Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 10

• Amazon adds Machine Learning to AWS; to Sell Predictions in Cloud Race Against Google and Microsoft: On Thursday, Amazon Web Services announced that it was selling to the public the same kind of software it uses to figure out what products Amazon puts in front of a shopper, when to stage a sale or who to target with an email offer. The techniques, called machine learning, are applicable for technology development, finance, bioscience or pretty much anything else that is getting counted and stored online these days. In other words, almost everything. AWS’s introduction of the product, called Amazon Machine Learning, follows Microsoft’s announcement last summer of an online machine learning service to complement its Azure public cloud computing business. Last month, Google took a dramatic step in how it holds corporate data by lowering the cost, with an eye to becoming the analysis and prediction hub for the world’s companies. The services offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google draw off each company’s relative strength. Microsoft has Excel, by far the most widely used analysis tool in the world. Most people actively developing businesses on the web are familiar with Google Analytics. AWS appears to offer much of its own internal decision-making process. With Amazon Web Services’ new features, “it will bring an entirely new decision-making technology into an organization,” said Matt Wood, the head of data science at AWS. “It can provide a company with information on the challenges facing them, or an overlay about what to do next.” Mr. Wood devoted four years of studying for his Ph.D., which he got 15 years ago, to solving a problem in protein folding, an essential part of genetics research. Using the new AWS product, he said, that would take about a week. At this point, there is no need to pick a winner in the cloud race among Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. The real point is that if all of these cheap cloud companies are offering low-budget data science, it is almost certain to spread widely. While machine learning is expensive and arcane, if it becomes cheap and easy, it will get stuck onto all sorts of things, not just better online selling, or the way that Netflix uses it to recommend your next movie. This would be bad news for companies like IBM, which has spent billions on analytics companies and mathematicians, or the SAS Institute, a maker of big predictive software packages. Much of what these companies do will almost certainly become cheaper, based on what Amazon Web Services is charging. In testing its software, AWS put two engineers on the problem of telling the gender of a person’s name. Using conventional means, the company said, the team gained 92 percent accuracy in 45 days. Using the new Amazon Machine Learning product, one engineer reached the same accuracy in 20 minutes.

• Teens aren’t fleeing Facebook as quickly as some thought: It's not always clear how teens are really using social media these days. To explore the question, The Pew Research Center asked over 1,000 respondents, between ages 13 and 17, for their thoughts, and included them in a report published Thursday. Here are few key takeaways: Teen smartphone use is super, super high. A majority of teens have smartphones -- a fact that doesn't change even when looking at different income levels. Of teens who live in households that make less than $30,000 per year, 61 percent have access to a smartphone. Among the richest teens (households over $75,000), it's 78 percent. Overall, a full 73 percent of teens have access to a smartphone; only 15 percent are rocking a basic phone. That also falls in line with what Pew found about adult smartphone use in a report released last week. Those anonymous apps? Not as popular as we may have thought. According to the Pew study, only 11 percent of all teen cell phone users use anonymous apps such as Whisper, YikYak and Ask.FM, which allow users to put up posts without revealing their identity. When these apps first came on the scene, they were seen as an outlet for teens who didn't want to be haunted by a digital footprint down the line. But the use isn't quite as high as researchers predicted. The study also found that girls use these sites slightly more than boys -- 13 percent of female respondents versus 8 percent among males. Facebook is still the number-one social media network among teens. Put your alarm bells away for now; Facebook isn't exactly withering on the vine among teens. Facebook is used by 71 percent of all teens, followed in popularity by the Facebook-owned Instagram and Snapchat. Even within the 13-17 age group, however, there are differences in Facebook use. Older teens, ages 15 to 17, are far more likely to use Facebook than younger teens, listing it along with Snapchat and Twitter as their go-to networks. The 13- and 14-year-olds, meanwhile, told researchers they are more likely to turn to Instagram.

