Daily Tech Snippet: Monday March 9

• Adding to India investments, News Corp buys VCCircle: News Corp is continuing its focus on India after it announced a deal to buy tech and startup-focused media company VCCircle. Founded in 2005, VCCircle runs news sites VCCircle.com and Techcircle.in, in addition to research platform VCCEdge, VCCircle Training and an events business. The Noida-headquartered company has over 100 staff, and it will become part of the News Corp India organization, which already includes Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal. The undisclosed deal is Media Corp’s third piece of business in India, each of which has closed in the past six months. The U.S. media giant put $30 million into property company PropTiger back in November, and it bought financial planning service Bigdecisions.com in December. “This significant investment is a sign of our faith in India’s future and our enthusiasm for working with and building up emerging talents in the country. India is an increasingly meaningful part of our portfolio, which is itself increasingly digital and global,” News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said in a canned statement. P.V. Sahad, Founder and CEO of VCCircle, said that the company’s acquisition would “accelerate our already aggressive growth plans,” although he did not provide more specific details of those goals. India’s booming tech scene is attracting investors in large numbers — including SoftBank, Google Capital and a new Tiger Global fund — and higher funding rounds, all of which increases the importance of quality on-the-ground reporting, analysis and events. Added to that, this is an interesting deal because we don’t often see ‘pure-play’ media companies being acquired in India.

• Jet, an American marketplace is gaining traction by focusing on the merchant experience rather than the customer experience: The Jet business model is pretty simple. Jet plans on making their revenue from a $50/yr subscription paid for by members. Like a warehouse club model (Costco, BJ’s, Sams) that will be the primary driver. Also like a wholesale club model, Jet plans on passing a lot of savings to the member. The merchant model is similar to what you would find at an eBay or Amazon marketplace – you pay a commission for sales based on category. BUT there are two important differences: A merchant can choose a variable commission based on your own rules (see example below) for shipping, email opt-in, returns and more. Jet takes the commission and instead of pocketing it as profit as other marketplaces do, it returns it to the consumer in the form of Jet savings and behavior based incentives (more on this later).

• Amazon opens store on Alibaba's online marketplace Tmall: Amazon.com Inc has opened an online store on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's fast-growing online marketplace, Tmall.com as it seeks to expand in China, an Alibaba spokesman said. Alibaba's Tmall offers virtual storefronts and payment portals to merchants. Several western retailers, including Zara owner Inditex, Britain's Burberry and ASOS, have joined TMall this year as they look to boost their presence in China. Imported food, shoes, toys and kitchenware are listed on Amazon's store, one of the many on Tmall that sell brand-name goods to Chinese shoppers, Bloomberg, which first reported the news, said on Thursday. Amazon also operates its own e-commerce site in China. U.S. retailer Costco Wholesale Corp last year opened an online store in China using Tmall, entering the country's booming e-commerce market to combat slowing sales at home. Amazon’s China website has long struggled in the country, trailing behind Alibaba’s two marketplaces (Taobao and Tmall) as well as other homegrown rivals like JD and Suning. Amazon was China’s eighth biggest estore at the end of 2014, with just 1.3 percent market share of transaction value, according to data from iResearch. Tmall dominates the market with 57.6 percent market share. It’s an awkward but inevitable situation for Amazon. It’s as if Amazon opened up a huge shop on the wrong side of town and then had to suffer the indignity of opening up a branch in Alibaba’s crowded shopping mall where there’s much greater foot traffic. This move means Amazon is effectively an Alibaba customer and has to pay a commission for each sale that occurs in the Tmall outlet. A number of major brands and retailers use Tmall for their flagship stores, even though many have their own standalone ecommerce sites in China. Other online retailing companies have opened up stores on Tmall before, such as Walmart’s Yihaodian.

• As programming becomes ubiquitous, Yale's weak Computer Science program is driving top students to Stanford, Harvard instead: One of the world's top universities in most respects, Yale has fallen way behind in computer science. Yale, one of the world's top universities in most respects, has fallen behind in computer science. It doesn't crack the highest tier of schools measured by the number of graduates in software companies or by salaries for majors in the discipline; it's struggling to educate throngs of students with a faculty about the same size as three decades ago; top students in the field are opting to enroll elsewhere; the head of its computer science department is publicly complaining; and undergraduates are circulating a petition in protest. “The best universities in the world are now judged by the quality of their computer science departments,” reads the petition, distributed this week and signed by more than 450 students. “We are distraught by the condition of Yale's.” Yale has long been known for its strength in the humanities. Literature scholars deconstructed texts in cloistered seminar rooms at the center of its Gothic campus, while the more quantitative-minded had to trek up “Science Hill” for their classes. Famed English literature professor Harold Bloom once told the Paris Review that he favored the ballpoint pen over the typewriter and “as far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less.” Yale's computer science department has focused more on theory than practical applications, unlike Stanford University, known as the birthplace of Google, or Harvard, associated with Facebook and Microsoft. Though many of Yale's science Ph.D. programs such as biology, math, physics, and chemistry are top-ranked, Yale is struggling to adapt to a U.S. economy and educational system reordered by the ascendance of technology. With fewer students majoring in the humanities and a generation of graduates worried about getting good jobs, universities are scrambling to shift resources from traditional subjects into fields once scoffed at as vocational. “These are skills needed by anyone in the modern age,” says Jeannette Wing, who oversees research labs worldwide for Microsoft. All students should learn programming, even those studying such fields as archeology and English, she says.

• Apple's Secret Lab Lets Facebook Fine-Tune Apps Before the Watch's Debut: In a lab shut off from communication with the outside world and where visitors can't bring in a pad of paper, let alone a phone, Apple Inc. has given some companies special early access to Apple Watch. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Facebook Inc., United Continental Holdings Inc. and others have spent weeks at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, working hands-on with the smartwatch to test and fine-tune applications that will debut alongside the device next month, according to people familiar with the process, who asked not to be identified because of non-disclosure agreements. Apple, which will share more details about the gadget at a March 9 event, uses extreme measures to keep the work secret. Internet access is blocked inside the rooms, and no outside materials can be brought in to the labs with the test watches, a person who attended said. The companies, sometimes sharing a room, must bring in source code for their apps on a computer hard drive that can't leave Apple's headquarters. To prevent information from leaking out, Apple is storing the code and sending it to the companies closer to the watch's introduction date, the person said. "There's a lot of confidentiality," said Stephen Gates, a vice president and creative director for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., which is building a watch application to unlock hotel-room doors. Apple featured Starwood's application in September, when it first announced the watch. Gates said he's made several trips to Cupertino to develop the software, but declined to comment on what those visits included. As Apple's first new device since the iPad in 2010, the stakes are high for Apple Watch, and the sophistication of the apps available is critical in wooing buyers. Just as the App Store has been a key reason for the iPhone's success, tools for Apple Watch will help determine how customers use the gadget and whether it will be a sales hit. The watch must be paired with an iPhone to fully work, and anything less than seamless integration may alienate potential customers. Apple has made the yet-to-be-released watch available to some companies so they can test out their apps, check for glitches and adjust the tools to the watch's design. Hundreds of applications may immediately be available once the Watch reaches stores, according to Jim Suva, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. A big challenge for Apple and its developers is building applications that are useful without being annoying. Apple has recommended that developers be judicious about interrupting people with constant alerts that will buzz their wrist or drain the battery. If desktop computers can be used for hours at a time, and smartphones for minutes, the watch is being measured in seconds. Apple is suggesting developers design their applications to be used for no longer than 10 seconds at a time.