Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 30

• Paytm’s big day: IRCTC adds Paytm wallet as a payment option: Government-owned railway ticketing platform IRCTC, which is the one of the most used internet commerce site in the country clocking on an average over half a million tickets a day, has added Paytm’s wallet as an online payment option. IRCTC, the primary seller of railway tickets online (others OTAs act as secondary link) in the country, has been offering various online payments options besides the conventional credit/debit cards and net banking. It allows payments through cash cards, its own co-branded pre-paid Rupay card with Union Bank and with Paytm wallet it adds another payment option. Last we checked the Paytm payment option was integrated on IRCTC’s web portal but was not yet available on its mobile app on Android. The development means a big move for Paytm as it is already available as an alternate payment option in several key internet ventures such as the country’s top online food ordering venture Foodpanda, cab hailing app Uber (in India), eBay and Jabong. Although IRCTC has come a long way in terms of streamlining online payment process on its site, given the huge load on its servers it is not uncommon to see payment failures in a multi-authentication process which comes with a credit and debit cards. Paytm wallet would look to capitalise in partly solving this pain point for users and hopes to also expand its reach in tier-II and tier-III markets, where trains are a primary mode of long distance travel and IRCTC by default is the booking platform.

• This too shall pass: Secret Shuts Down: Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages. Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees, including top talent like Sarah Haider, Safeer Jiwan, and Amol Jain have left the company over the past month or so. One source says the company has been whittled down to under 10 employees from over 20 several months ago and has been in “maintenance mode.” More here: Secret’s trajectory illustrates the flash-in-the-pan nature of Silicon Valley’s current technology boom. Even as a handful of start-ups rise to stratospheric valuations and take in billions of dollars in financing, other privately held companies cannot sustain their following. Fab.com, a onetime e-commerce darling, was once valued at more than $1 billion and had raised more than $150 million before ending up in a fire sale this year, when it was bought for about $15 million. Other start-ups are dealing with a cooling-off process as big companies muscle in on their turf. Meerkat, a live-streaming video app that gained great traction early this year, is now grappling with the entrance of Twitter and its Periscope live-video app, for example.

• Cloud CRM major Salesforce is exploring a sale - shares up 17%; seen as pricey but valuable target: Cloud software company Salesforce.com Inc is working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential acquirer, Bloomberg said, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The company's shares rose as much as 17.3 percent to touch an all-time high of $78.46 on Wednesday. They closed up 11.6 percent at $74.65, valuing the company at about $49 billion. Salesforce Seen as Attractive, If Pricey, Target for Cloud Push: Salesforce.com, the software provider that has hired bankers to field takeover offers, would make sense as a partner for a buyer willing to spend a lot to become the leader in cloud computing. Salesforce jumped 12 percent to close at $74.65 in New York on Wednesday, giving the company a market value of about $49 billion. Salesforce’s business is entirely cloud-based. That means that as the company adds clients, it can lower costs-per-customer through economies of scale and by improving operations in its software and data centers. It also can update products and roll out new business lines quickly via the Internet. Also, customers are flocking to software and service contracts that tend to be simpler for cloud computing than for traditional software. Cloud clients also can avoid the sunk costs of buying hardware. “Specific to the cloud, the shift is accelerating and it’s happened more quickly than the big guys were hoping,” Steven R. Koenig, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc., said in an interview. The San Francisco-based company would give an acquirer “a lot of critical mass in the cloud.” Salesforce had 16 percent of the customer-relationship management market in 2013, compared with 13 percent for SAP SE, 10 percent for Oracle Corp. and 7 percent for Microsoft Corp., according to Gartner Inc. Salesforce will have more than 15 million end users in 2018, up from around 6 million last year, Gartner wrote in a November report. The CRM market has “gone to Salesforce, and no one is going to catch up,” Koenig said. Around 40 percent of organizations with greater than a billion dollars in annual revenue ran all their CRM applications within their own data centers last year, according to Gartner. That will shrink to 25 percent by 2020 as companies move to the cloud, Gartner said. As customers start to move into cloud CRM systems offered by Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, they also to tend to buy related products, such as analytics or marketing services, from the same company. That stitches clients tightly to their provider, making it less likely for them to move away. “There is still room for Salesforce.com and competitors to grow rapidly in CRM without reaching capacity for at least the next five years,” Gartner wrote. Salesforce has begun investing in data centers around the world. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has said the company would open “multiple” data centers in Germany, along with ones in France and Canada. Local facilities help the company serve customers with stringent data regulations, without having to give up the economies of scale and operational expertize gained by being a cloud company. Salesforce also has expanded into data analytics through investments and product development. Lashing these various products together with its Salesforce1 program has allowed the company to pursue larger contracts with bigger firms. Salesforce closed 550 deals valued more than a million dollars each in its most recent fiscal year, up around 100 from the prior year, the company said in February.

