essentials, drinks and beverages, personal care, household supplies, etc. There is an option to sign up with Kirana Now. Last we checked it threw a message saying: ‘Sorry something went wrong. We are working on fixing it’. The products were also showing as currently unavailable. To be fair, it is just the beginning and the firm says it is currently offering the service to select pincodes in Bangalore. Moreover, this is available only between 9AM and 6PM. Notably, this pitches Amazon against e-grocers like BigBasket, ZopNow and Godrej Nature’s Basket (which recently acquired EkStop) as also express delivery service providers such as Grofers, which essentially picks products from local vendors to supply to consumers.

• US R&D spending surges 6.7% Y/Y, with largest gain since 1996; software spend up 10% - both leading indicators of productivity: Corporate spending on research and development rose 6.7 percent in 2014, almost twice the previous year’s gain and the biggest advance since 1996, according to Commerce Department data. The pickup was capped by a 14 percent fourth-quarter surge that signals additional increases are on the way. The spending could extend the momentum of an era of growth-inducing innovation that produced smartphones and tablet computers, 3-D printers, cloud software that delivers services via the Internet and hydraulic fracturing that is making the U.S. more energy self-sufficient. Combined with what’s still on the drawing board, such initiatives raise the odds productivity will rebound, boosting the standard of living. “CEOs wouldn’t be paying all these researchers -- which is where the R&D budget primarily flows to -- unless they thought that there was something really interesting going on,” Jason Cummins, chief U.S. economist and head of research in Washington for hedge fund Brevan Howard Inc. “R&D surges like this sow the portents of better productivity growth three, five, 10 years later.” The U.S. could benefit from such a boost. Employee output per hour has climbed 0.7 percent a year on average since 2011, compared with gains of 2.5 percent from 1990 through 2005, a period encompassing what some economists have called a “productivity miracle.” The pickup in R&D spending last year was paced by well-known names, as 18 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index boosted such investment by 25 percent or more from 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes drug-makers such as Pfizer Inc., travel-booking firms Priceline Group Inc. and TripAdvisor Inc., and Apple Inc. and Google Inc. Pharmaceutical companies were some of the biggest spenders on R&D in 2012, running up a $48.1 billion tab, according to the latest data from a survey by the National Science Foundation. The information industry -- including publishing, telecommunications and data processing -- shelled out $46.8 billion, while transportation-equipment makers spent about $42.3 billion. The U.S. is a leader in R&D spending in part because some 70 percent of venture capital money is based here, said Subramanian. This is “another good barometer of how innovation-oriented a particular region is,” and shows that America is “hyper-focused” on that investment, even if some of the venture capital money ends up in foreign companies, she said. The benefits of increased spending on R&D also are likely to help spur sluggish wage growth, Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania, wrote in a March 19 research note. More investment in intellectual property -- which includes software and entertainment in addition to R&D -- should prompt acceleration in incomes in the next couple years, he wrote. Spending on computer software, which is tallied separately from the government’s R&D category, also has shown a revival. It increased at a 10.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter, its best gain since 2011.

• Lyft Adds Profiles to Make Ride Sharing More Personalized: Unlike Uber, the giant ride-hailing start-up with its powerful name and sleek, black-and-silver branding, Lyft has gone for a warmer, fuzzier exterior. Lyft drivers eschew fit and finish for large, pink dashboard mustaches to identify themselves. The company encourages lively conversation between passengers and drivers. It is, to some degree, a kinder, gentler and perhaps more convivial form of taking an Uber car. Expect more of the same in the future. On Thursday, Lyft plans to add user profiles for drivers and passengers to its app, essentially adding another personal touch to the act of taking a ride somewhere. The additions are not extreme. People are asked to provide their hometown, music tastes or other things about themselves that may be interesting topics of conversation. If a user has connected their Facebook account, the Lyft app can show if drivers and passengers have mutual friends in common. “It’s our first step on the road map to personalizing that in-car experience,” said Tali Rapaport, vice president of product at Lyft, who was tasked with creating the profiles. The feature is entirely optional, and users aren’t forced to turn it on. Part of the exercise is certainly branding. Lyft recently brought on Kira Wampler, a former executive at Trulia, to be its chief marketing officer. Since joining in December, Ms. Wampler has helped revamp Lyft’s image, swapping the furry mustaches that Lyft drivers stuck to their cars with the “glowstache,” a luminescent replica that sits atop a driver’s dashboard so that passengers can spot their rides. But profiles speak to Lyft’s broad vision of the company. Lyft is pushing Line, its car pool product, as the future of the company, one where there’s a “butt in every seat,” as Ms. Rapaport put it. Instead of hailing a personal car, calling a Lyft Line offers passengers a discount for picking up one or two more people who are traveling along a similar route. As they travel the route, passengers are dropped off at different points along the way. Passengers save money and, in theory, net income goes up for both Lyft and the driver. Lyft’s ideal version of the future is to have as many people using Lyft Line as possible, cutting down on the number of cars on the road. So an addition like user profiles, however small, may make the experience of traveling by car pool more enjoyable. Topics of conversation are easily available, for instance, or a driver may play a track from a passenger’s favorite band. “When you build a product that touches millions of people, it should be human, not transactional,” said John Zimmer, co-founder and president of Lyft.

