Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday March 10

• Apple unveils the Apple Watch and makes a play for the truly affluent with a watch — priced as high as $17,000: Pricing: the device would start at $350 and, depending on the band and finish you chose, go into the thousands of dollars. Battery Life: While rumors had suggested that Apple was having trouble getting the battery lifespan up to something reasonable, Apple now claims that its watch should be able to handle at least 18 hours of regular use. That’ll vary depending on how you use it, of course — but Apple is content enough with the lifespan to call it an “All-day battery”.Hardware: the Apple Watch comes close to being beautiful, and it is certainly one of the best-looking computers you can buy for your wrist. Yet it’s hard to forget that it is a computer for your wrist. Even in its top-end versions, it lacks the understated elegance of old-fashioned high-end analog watches. Interface: Last fall, Apple made a big show of the rotating crown on the side of the device, the company’s take on what most of us call a watch dial. The company held up the crown as its next great interface, something on the order of the mouse, the iPod’s clickwheel or the touch screen on the iPhone. I was surprised, therefore, to discover how small a role the crown plays in typical use of the watch. It has two primary uses: When you press it, you get to the watch’s main screen of apps — or, if you’re already on that screen, the watch switches to displaying the clock. In other words, the crown works as a home button. Uses: Apple spent a long while going through most of the watch’s major functions, including its use as a fitness tracker, texting app, email reader and payment device for locations that accept Apple Pay. I boiled down the list to this rule of thumb: Just about anything you can do with your phone, you can do with your watch, faster. But because the watch needs the phone for connectivity, it’s hardly liberating you from that device. It’s just giving you less of a reason to look at it. Collections: The Apple Watch is unique among Apple’s product offerings in terms of just how much variety it offers in terms of buyer options. To help clarify and define the available choices, the company has separated Apple Watch models into three distinct collections: The Apple Watch Sport, the Apple Watch, and the Apple Watch Edition. All three offer both 38mm and 42mm rectangular case sizing options, but materials and finishes vary by collection, as do the band options offered by default.

• As Alibaba stock continues to slide, firm announces a re-org, brings Taobao, Tmall and Juhuasuan into a newly created division: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd appointed Jeff Zhang to oversee its main services on Monday, bringing Taobao, Tmall and Juhuasuan into a newly created "China Retail Marketplaces" division. The appointment marks one of the highest-profile personnel shuffles since China's largest e-commerce company went public in September. Together with the creation of the new division, the move will streamline operations and enhance efficiency. The company, which now handles more ecommerce than Amazon.com and eBay Inc combined, has been struggling to sustain the rip-roaring pace of growth it enjoyed in past years as it gains scale. It's unclear how Zhang's appointment affected Yilei Wang, who was President of the Amazon.com-like Tmall retail website. On Monday, Chinese news website sina.com reported that Wang had been dismissed from his post, though the company declined to comment on his current situation. Shares in the company ended 2.2 percent lower at $82.53 on the New York stock exchange.

• India is becoming the land of the errand app: A growing number of startups cater to people who want to avoid the poor roads and polluted air, and can afford to do so because of the plentiful cheap labor. Almost anyone can use an app to have someone pick up groceries, drop off a letter at the post office or prepare a lunch that runs 75 rupees ($1.20) with delivery. “People today want to do as much as possible with their phones,” said TinyOwl co-founder Mandad, who graduated from Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology in 2012. “It is a friction just to go out -- there’s the heavy traffic, pollution and waiting involved for a cab.” The startups are carving out niches by serving certain neighborhoods or parts of cities, realizing the “hyper-local” strategy long envisioned in more developed countries including the U.S. Larger e-commerce companies such as Flipkart and Snapdeal dominate online sales of more traditional goods, including books, apparel and electronic goods. Need your bike serviced, your dry-cleaning picked up or even your own errand boy for a few hours? There are services for all that. There are also at least a dozen startups focused on food and grocery delivery, with angel investors and venture capital firms lining up to invest. With traffic snarls in big Indian cities an everyday occurrence, it’s common to find vehicles crawling along at less than 5 kilometers per hour on some Delhi roads, almost as slow as bullock carts, government data shows. Air quality is poor, with several cities faring worse than even Beijing. All that has translated to fewer visitors in stores. People can get everything from apparel to groceries at the click of a button, said consultant Ashok Deenadayalu, who advises retailers on strategy and store management. “Earlier it used to be a pastime to go to the malls on a weekend,” Deenadayalu, who’s had a 24-year career at some of the nation’s largest chains such as Reliance Retail, Bharti Wal Mart Pvt. and Metro AG. “Now it’s just a torture.”

