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.