• Late to streaming - Apple finally developing streaming music service to rival Spotify: In what would be the biggest change to its music strategy in years, Apple is pressing ahead with a sweeping overhaul of its digital music services that would allow the company to compete directly with streaming upstarts like Spotify. Almost a year after agreeing to pay $3 billion for Beats, the maker of hip headphones and a streaming music service, Apple is working with Beats engineers and executives to introduce its own subscription streaming service. The company is also planning an enhanced iTunes Radio that may be tailored to listeners in regional markets, and, if Apple gets what it wants, more splashy new albums that will be on iTunes before they are available anywhere else, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. In a sign of how important Beats is in reshaping Apple’s digital music, the company has made a musician a point man for overhauling the iPhone’s music app to include the streaming music service, as opposed to an engineer. Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who was the chief creative officer for Beats, is playing a major role in redesigning the music app, according to two Apple employees familiar with the product, who spoke on the condition they not be named because the plans are private. Perhaps most telling for Apple is what its new streaming service will not have: a lower price than rival services. According to several music executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private, Apple recently tried but failed to persuade record labels to agree to lower licensing costs that would have let Apple sell subscriptions to its streaming service for $8 a month — a discount from the $10 that has become standard for services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio. That $2 markdown may be small, but Apple’s failure to secure it reflects a shift in the company’s relationship with the music industry. While Apple once enjoyed enormous negotiating power as the dominant force in digital music — an area it helped pioneer more than a decade ago with music downloads — it now faces an array of new competitors and finds itself in the position of needing to modernize its offerings to catch up to the streaming revolution. That has weakened Apple’s leverage — and the labels could not be happier about it. Apple’s turn toward streaming is a matter of necessity, as listeners increasingly shift from music downloads to streaming. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, downloads generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2014, down 8.5 percent from the year before. Streaming made $1.87 billion last year, and overtook CD sales for the first time. As the biggest retailer of music, Apple remains a crucial marketing partner for the music industry. Yet its absence from streaming has let others get a head start. Spotify, which started in Sweden in 2008 and came to the United States in 2011, said in January that it has 15 million paying subscribers around the world, as well as 45 million more who listen free, with advertising. (Apple’s iTunes has more than 800 million customer accounts.)

• Questions arise as bankrupt RadioShack seeks to sell trove of customer data. After filing for bankruptcy in early February, RadioShack is currently making its way through the painful process of  figuring out how creditors will be paid back -- auctioning off real estate and trademarks. Also on the list is more than 13 million e-mail addresses and 65 million customer names and physical addresses -- as well as potential information about customers shopping habits. How much that data could be worth to a buyer is still unclear, but the proposed sale is drawing protests from consumer advocates and raising potentially disturbing questions about how data about shoppers is handled. In the Internet Age, people leave a near constant trail of digital bread crumbs about their lives. And it's clear that data has value: The entire online advertising industry is based on collecting it. But what happens if a company that has amassed a huge trove of data on nearly every aspect of a person's life gets sold off for parts? Radio Shack declined to comment about its bankruptcy's process. The company was a pioneer in collecting customer data, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Radio Shack was the first company that routinely asked for phone numbers. The privacy policy was critical to maintain consumer confidence," he said. And in its privacy policy, RadioShack told customers that it wouldn't sell or rent their personally identifiable information to third parties -- which should make this a pretty clear issue, Rotenberg said. But as Bloomberg News noted, a Web site for Hilco Streambank, a company serving as an intermediary for RadioShack in the bankruptcy process, listed the retailer's "customer databases" as among the assets for sale. Hedge fund and RadioShack creditor Standard General won an auction for the company's assets, according to Bloomberg. But the deal must still be approved by a bankruptcy court in Delaware and is facing several challenges. Back in 2000, after the dot-com bubble burst, the FTC sued to stop Toysmart.com from selling off customer data in violation of its privacy policy. In that case, the FTC said that data in question included names, addresses, billing information, shopping preferences and family profiles,  including the names and birth dates of children. The data was eventually destroyed. The FTC has also sent letters about proposed data sales in the bankruptcies of other companies, including Borders, XY Magazine, and ConnectEDU.