• China's market regulator claims it will tighten eCommerce regulations: China’s market regulator said today that the government will regulate ecommerce more strictly in an upcoming clampdown on counterfeit products and poor customer service. The comments came from Zhang Mao, minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), speaking on the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary session, according to state news agency Xinhua. The move comes weeks after the SAIC produced a controversial report on fake products being sold online by China’s top ecommerce stores. That report slammed Alibaba’s marketplace, Taobao, claiming that about 63 percent of the stuff for sale on the site is counterfeit. However, that was extrapolated from a survey of 51 products that SAIC’s secret shoppers bought from Taobao. SAIC’s entire report was based on just 92 products bought from six leading Chinese estores. “The reason why there are so many market violations is that the cost of breaking rules is too low,” Zhang said Monday in reference to Taobao’s poor performance in the SAIC’s study. He added that new regulations on ecommerce would be focused on companies’ “key responsibilities” to consumers in terms of “credibility and integrity.” Referring to China’s online retailers, Zhang said the SAIC will “listen to them, provide guidance for them, and demand their self-discipline.”

• What Brands Are Already Doing on the Apple Watch: Each use case is remarkably different: Starwood Hotels: The tech-savvy hotel chain is working with software company WatchKit on its upcoming smartwatch app. The Stamford, Conn.-based hospitality marketer already has a smartphone app that unlocks hotel room doors, and its smartwatch app plans to do the same. It's a simple concept, yet it entails big implications in cutting the cost that hotel brands pour into producing physical room cards. Retale: The location-based couponing app turns print circular ads into digital promos from 130 merchants and will be one of the first retail names to launch a dedicated feature for Apple Watch. The wrist app will sync with Retale's existing iPhone and iPad apps, so people can save information—like lists of local stores—on multiple devices. Retale is tight-lipped about what the actual app will look like, but it will take advantage of a store-finder feature to help people locate nearby offers. A mockup of the app shows a map that plots the distance from a user to a nearby Target store, for example. Marsh Supermarkets: Earlier this year, Marsh Supermarkets started loading up its 75 stores with beacons in anticipation for Apple's smartwatch announcement. Up until now, beacons have primarily been utilized to trigger push notifications on smartphones, and Marsh claims to be the first to employ the technology to build out a smartwatch app with beacon vendor InMarket. Shazam: The music-discovery app has its sights on devices beyond smartphones, as CMO Patricia Parra said last week. Like InMarket's Dipaola, Shazam's Parra also plans to eventually make the content that smartwatches stream handless. "We are going to get to a world where you don't even have to [touch an app]," she said. "We are going to be wearing stuff that tells us things like when our blood pressure rises." These sites are already overloaded with user-generated photos, and with wrist-enabled cameras, one can only expect for the amount of photos to grow. Panera Bread: In September, the bakery chain rolled out Apple Pay, which includes an option to pay through Apple Watch. Similar to other brands' apps, the payment technology plugs into Panera's mobile app and lets people hold the watch over a reader that's at the point of sale. CNN: The news site's upcoming app will pull in breaking news from 12 categories like breaking news, health and entertainment. The app will also livestream CNN TV coverage and lets people tap to read and save stories.