• India startup action#1: Ola raises $310M led by DST Global; valued at $2.3B: Ola (formerly Olacabs), has raised $310 million (Rs 1,952 crore) in its fresh round of funding led by Russian investment firm DST Global, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle, based on filings with Registrar of Companies. The latest deal values Ola at Rs 14,552 crore ($2.3 billion), almost four times its valuation in October when Japan’s SoftBank led a $210 million funding round in the company. DST, which backed India’s largest e-com venture Flipkart last year, has brought in Rs 1,153 crore ($185 million) and has picked 7.9 per cent stake, becoming the fourth-largest shareholder in the company behind SoftBank, Tiger Global and Matrix Partners. The round also saw participation from a bunch of other existing and new investors, including a few who joined in recently with the acquisition of TaxiForSure through a cash-and-stock transaction. While Ola’s single-biggest shareholder SoftBank did not participate in the latest funding, its first institutional backer Tiger Global brought in $40 million to restrict equity dilution.

• India startup action #2: Urban Ladder raises $50M led by Sequoia & TR Capital: Urban Ladder, has secured $50 million in Series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital and TR Capital. Existing investors Steadview Capital, SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital also participated. Urban Ladder was launched in July 2012 and offers a curated range of over 4,000 products across more than 35 categories in furniture and home décor. It was co-founded by Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa. At present, Urban Ladder delivers to 12 cities in India (Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi/NCR, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Cochin Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Surat, Kolkata and Mangalore). Last year, it said it aims to hit 25-30 cities by March 2015. Now it has extended the time period to reach this goal. The latest funding comes just nine months after it raised $20 million in Series B round of led by Steadview Capital, with participation from SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital. In the past, it has raised $5 million in Series A from SAIF and Kalaari and prior to that it got around $1 million from Kalaari. Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus, Tata Group, also made a small personal investment in the company in November 2014. Although the amount was not disclosed, it is believed to be in the region of around $1 million. It competes with the likes of Rocket Internet-incubated FabFurnish and Pepperfry.com, besides other horizontal e-commerce players such as Flipkart.com, Snapdeal.com and Amazon.in. Among the investors, the deal deepens Sequoia’s bet on vertical e-com space in India. The VC firm has backed several single vertical e-tailers and has just got an exposure to Snapdeal. The horizontal e-com marketplace has acquired FreeCharge in a deal which gives Sequoia among other VC investors of the mobile recharge company a stake in Snapdeal. TR Capital is a Hong Kong-based mid-market PE firm targeting investments in Asia. This is its second known investment in India. Early this year TR Capital co-invested with TPG and others in eyewear e-tailer Lenskart.

• Amazon sues to block alleged fake reviews on its website: Amazon.com Inc has sued four websites to stop them from selling fake, positive product reviews. In a complaint filed on Wednesday in King County Superior Court in Washington, Amazon said the bogus reviews undermine a system that the Seattle-based online retailer launched 20 years ago to help shoppers using its website decide what to buy. Four- and five-star reviews can aid sales, especially if customers perceive them as unbiased. But Amazon said the defendants are misleading customers, and through their activity generating improper profit for themselves and a "handful" of dishonest sellers and manufacturers. "While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon's brand," the complaint said. The defendants include Jay Gentile, a California man who allegedly runs buyazonreviews.com, as well as unnamed operators of buyamazonreviews.com, bayreviews.net and buyreviewsnow.com, according to the complaint. Amazon said the defendants have caused reviews to be posted on its website intermittently, through a "slow drip" designed to evade its detection systems, at a typical cost of $19 to $22 per review.