• Alibaba's money-market fund ended 2014 with $93B in AUM, but its phase of explosive growth might be over: Ant Financial, Alibaba’s affiliated financial branch, revealed a few benchmark numbers for Yu’ebao, the company’s consumer-facing money-market fund. By the end of 2014, Yu’ebao’s user count hit 185 million, up more than four times the previous year’s count of 43 million. The fund’s worth in assets reached RMB 578.93 billion (about US$93 billion) by the year’s end, marking a 200 percent annual increase. Ant financial also claims that Yu’ebao’s funds generated RMB 24 billion (about US$3.8 billion) in value by year’s end, amounting to RMB 139 per person. While these numbers appear massive from a birds-eye view, not all is peachy keen for Yu’ebao. The fund’s size shrunk to about US$87 million last autumn, and while these latest numbers appear to show a rebound, its days of rocket growth seem to be over. Yu’ebao is the shell and banner for a money market fund run by Tianhong Asset Management. Alibaba’s Ant Financial purchased a majority stake in Tianhong in late 2013 for a reported US$192 million. Yu’ebao is accessible directly in Alipay Wallet, the mobile app for Alipay, Alibaba’s third-party payment software. Yu’ebao marks Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s attempt to enter consumer banking. In the past, the ecommerce mogul has been vocal about his disdain for China’s banking industry, wherein banks typically give consumers low interest rates for opening savings accounts. China’s tech giants don’t like to get one-upped, and other leading internet firms have also opened money-market funds similar to Yu’ebao. Tencent operates Licaitong, an analogous money market fund, and recently opened what has been described as China’s first “internet bank.” Baidu also has its hat in the ring, as does Xiaomi, which recently launched a money-market fund in beta.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 26

• Amazon’s On-Demand Services Marketplace Launches Monday: Amazon’s Angie’s List competitor, called “Amazon Local Services,” has been rebranded as “Amazon Home Services” ahead of a larger launch happening Monday, sources familiar with the plans tell TechCrunch. The site, which previously featured only a limited number of service offerings in a handful of select markets, has also recently expanded to include a much larger number of categories of services as well as additional cities around the U.S. As you may recall, Amazon Home Services quietly rolled out in late 2014 as the company’s initial foray in to providing a marketplace for services that would exist alongside its product offerings, offering the retailer another means of generating revenues outside of shipping physical products. Initially, the marketplace largely featured service providers whose businesses could help Amazon shoppers with additional needs that might follow a product purchase, however – like installers who could mount a new TV, for example. Now that expanded category line up is live – or at least it will be on Monday. On the rebranded “Amazon Home Services” website there are a variety categories beyond those that only relate to products Amazon sells. Top-level categories include Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Automotive, Computer & Electronics, and Lessons. There’s even a “More” category for those that don’t fit into the other groupings, which includes some more interesting services like “goat grazing” or “singing performances.” The idea here is to expand the marketplace to include any services a customer may need – even everyday needs like housecleaning or babysitting. In other words, with the official launch, Amazon is taking a big step to compete in the on-demand economy. But in our understanding, Amazon is partnering with some of these on-demand service startups, rather than trying to replace them entirely. This is a similar strategy to what Amazon has pursued with other initiatives, like its online art store or its Amazon Sellers program. Amazon could end up driving more business for some of these companies, the way it has provided additional customer flow for small retailers of physical goods. Also of note, Amazon hand-picks the businesses it includes on its site, and required all those who were listed to be licensed, insured and background-checked. The website previously said that Amazon would take a 20 percent cut of the services that cost under $1,000, and 15 percent for those over $1,000. But recently, the language on the website was updated, noting that, as of March 27, service fees are divided into three tiers: standardized, custom and recurring, each with a 5 percent transaction fee, and then with varying “service platform” fees ranging from 15 percent (standardized) to 19 percent (custom) to 5 percent (recurring). For consumers, the updated marketplace offers a number of features that could make it competitive to other providers, like Angie’s List, Yelp or Google’s business listings as a place to find providers. Because Amazon shoppers buy the services by placing them in an online cart, the company can verify the purchases leading to authenticated user reviews – meaning no one can slam a business out of spite or to take down a competitor. Instead, service reviews only come from real customers. Plus, the pros on the site offer Amazon the same pricing as if you dialed them direct, the website now claims – and if you find they offer a lower price, Amazon will match it. That change may be related to earlier complaints from consumers trying the service during its beta phase. Some found that they ended up haggling over pricing, and had trouble getting Amazon to pay up when they were given an incorrect quote.

• At developer conference F8, Facebook Opens Messenger for App Developers, Realtime Comments, New Ad Formats, Analytics for Apps,..: (more here and here) Today marked the first day of F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, and the company announced a ton of stuff Messenger As A Platform: Facebook is opening up Messenger as a platform for developers. That means developers will be able to add in new functionality to Messenger — things like Giphy for on-the-fly GIF searching, goofy voice changers for voice messages, a drawing pad for doodling things up for your friends, etc. Think of it like a mini-app store within Messenger. New Realtime Comments System: Facebook’s Comment system (like the one you see in use at the bottom of this post) is pretty solid, but it’s been a while since it got much love. Today, it’s seeing a bit of an overhaul. New comments will show up in real time, comments will sync between the story page (this one) and the shared story item on our Facebook Page, FB Embeddable Videos: Facebook is making a move on YouTube’s turf, now allowing users to embed their Facebook videos on other sites. Will this mean less personal, home-video style content on YouTube? Maybe. Will Facebook start tapping these embedded video streams as yet another place for them to stick an ad? Almost certainly. Spherical Video: In a curious move, Facebook will now support 3D, spherical video in the newsfeed. You can pan around the video with your mouse cursor. While spherical video looks a bit strange on a flat screen, the key here is Facebook’s purchase of the Oculus Rift. Parse For Internet Of Things: FB launched Parse for Internet Of Things — a set of SDKs that act as the backend brains for IoT projects. It’s compatible with Arduino first, with other platforms on the way. LiveRail: Last year, Facebook bought LiveRail — an ad exchange that fills ad space within apps and sites to the highest bidder. Today, they made two changes: they’ll support mobile display ads in addition to video, and will be able to tap into a pool of anonymized Facebook data to determine which ad to show. Analytics For Apps: Facebook knows a lot about the users of their apps. Now they want to help developers figure out who is using their apps. Are most of the people playing your game female? Are they teenagers? Are those teenagers spending money in game, or are most buyers in their early 20s? Facebook’s new analytics platform helps you figure that out.

