Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 2

• The PayPal Mafia’s Golden Touch: The ride-hailing app Uber, the apartment rental site Airbnb and other darlings of the next generation of Silicon Valley start-ups are reshaping the way people use the web. They are also changing expectations about just how much money private companies can raise while still staying out of the public markets. Known as the unicorns, these private technology companies are worth $1 billion or more, thanks to an influx of cash from venture capital firms, hedge funds, private equity firms and mutual funds. But alongside the Wall Street money flowing into these companies’ coffers, a familiar set of names is operating behind the scenes by advising, investing in and, in some cases, founding the unicorns. The PayPal Mafia — a nickname given a group of alumni of PayPal, the payments company that went public in 2002 and was acquired by eBay — has its hands in many, if not most, of today’s most valuable private tech companies. Their enduring influence, more than a decade after they made their first fortunes, speaks to the tightknit social fabric of Silicon Valley’s technology industry, and to the trust new entrepreneurs place in those who have succeeded before them. And now, the PayPal group’s close ties with the current crop of unicorns — a collection of some of the most valuable technology start-ups ever seen — suggest its influence is undiminished. The shared experience of PayPal alumni makes their advice — and money — particularly valuable to young entrepreneurs. An online payments provider founded in the 1990s, the company succeeded despite going public shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, even as the economy was still reeling from both the attack and the collapse of the dot-com bubble. “PayPal was an extreme experience in survival against all odds, over and over again, with enormous and lasting success,” said Max Levchin, PayPal’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “Like veterans of an intense military campaign, we fall back on lessons learned, and relationships established in our early 20s.”

• eCommerce Search is Hot: intelligent search startup Tagalys and visual search startup Wazzat among winners of TechInAsia's India startup contest: Ecommerce is booming in India, and this Chennai-based startup has an intelligent search tool for online retail sites. It helps drive revenues with product recommendations and analytics. Co-founder and CEO Antony Kattukaran said Tagalys already has five paying customers and three more have signed up for a trial. Currently bootstrapped, Tagalys charges clients based on usage. Right now, the gang of four at Tagalys is focused on product development. “We are offering Search as a Service. The market for this is as big as US$2 billion to $4 billion, and it’s growing,” Kattukaran said. The judges found the idea compelling enough as search is the biggest problem for every ecommerce company or website. But they also had some pointed questions. “Why would ecommerce companies outsource this core problem to somebody else? Why are you better at search compared to ecommerce companies who are your clients?” Takeshi Ebihara asked. Kattukaran was confident that the Tagalys technology with its results-based payment model would be a draw for the mid-sized ecommerce segment, which is the startup’s target base. While some of the biggest ecommerce sites would invest in their own tools, many others would welcome “search as a service” to keep up with tech. Tydy: A close contender was Tydy from Bangalore. It has developed a new content system tailored for mobile devices. It aims to take the pain out of trying to use Excel or Powerpoint on mobile. It puts together images, video, and text to create and share interactive mobile documents. The five-man Tydy team has already validated the product with over 250 users in India and is poised to scale up globally to serve the mobile generation. Currently in the enterprise space, Tydy charges its clients – small and medium-sized businesses – US$10 per month Wazzat: Next in line was a contender from Hyderabad. Wazzat is a cloud-based and mobile-friendly image recognition and visual search platform. “Our flagship product Wazzat Fashion is adding eyes to fashion ecommerce stores. Consumers can download our partner retailer’s app or visit their website to snap or select the photo of an apparel and instantly search for similar clothes. It also automatically learns the consumer’s style preferences and offers recommendations,” pitched Mauktik Kulkarni, co-founder of Wazzat Labs. The Wazzat Fashion widget is currently live on US-based retailer Target’s website. It is also in pilot stage on a couple of Indian ecommerce stores. It had a top three finish at last year’s MIT Global Startup Labs India accelerator program and recently graduated from the Target accelerator program.

• Delta starts accepting payments via Alipay: Delta Air Lines Inc has become the first U.S. airline to accept payments via Alipay, the PayPal-like service run by an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd affiliate that is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers. The airline has started taking payment for flight tickets on delta.com from Alipay's 300 million-plus registered users, Alipay said in a statement on Wednesday. As the largest online payments service in a country where consumer finance remains less-than-fully developed, supporting Alipay - run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial - should make it more convenient for would-be Chinese travelers to buy Delta tickets. That decision underscores the attractiveness to the industry of China, now the world's largest source of outbound tourism after a decade of super-charged economic growth. The U.S. airline has said it wants to be the most Chinese-friendly American carrier.