• Yelp Shares Tumble on as First-Quarter Earnings, Outlook Disappoint: Yelp Inc., an operator of user-review websites, declined as much as 17 percent in extended trading after its profit and sales forecast missed analysts’ estimates. The San Francisco-based company reported a first-quarter loss of $1.28 million, or 2 cents a share, from $2.64 million, or 4 cents, a year earlier. Analysts’ estimated a profit of 1 cent. Revenue was $118.5 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement, trailing estimates of $119.8, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yelp forecast second-quarter sales of $131 million to $134 million, falling short of analysts’ average estimate of $137.4 million. “There’s not a lot of forgiveness for technology companies right now,” said Blake Harper, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities Inc.. “They are valued pretty well and there’s an expectation that they’ll perform well.” Yelp operates websites that let users search local businesses for free and read reviews about them. The company charges for advertising on those sites. It had 142 million unique monthly visitors in the period, an increase of 7.6 percent from a year earlier. Yelp’s local advertising revenue dropped as a result of a sales-force restructuring implemented in the first quarter, Harper said. Shares of Yelp dropped to a low of $42.68 in extended trading after closing at $51.28. The company competes with Angie’s List Inc. as well as new features offered by companies including Amazon.com Inc.

• Baidu Sees Revenue Growth And Profit Slump In Q1 2015: China's dominant Internet search engine Baidu Inc on Thursday posted its slowest revenue growth rate in almost seven years in the first quarter of 2015, as customers spent less money on its core online marketing business. The company's bid to create new avenues of income from mobile in China, the world's biggest smartphone market, also took their toll. Baidu's profit margins sank to their lowest in a decade, or 19 percent, as promotional costs for new businesses and research and development expenses skyrocketed. The search company's bid to promote new mobile-centric businesses like food delivery to compete with Tencent and Alibaba saw selling, general and administrative expenses rocket 47.2 percent to $477 million from a year ago. Revenues of 12.73 billion yuan ($2.05 billion) came in below forecasts of 12.9 billion yuan, according to a Thomson Reuters SmartEstimate poll of 16 analysts. Coupled with a 3.4 percent decline in net profit from the previous year, this prompted shares to slide 2.6 percent in trading after market close in New York. Baidu said it expected second-quarter revenue to be between 16.37 billion yuan and 16.75 billion yuan. A hiring spree for research and development also pushed the department's expenses up 79.1 percent to $368.8 million. Baidu's net income, its lowest in two years, was 2.4 billion yuan for the first three months of 2015. Profit margins of 19 percent were the lowest in almost a decade.

• Flipkart acquires Delhi-based analytics and visual A/B testing platform Appiterate: India’s largest e-commerce platform Flipkart has acquired Delhi- and San Francisco-based DSYN Technologies Pvt Ltd, which provides a native mobile analytics and A/B testing platform for app developers and enterprises under the brand name Appiterate. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is in line with Flipkart’s ‘mobile first’ focus, the firm said on Wednesday. Post the acquisition, Appiterate’s mobile marketing automation platform will be integrated with Flipkart’s mobile app which will help the e-commerce firm in targeting users based on their activity on the app and website. Appiterate is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) A/B testing platform for native mobile apps. It allows app publishers to A/B test and iteratively optimise the designs (UX) and functionality of their mobile apps to improve in-app purchases, user engagement and conversion metrics. It also allows app publishers to run tests based on user segments and see real-time conversion metrics. The company says it has been delivering more than 100 million personalised notifications each month through its platform for leading e-commerce companies. Last year, it raised Rs 3 crore in seed funding from SAIF Partners, with participation from a group of individuals, including Greg Badros, former VP (product & engineering) at Facebook and Prashant Malik, former tech lead at Facebook and co-creator of Apache Cassandra.

• Twitter Troubles Lie in Marketers’ Reluctance to Buy New Kind of Ad: As a company, Twitter is an adolescent — gangly, starry-eyed, growing like a weed and unpredictable. No wonder advertisers and investors are having trouble figuring it out. The social networking company shocked Wall Street on Tuesday by reporting slower-than-expected growth in advertising sales, which account for nearly all of its revenue. Shares of Twitter, which fell 18 percent on Tuesday after the first-quarter results were disclosed, dropped an additional 9 percent on Wednesday. Although revenue rose a brisk 74 percent in the quarter compared with the same quarter a year ago, it was less growth than in Twitter’s five previous quarters and well below the high bar that the company had set. Twitter attributed the disappointment to advertisers’ reluctance to spend heavily on ads that prompt the viewer to take an action, like download a smartphone app or apply for a credit card. This type of ad, known as direct response, is a newer area for Twitter, which originally focused on general brand image ads. Marketers say they are indeed more cautious about Twitter’s direct-response ads because the microblogging service has not yet shown that it can target or track those ads with the level of precision that advertisers want. Compared with mature rivals like Google and Facebook, Twitter doesn’t know as much about its users, and it is more difficult to measure results. Facebook has so much data on its users, “you could actually target a premium credit card to a businessman you know is traveling all the time,” said Bryan Wiener, chairman of 360i, a digital marketing agency that works with brands like Capital One, NBCUniversal, Spotify, Oreo and Oscar Mayer. “That’s the kind of information that’s missing from Twitter,” he said. “There’s not this rich history of your holistic life.” As a result, he said, many brands are unwilling to commit big money to Twitter ad campaigns. Mr. Freeman said that, in general, Twitter is best for building brand awareness and recall. Its weakness is the ability to measure direct-response effectiveness. “A lot of times, brands don’t really know what to do with it,” he said. “And that was Twitter’s fault because I don’t think they had a very clear direction.”