• Uber, Ola stare at a possible IP address block in India: (more here) The Delhi government has asked India’s information technology ministry to block the taxi-hailing apps of Uber and Ola in the national capital, news agency Reuters reports, quoting an unnamed government official. Yesterday, Delhi transport officials asked Uber and Ola to cease operations if they want their applications for radio taxi licenses to be processed. The officials had earlier asked the central government to block Uber’s IP address in India if the company does not abide by the law on running taxis. A block of the IP address would prevent passengers and drivers from accessing the app. Now, Ola too seems to be caught in this regulatory fix. Taxi-hailing apps hit a roadblock in India when an Uber driver raped a passenger in Delhi three months ago. This led to a ban in several Indian cities, and a close scrutiny of safety measures, driver screening, and liabilities that these ride-hailing companies assume. Uber had given in to a transport authority demand to apply for a radio taxi license in India, after initially insisting that it is not a radio taxi company. But its application fell short of what was required. The bone of contention is Uber’s insistence that it is just an internet platform connecting owners and drivers of cars with their customers, while regulators are equally insistent that it has to follow rules like any other taxi service. The transport authority refused to give a license to Uber unless it met the licensing conditions. On its part, Uber said it is “evaluating the perceived deficiencies in the time period provided to us by the government.” Uber tied up with First Advantage to do background checking of its drivers and included two new panic buttons on the Uber app – only in India – to persuade consumers and authorities that it is serious about safety. Earlier this week, it got into a “commercial marketing arrangement” with The Times of India Group to help ease its rollout across India.

• Tinder hacked, results in matches of unaware straight men, odd conversations: Flirting can be hard, especially through a screen. But these guys never had a chance, considering they were chatting with other heterosexual male users as part of a clever technological ruse. A hack on Tinder isn’t anything new. More tech-savvy folks have actually dug into the app to automatically swipe right on every potential match, and then there are all the marketers that are tricking folks into chatting with a brand instead of a human. But the Verge reports that a hacker recently set up a program that would use female dummy accounts to put heterosexual men into conversations with each other. Using Tinder’s API, the programmer was able to channel messages from one unknowing man to another, with both parties in the conversation believing instead that they were talking to a woman.

• 3 Pinterest Features Retailers Need to Know: Pinterest should, if not already, be an integral part of your e-commerce strategy. The site’s visual nature can help you provide detailed images to buyers, share products and information, draw buyers to your website and ultimately increase sales. It’s an ideal fit for brands and retailers looking to boost product visibility and purchases. Because of its relatively young age, Pinterest is still expanding at a considerable rate. Below are three innovative Pinterest features to have on your radar. Price Notifications: Price notifications are a recent practical addition to the social network. Users who pin a Rich Pin — pins that are available to business accounts and include extra information like a title, price and availability — that is later reduced in price will receive a notification alerting them to the price drop. This is a unique way to notify shoppers about price changes and to interact with potential customers. Because both Rich Pins and Pinterest business accounts are free of charge, we strongly recommend trying them out. Promoted Pins: promoted pinsCurrently a reservation-only program for US-based businesses, Promoted Pins are Pinterest’s foray into advertising. Retailers can promote specific pins to targeted audiences so that they show up in relevant search results and in users’ home feeds. You’ll be charged when people click through to your site. Pinterest has been testing the program in beta, and the company reports that advertisers experienced about a 30% increase in earned media from their Promoted Pins campaigns. Buy Button: Pinterest is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter by adding a Buy button, which allows users to order and pay for products without leaving the social network’s website or app. Essentially, it’s a tool to reduce the steps in a consumer’s path to purchase Even though Pinterest is entering the social commerce game late, it has an advantage over Facebook and Twitter because its users are already coming to the site for product ideas and inspiration. When the act of pinning occurs, people are signaling some interest — if not clear purchase intent. Over the past five years the social giant has proven itself to be a big player in e-commerce. Think about it — 70 million active users are searching, sharing and “pinning” images of products. As Pinterest continues its rapid growth, more consumers will continue to trust the network to recommend quality products. This social channel is an ideal match for online retailers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 25