• Facebook’s Newest App Riff Lets Friends Add Clips To Collaborative Videos: Shoot a video of up to 20 seconds in Riff, and give it a title that instructs others what they should add to it like “Make A Funny Face” or “Birthday Wishes For Johnny” or “Adventures Of Mr. Banana.” Friends will see the video on Riff and get a notification inviting them to contribute, with each clip tacked on at the end. The contributors’ friends are then invited to add scenes, too. Facebook’s Riff Product Manager Josh Miller says “The potential pool of creative collaborators can grow exponentially from there, so a short video can become an inventive project between circles of friends you can share to Facebook or anywhere on the Internet.” Riff is the latest Facebook Creative Labs project following other experiments in app design like Paper, Slingshot, Mentions, Rooms and Groups. Like those, even if it doesn’t gain mass traction, it could teach Facebook what people want, in this case around video. If it does vie for growth, it could boost video creation on Facebook, but will have to compete with fellow collaborative video apps like JumpCam, Vyclone, MixBit, and Snapchat’s Our Stories feature. A few rules for Riffing: You can only shoot video in Riff, no uploads. You get a 3-2-1 countdown, and can approve your clip before posting, but there’s no multi-shot recording or editing features like those that have become standard on Instagram, Vine and other apps. There’s no liking or commenting in Riff. The goal is for people to contribute instead, so Riff is designed to make shooting unpolished, spontaneous video “feel inviting,” says Miller. Viewers can tap to fast-forward through boring clips, very similar to Snapchat Stories. Only friends of a video’s creator or collaborators can contribute to a video, making it expand virally through a social graph rather than going worldwide instantly. Your video could end up very public, though, as Riff will feature user video threads on its home page to inspire other users. View counts will help inspire people to reach for fame. When you post a Riff video to Facebook, all the contributors will automatically be tagged. The original creator can moderate their threads, tapping a ‘three dot’ button on their video to delete clips they don’t want. Anyone on Riff can report any specific clip as offensive, while Facebook users can report a whole video as containing something awful. While it’s available on iOS and Android worldwide today, it’s starting with only 15 languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Polish. Facebook has no plans to directly monetize Riff right now, but more videos uploaded to Facebook make it easier for it to show video ads that earn it money. The question now is whether Riff will see any traction. Facebook’s previous Creative Labs projects have largely flopped as consumer products. Riff certainly isn’t new. It’s basically a simpler clone of JumpCam, does what Everlapse did for photos, and offers a user-curated version of Snapchat’s editor-picked Our Stories.

• With Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung Tries to Regain Its Footing: Samsung’s internal code name for its latest top-of-the-line smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, is “Project Zero,” signaling what Samsung calls “a return to fundamentals.” The code name also suggests that Samsung finally seems to understand the many criticisms that have long been leveled at its phones: the plastic hardware looked cheap, the most promoted features were mostly useless and the software was too complicated. Samsung, according to Samsung, has realized the errors of it ways. The realization was born out of necessity. Samsung’s market share and profits in the smartphone business have plummeted over the last year. The company, which is based in South Korea, is in the unenviable position of getting squeezed from the bottom by the affordable phones made by Chinese upstarts like Xiaomi and at the top by Apple’s powerhouse line of iPhones. The elegant new Galaxy phones, which went on sale in the United States last week, are aiming to pull Samsung out of that pickle. But while the phones are magnificent to look at, they are most likely not quite enough to fix what ails the company. Despite improved hardware, the S6 and S6 Edge still lack compelling software. Unlike Apple, Samsung has never managed to create a built-in suite of software and services to keep people hooked to its own phones. And there are few obvious ways for Samsung to address this glaring flaw. “You can argue that they’re in phase one of fixing their software, which is getting rid of a lot of the junk,” said Jan Dawson, an independent technology analyst who anticipated Samsung’s recent troubles. “But we haven’t really seen phase two, which would be building its own stuff. We haven’t really seen much of that so far.”