• Global PC Shipments Decline as Corporate Spending Fades: Worldwide personal-computer shipments fell 5.2 percent in the first quarter as corporate spending that helped slow declines last year tailed off, market researcher Gartner Inc. reported. About 71.7 million units were shipped in the quarter, down from 75.7 million in the same period a year earlier, Gartner said Thursday in a report. Market researcher IDC reported a wider decline, finding that 68.5 million units were shipped, a 6.7 percent drop. IDC said it was the lowest number of PC shipments since the first quarter of 2009. The first quarter’s decline represents a return to a trend that saw PC sales hurt as consumers in emerging markets increasingly turned to smartphones and tablets to get online. That three-year downturn slowed temporarily last year as companies replaced corporate hardware that had become obsolete after Microsoft Corp. ended support of its Windows XP operating system. “That replacement cycle faded in the first quarter of 2015,” Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. Lenovo Group Ltd. widened its lead as the top supplier in the quarter, grabbing an 18.9 percent market share. The Chinese company shipped 13.58 million PCs worldwide, an increase of 5.7 percent from a year earlier, Gartner said. The only other gain among the top five companies was by Hewlett-Packard Co., which posted a 2.5 percent rise in shipments and boosted its share to 17.3 percent of the market. Dell Inc.’s shipments slipped 5.1 percent in the quarter, its first fall in six quarters, leaving it with a 12.6 percent market share. Its position was hurt by the decline in corporate purchases, Gartner said.

• Intel Said to End Talks to Buy Chip Designer Altera: Intel has ended discussions to buy Altera, a designer of specialized computer chips, people briefed on the matter said on Thursday, putting to rest what would have been the company’s biggest-ever takeover. The collapse of the talks halts what would have been the latest in a series of mergers of chip makers and designers as companies turn to consolidation to gain negotiating leverage with customers. And yet investors still appear hopeful that Altera will ultimately be sold. Though shares of Altera initially fell after CNBC reported the end of negotiations, they closed up 3 percent on Thursday, at $43.33. Shares in Intel ended down slightly, at $31.24. Intel first made a takeover offer several weeks ago of more than $50 a share, a premium of more than 40 percent to Altera’s stock price at the time, one of the people said. Ultimately, however, Altera rejected the approach, and talks between the two companies had gone quiet in recent days. It was unclear whether the talks would be revived. A takeover would have been, by far, the biggest deal by Intel in its 46-year history. To date, its largest takeover was the $7.5 billion acquisition of McAfee, a security software maker. Just six of the company’s deals have been worth more than $1 billion. Several analysts have said that they still think Intel will be on the hunt for acquisitions.

• LinkedIn to Buy Lynda.com, an Online Learning Company: LinkedIn, the professional networking site, is branching out yet again. The site said on Thursday that it had agreed to buy Lynda.com, an online learning company that teaches career skills, for about $1.5 billion in cash and stock. It is the biggest acquisition by LinkedIn in its 12-year history as it continues to expand beyond its core social network. In the past, LinkedIn has said that users visit its site most often to update their résumés when they are looking for a new job. The company earns most of its revenue from subscriptions to its premium services and advertising on its site, generating $2.2 billion in sales last year. But the company has labored to become more than just an online repository for résumés and job histories. For instance, in 2012, LinkedIn began soliciting influential business personalities like Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, to write original content for the site. The company hired Dan Roth, a former editor at Fortune magazine, to be LinkedIn’s executive editor. Last year, the company introduced blogging capabilities for LinkedIn’s users, essentially becoming an original content platform. And two years ago, the company bought Pulse, the maker of a newsreader app, for $90 million. LinkedIn binds all those services into what it calls the economic graph, where users can connect to both new professional opportunities and the skills needed to take advantage of them. But e-learning and professional development services is an entirely new category for the company, and LinkedIn hopes it will be another way it can lure users back to using its site every week or even every day. Lynda.com was started two decades ago as a small online portal for students to learn web design skills. It was founded by the husband-and-wife team of Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin, themselves graphic design experts who have both held positions at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Today, Lynda.com focuses on a number of subjects, like management skills, programming and video. It sells subscriptions that start at $25 a month. The company collected more than $150 million in revenue last year and has turned a profit since 1997.