• Google hired Morgan Stanley's CFO to succeed Patrick Pichette as its new CFO: Google said it hired Ruth Porat, Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer, to succeed Patrick Pichette as its new CFO in May. Porat, 57, will leave Morgan Stanley in April after 28 years at the firm, the New York-based company said Tuesday in a memo to employees. Jonathan Pruzan, 46, co-head of global financial institutions banking, will become Morgan Stanley’s new CFO. Porat, one of Wall Street’s most senior female executives, pivots from a job in which she built up cash reserves for safety to one where she must figure out how to use Google’s growing cash pile. In five years as Morgan Stanley’s CFO, the Stanford University alumna has helped stabilize an investment bank that almost collapsed in 2008. “I’m delighted to be returning to my California roots and joining Google,” Porat said in a statement released by the Mountain View, California-based Internet company. “Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford’s board, I’ve had the opportunity to experience first-hand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives. I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and get started.”Silicon Valley has tapped Wall Street bankers to help them manage the finances associated with their rapid growth. Twitter Inc. last year named Anthony Noto, 46, previously Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s co-head of technology, media and telecommunications banking, as its CFO.

• More on the same: Its stock trailing peers, Google looks to Wall Street for CFO as costs, cash grow: Google Inc. is turning to Wall Street for its next chief financial officer as the technology giant grapples with rising costs, a growing pile of cash and a need for fiscal discipline as it invests in new industries. Ruth Porat, 57, will leave Morgan Stanley in April after more than 25 years there, the New York-based company said Tuesday in a memo to employees. Jonathan Pruzan, 46, Morgan Stanley’s co-head of global financial-institutions banking, will become the company’s new finance chief. At Google, Porat will succeed Patrick Pichette, who announced earlier this month that he would retire. She is set to take her new post on May 26. Investors are looking for Porat, one of the financial industry’s most senior female executives, to apply her financial acumen as Google invests to spur growth amid increased competition from Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. She follows other financial-services veterans who have migrated to Silicon Valley firms, such as social-media service Twitter Inc., payments-provider Square Inc. and messaging startup Snapchat Inc. “A dose of increased discipline could certainly serve Google well,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners LP. “The key to this job is going to be the person that rationalizes the expenses of the company. Google is full of people who want to pursue big ideas.” Google’s net income climbed 41 percent in its latest quarter from a year earlier, while Facebook’s increased 34 percent and Apple’s rose 38 percent. Google’s shares have lagged behind its rivals, dropping 0.3 percent in the year through Tuesday. Facebook’s shares meanwhile rose 33 percent, while Apple’s increased 64 percent. Google’s shares rose 2.2 percent to close at $577.54 on Tuesday.

• TPG-backed AGS Transact plans up to $216.6 million India IPO: India's AGS Transact Technologies, partly owned by U.S. private equity firm TPG Capital [TPG.UL], plans an up to 13.5 billion rupees ($216.6 million) initial public offering, according to a term sheet of the deal seen by Reuters on Wednesday. The company plans to raise up to 4 billion rupees by issuing new shares, while TPG and other shareholders would raise up to 9.5 billion rupees selling existing shares in AGS, which offers payment solutions and technology products to banks and retailers, the terms showed.

• Accel announces $305M India fund, joins large tech investors accelerating India-focuse activity: Accel Partners has just announced a new US$305 million fund for India to invest in very early stage companies as well as those already in the growth trajectory. “The investment focus area will cover consumer, enterprise software, mobile, and healthcare businesses,” Subrata Mitra, partner with the VC firm, wrote on the company blog. This is Accel’s fourth fund for India. Accel has a star-studded portfolio of companies in India, including ecommerce major Flipkart, analytics company MuSigma, and cloud-based customer support provider Freshdesk. Since its Indian entry in 2005, it has had a few successful exits as well, including Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart, TaxiForSure, which was acquired by Ola, and Virident, which was acquired by Western Digital. The venture capital flow into India moved to a new orbit last year, with nearly US$5 billion of startup funding. A number of big players have been pumping money into India. The leader of the pack is Tiger Global, the lead investor in Flipkart, which raised a whopping US$1.7 billion in 2014 alone. Tiger Global raised US$4 billion in two rounds last year, and a substantial portion of that can be expected to come to India. Sequoia is another big player from Silicon Valley, which raised a US$530 million India-focused fund last year. India-based VCs too are pulling in big bucks. Earlier this month, Saif Partners raised a US$350 million fund, and late last year, Lightbox VC raised a second fund of US$100 million. Investors focused on just the early stage startups have also been successful in raising money for India. 500 Startups and Blume Ventures have recently raised their second funds. There is growing interest from the east as well. SoftBank of Japan made three big investments last year in Snapdeal, Ola, and Housing. What’s more, it has pledged an investment of US$10 billion into India over the next few years. The rapid spread of smartphone and internet usage in a large population is one of the main factors making Indian tech startups attractive. An improvement in economic sentiment following the change in government is also making India the place to go for venture capital investors.

• With turn-by-turn directions, Google's Waze app wants to win location-based mobile advertising: Two years after Google acquired Waze for more than $1 billion, new research and prolonged advertising deals from brands show that the mapping app is making a dent in the lucrative—and competitive—market of location-based mobile advertising. Waze has kept a relatively low profile since being acquired by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, building up an ad business with a core group of retail, fast-food, gas and transportation brands. Equipped with data and a solid following of daily users who consistently use the app to navigate traffic, Google is battling Facebook, independent ad networks and Foursquare for a piece of what BIA/Kelsey forecasts will be a $15.5 billion market by 2018, up from $4.5 billion in 2014. New research released this week shows how the app's promos affect ad recall and navigation rate, or the number of people who drove to a location after clicking on an ad. The mobile player offers advertisers two formats—branded pins and takeover ads. Branded pins show drivers how far away they are from stores. And takeovers are interstitial ads designed not to distract drivers. They pop up when a user is idle for three or more seconds and disappear when the car starts moving. Per Waze, ad recall increased 86 percent for drivers who saw branded pins compared to those who didn't. And takeover ads boosted ad recall by 155 percent when compared to a group of drivers that was not served ads. To measure navigational lift, Waze compared how people searched and clicked for directions after seeing a brand's ad, with a control group that did not see ads. On average, navigational lift increased 53 percent after either a pin or takeover ad. According to Jordan Grossman, head of U.S. sales at Waze, the average Waze user spends more than five hours with the app each month. That high level of engagement has kept advertisers coming back. After working with brands on quarterly campaigns in 2014, 25 percent of Waze advertisers—including Dunkin' Donuts, Phillips 66, Chick-fil-A, Panera Bread, Outback Steakhouse and Metrolink—are running yearlong campaigns for 2015. Waze crowdsources traffic data that brands can then use to target their promos by time, day and location. The app also has a partnership with Accuweather, pulling in real-time weather conditions like temperature, humidity and pollen count that brands can buy ads against. "[Advertisers are] now drilling in on a tactical level and seeing there are a number of different layers that you can use to engage people within a mobile environment," Grossman said.

• Slack said to be in talks to raise money at more than $2B valuation: Slack, the San Francisco start-up that makes a​ workplace collaboration app, is back on the fund-raising trail and is​ in talks to​ rais​e money at a valuation of more than $2 billion, according to ​a person familiar with the matter. The talks come just four months after Slack, which is run by the entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield, raised $120 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The valuation could change because the talks are still occurring, according to this ​person, who requested anonymity because of continuing ties to the company. ​But the talks are another reflection of how Silicon Valley start-ups have been raising money at a furious pace, often snagging tens of millions of dollars and more than doubling their value just months after a previous financing round. Uber, the hugely popular ride-hailing app, has raised billions of dollars in little more than two years. Snapchat, a messaging start-up, has raised hundreds of millions in very short order as well. Bloomberg News earlier reported Slack’s new fund-raising. Mr. Butterfield declined a request for comment. In a recent interview, Mr. Butterfield acknowledged that Slack has “a lot of money and not a lot to spend on,” though he added the company is planning to increase its spending on marketing. The company employs just over 100 people. ​To date, Slack has raised about $180 million from firms such as Google Ventures, Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. Mr. Butterfield has been tossing around the idea of leasing a small storefront in one of San Francisco’s prime retail hotspots. A store, which might cost about $15,000 to $20,000 a month, could work as a public help desk for Slack’s rising number of users. It would also work to market the brand to new users. Slack was introduced about a year ago by Mr. Butterfield and now serves about half a million workers every day, who use the app as a kind of replacement for email and instant messaging. The company offers a free version of its product and also charges companies a monthly fee of $6.50 or more for each user if they want additional features. Mr. Butterfield recently said Slack wasn’t profitable and that its losses totaled “a couple hundred thousand dollars a month.”​

• Apple acquires NoSQL provider FoundationDB to bolster its server-side cloud technology: Apple has acquired FoundationDB, a company that specializes in speedy, durable NoSQL databases, TechCrunch has learned. A notice on the FoundationDB site notes that it’s no longer offering downloads of its database software. Financial terms of the deal were not available. CEO David Rosenthal was previously VP of Engineering at Omniture and co-founded the company with COO Nick Lavezzo and Dave Scherer in 2009. FoundationDB’s attractiveness came in the speed at which it handled ACID-compliant transactions and coupled that with strong scalability. FoundationDB hosted a booth at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2012, where we first wrote about its approach to a modern NoSQL database and its ‘NoSQL, YesACID’ motto. FoundationDB’s latest engine, which was covered by TC Columnist Jon Evans late last year, scaled up 14.4 million random writes per second. imag1829 A FoundationDB blog post on its newest engine made the following claim: At current (December 2014) AWS (non-spot) pricing and including enterprise FoundationDB licenses for all 480 cores with full 24/7 support this mega-cluster only costs about $150/hr. In that same hour this cluster will achieve 54 billion writes, yielding a cost-per-write of 3 nanodollars. Said another way, FoundationDB can do 3.6 million database writes per penny. So. A fast, affordable and durable database company, acquired by Apple. It seems likely that this was an acquisition designed to bolster Apple’s server-side technologies for the App Store, iTunes Connect or iTunes in the Cloud. With millions of apps now in the store and billions being served to users, there is undoubtedly room for improvement in those systems. Of course, there is always Apple’s rumored over-the-top TV service, which some reports claim is coming our way later this year. The need to be able to serve video at scale there will likely require bolstering systems, as we discussed with the head of media at the MLB just this week. The reliability and speed of Apple’s cloud services are more critical than ever now that it has shipped 700 million iPhones alone — along with millions more iPads and Macs — all of which use iCloud.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 24

• Uber Sells $24M Stake to India’s Times Group in Marketing Deal: Uber Technologies Inc. said the publisher of India’s most-read English newspaper has taken a small stake in the ride-hailing application company as part of a strategic partnership to support its expansion. The investment made by Times Internet is worth about 1.5 billion rupees ($24 million), the Indian company said in an e-mailed reply to a question. The Economic Times newspaper, also published by Bennett, Coleman, had first reported the value of the deal citing people familiar with the transaction. The deal with Times Internet Ltd. will help increase the marketing and distribution of Uber’s services to more than 200 million consumers in India, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement on its blog, without giving details of the investment. Times Internet is a fully owned unit of Bennett, Coleman & Co., the flagship company of the Times of India Group and publisher of The Times of India newspaper. Uber counts India as its biggest market outside the U.S. and the fastest growing globally. Baidu Inc., China’s largest Internet search engine, in December agreed to invest in Uber and said the company will connect its map and mobile-search features with the ride-hailing service. Uber’s service is available in 11 Indian cities and offers three types of cars, including hatchbacks for as little as 7 rupees (11 cents) a kilometer.

• Chinese city Hangzhou cracks down on Taobao seller-on-seller dirty tricks: China’s online ecommerce market is massive, but it’s also kind of a jungle. Especially in the C2C wilderness that is Taobao, shop owners use all kinds of shady tactics like brushing to make sure they get the sale, whether or not the consumer is actually getting what they want. Now Hangzhou, they city that plays host to Alibaba HQ, has passed a new set of regulations on ecommerce transactions that makes behavior like that illegal and punishable by local authorities. The new regulations will require Hangzhou sellers to register as businesses with the ecommerce platform they use, and levy fines of RMB 10,000 to RMB 30,000 (US$1,600-4,800) on platforms that don’t collect the proper information. Sellers can also be fined between RMB 10,000 to RMB 30,000 for doing any of the following: (1) Using the name or trademark of a famous company, product, brand, person, social organization, or government organization without permission (2) Leave negative reviews for, slander, or falsely report rival sellers and shops (3) Buying products in bulk and then returning all of them or refusing to accept delivery to harm rival shopkeepers’ profits (4) Falsifying internet transactions [like “brushing”] to get good reviews (5) Using technological measures to interfere with search rankings (6) Releasing fake products or false service information Harming national interests, public interests, or the lawful rights of others (6) Additionally, sellers can be fined between RMB 2,000 and RMB 20,000 (US$320-3,200) if they engage in any kind of customer harassment like calling customers who left negative reviews and berating or threatening them until they change their review score. Because these laws were passed by the city of Hangzhou and not China’s national government, they don’t apply to all online sellers yet. But they certainly provide a window into the kinds of dirty tricks that some Chinese C2C shopkeeps go in for, and the dangers consumers still face when shopping on C2C marketplaces like Taobao.

• Apple Pay’s pitch: Simpler is better. But some security experts disagree. When Apple introduced its pay-by-smartphone feature last fall, the company touted the simplicity of the setup. All shoppers needed to do was wave their iPhones in front of a special scanner at the cash register — no need to fumble through pockets and purses for plastic cards or identification. But a sharp rise in reports of fraudulent Apple Pay transactions is raising questions about the security of the first mobile payment system to find a measure of popular success. One payments analyst, Cherian Abraham, estimated that as many as 6 percent of Apple Pay purchases are completed with stolen credit cards, or 60 times the rate of the old-fashioned plastic swipe. The problem is that Apple Pay may be too simple to set up, security analysts said. Fraudsters have been loading stolen cards onto iPhones to buy things at stores. As it turns out, it might have been better if Apple Pay required users to do more to prove their identities when they sign up for the service, these experts said. The balance between security and ease of use has long bedeviled technologists, especially those pushing for a new payment system to replace the plastic cards that are highly vulnerable to thieves. That need has grown more urgent as credit card hacks — such as those that have afflicted Target and Home Depot in recent years — have risen in scope and frequency. Mobile payments offer a potential solution. They are considered much harder to hack than traditional payment systems. And they avoid the swipe — a critical advancement since a lot of credit card numbers are stolen by fake card readers. But consumers, banks and retailers have been slow to embrace the technology, partly because of its complexity. Launched in October, Apple Pay was billed as simple to use, and the universe of stores and banks accepting the service has been growing steadily over the past few months. Apple boasts that Apple Pay is now accepted at hundreds of thousands of store locations. Bank of America said customers added 1.1 million of its credit and debit cards to Apple devices in the first two months of Apple Pay. JPMorgan Chase cited a similar figure. But reports of fraud are now giving retailers and banks some pause. “The issuers were probably so eager to be involved that they kind of forgot best practices and sidestepped some procedures they normally would’ve had [in order] to accept Apple Pay,” said Michelle Evans, senior analyst for consumer finance at market research firm Euromonitor.

• Google Fiber Plans Experiment With Targeted Ads for Television: In a note to customers who subscribe to Google’s Google Fiber Internet and television service in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo., the search giant said it would soon begin a trial of local TV ads that will be aimed at a viewer’s locality and viewing habits. A spokeswoman who confirmed the service said Google expected it to roll out in the coming weeks. The move, if it were widely adopted by rival cable companies, could represent a sea change in how television ads are viewed and sold. For starters, it would mean that people in the same city might see different ads while watching the same show. It could also change how ads are sold by giving advertisers more leeway over when ads are shown, to whom and how often — the same kinds of control they have when advertising online. Google’s trial — which for now is aimed only at customers in the Kansas City area, who can opt out of having their viewing history used for advertising purposes — will use ads that are targeted by geography and what kinds of shows they view most often. “Fiber TV ads will be digitally delivered in real time and can be matched based on geography, the type of program being shown (like sports or news), or viewing history,” Google said in a online forum for Google Fiber. “If you’re a local business in Kansas City, just as with digital ads, you’ll only pay for ads that have been shown, and can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a given TV.” Analysts had been expecting Google to start experimenting with targeted television ads from the moment it announced its Google Fiber Internet service, which is about 100 times faster than the standard broadband connection. The company makes about $60 billion in annual revenue based largely on its ability to mine its user information to deliver highly targeted ads. Invidi Technologies, based in Princeton, N.J., makes software inside around 30 million United States cable boxes that can be used to target television ads based on age, gender, income, whether the viewer owns a dog or if their car lease is about to expire. Verizon, Dish, DirecTV and Comcast are all customers. “It is like direct mail for television,” said Michael Kubin, an executive vice president at Invidi.

• China's tax environment is tightening - regulator to reap Alibaba windfall as tightens up on tax: China could make billions of dollars from taxing gains made by employees of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group (BABA.N) who are free to sell their shares for the first time since its IPO, as the country tightens up its leaky mechanisms for tax collection. On Wednesday, a six-month lock-up period for the recently New York-listed stock expired, allowing insiders who bought 437 million shares prior to the IPO to sell their stock, though 100 million of them are subject to trading restrictions that apply to employees until the company reports results in May. The total lock-up represents roughly 18 percent of Alibaba's shares, which if sold would fetch just over $37 billion at Friday's closing price. Although Alibaba did not disclose the identity of the shareholders subject to the lock-up, many will be taxable in China, where most of its 22,000 people are employed, and its share scheme is subject to a number of controls that will help ensure China gets its tax. Current and former employees hold around 26.7 percent of the company, having built up holdings through stock options and other incentives since 1999, according to a Reuters report from June using IPO securities filings. Those subject to the expiring lock-up will have obtained their shares at different times and costs, so the gains figure is unknown, but the tax is expected to reach billions of dollars for China's State Administration of Taxation (SAT). While tax on employee compensation is withheld by employers, tax on share sales must be declared by employees, meaning it's typically harder for the authorities to track. It is not uncommon for employees participating in Chinese company stock incentive schemes to transfer their shares to offshore trusts in the Cayman or British Virgin Islands to avoid tax, according to a person who helps create such structures. But Alibaba's newly minted millionaires won't escape the gaze of the tax inspector, said a Beijing-based accountant. "Because it was such a large IPO, the tax bureau will for sure be monitoring that." While the potential tax windfall is tiny relative to China's total fiscal revenue of 14 trillion yuan ($2.26 trillion) last year, it reflects the government's more rigorous stance on tax.

• Facebook May Host News Sites’ Content: Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous. With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site. Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements. Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said. To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content. Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter. In addition to hosting content directly on Facebook, the company is talking with publishers about other technical ways to hasten delivery of their articles. Even marginal increases in the speed of a site, said Edward Kim, chief executive of the analytics and distribution company SimpleReach, generally mean big increases in user satisfaction and traffic. So it is likely, he said, that Facebook’s plan focuses on those small improvements, rather than on getting money from deals with media companies. “But there are a lot of implications for publishers,” he added. “It really comes down to how Facebook structures this, and how they can ensure this is a win on both sides.” The issue is also pressing, he said, because some media companies have seen a drop in traffic from Facebook that could be attributed to the company’s prioritizing of video — a much more lucrative medium for ad sales.