Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 5

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• The Apple Watch will hit retail stores on June 26: Apple said it would start selling some models of its watch at its retail stores this month, and also roll out the gadget in seven more countries. The watch has been on display in Apple stores around the world since April 10, when it became available for preorder online and at shops including trendy fashion boutiques in Paris, London and Tokyo. Apple had directed people to order online, preventing long queues around its stores that have become a norm with the company's rollout of new products. Apple Watch will be launched in Italy, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan on June 26, the company said. The watch is currently available in the United States, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and the UK. Apart from online stores, customers in these countries can also buy the devices at Apple's retail stores and some authorized resellers. The company has not given any sales figures for the watch since it began taking orders, but has often said demand was outstripping supply. "The response to Apple Watch has surpassed our expectations in every way," said Jeff Williams, senior vice president of operations. "We're also making great progress with the backlog of Apple Watch orders."

• Amazon's e-gifting offering launched quietly recently: Amazon Allowance, which recently debuted without much fanfare, lets people set up monthly or weekly payments to credit their kids' — or anyone else's — Amazon account with a cash balance, like a gift card. That saves parents from having to find cash, write a check or a make a bank transfer, and gives the recipient a way to shop on the website without a credit or debit card. The initiative is significant in a few ways. The e-giving (electronic gift card) market is projected to reach $14 billion in 2017, up from $6 billion last year, according to CEB, and U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and JC Penney Co. have all made e-gifting a part of their strategy. It's also a way to get younger shoppers accustomed to buying things on Amazon. And with Apple Inc. and Google Inc. aiming to turn smartphones into digital wallets, Amazon needs to keep shoppers close. Amazon account holders will be able able to set up one-time and recurring allowances for "family, friends, or employees that are age 13 and above," according to the website. The recipient must have an Amazon account (a parent or guardian will have to help set up an account for those under 17). People can also set up allowances for themselves to budget or save up for a purchase. "Sending money to family or friends can be a frustrating process," said Manish Bansal, general manager of gift certificates at Seattle-based Amazon. "A lot of early customers are using Amazon Allowances as a way to budget —whether through one-time or recurring allowances. We’re also seeing parents using Amazon Allowances to send money to college kids who need help buying textbooks and dorm essentials."

• Snapdeal, GoJavas to pick up return orders in 90 minutes: E-commerce marketplace Snapdeal, and QuickDel Logistics, which operates under the GoJavas brand, have launched a new service that will ensure pick up of return or replacement e-commerce orders within 90 minutes of intimation. The new service, christened ‘go-90′, has gone live in 15 cities, as per a press statement. GoJavas was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet. The move is seen as another step towards stimulating online shopping in the country since returns are seen as a major challenge. Reportedly, around 5-9 per cent of all e-commerce orders end up being returned in India.

• Facebook Launches Facebook Lite - A Stripped Down Android App For The Developing World: Today, Facebook is launching a bare-bones, low-resolution version of its Android app that works well on crummy networks or outdated phones, and burns much less data than its normal smartphone apps. It will roll out today in Asia, and come to parts of Latin America, Africa, and Europe in the coming weeks. Facebook Lite is designed specifically for the developing world to help the social network on-board its next billion users. Facebook Lite doesn’t offer data-intensive features like videos or Nearby Friends. But if users are willing to accept that and lower-resolution image thumbnails, they can access Facebook quick, smooth, and cheap from the most remote corners of the planet. Roughly a year back, that’s when we realized that our current Facebook experiences needed a lot more work, specifically in emerging markets and more specifically where networks are bad” Facebook Lite’s product manager Vijay Shankar tells me. So Facebook set out on two parallel paths. First, it would try optimize its flagship apps to load faster with less data. It’s already shrunk down its main Android app. Second, Shankar tells me “We floated another idea. What if we were building this from scratch for emerging markets? How do we completely re-architect this?” Rather than imagine what the problems in these areas were, Shankar says “we did a lot of research on the ground and spent a lot of time in Africa, and India and Indonesia.” The team discovered the solution would need three things: One, to work on any Android phone, regardless of storage space, RAM, and CPU. Two, to load fast even on 2G mobile connections, which is what 4 billion people on earth are stuck with. Three, to use as little data as possible, as the prohibitive cost of data plans is actually the largest barrier to Internet usage, not network access. The main way Facebook makes the app use less data is by never pre-loading full-resolution images. Photos and link preview thumbnails in the News Feed appear a bit grainy at first. They’ll load in full-res if tapped, but Facebook only wants to do those big data pulls if people volunteer for them. If you try to post a photo to Facebook Lite, the app compresses the image and then sends it in the background, so its small and you don’t have to spend the wait time staring at the screen. “Every roundtrip to the server is painful” Shankar says, so “we’re very careful about what features and experiences we offer in the app.” There will be some ads, but several of Facebook’s top formats like app install ads won’t be in Facebook Lite. Advertisers might not love the idea of their creative assets being compressed into low-res. But otherwise, users would probably scroll past them before they even load. Today, Facebook Lite begins its official global rollout. At under 1 megabyte in size, Shankar says it can be downloaded in seconds for cheap on even slow 2G connections. I played with it for a few minutes, and was surprised by how slick and full-featured it was despite the compromises.

• Coke's New Twitter Ads Call Out Viewers by Name As Social Promos Get Personal. Coca-Cola has been buying Promoted Tweets that show up in viewers' Twitter feeds and address them by their first names. The ad copy starts with: "Hey [NAME], #ShareACoke is back! Order..." You can see the full promo in the above image. The new tactic is part of a larger, ongoing "Share a Coke" campaign that debuted earlier this spring. The company is encouraging people to buy 8-ounce bottles of the soda, personalized with their names, for $5 apiece. Coke wasn't available for comment. But it appears the Atlanta-based soda giant is employing Twitter's Tailored Audiences platform in an innovative way to create this targeted style of advertising. Twitter deferred to Coca-Cola about the campaign and didn't state whether other brands were using the personalized call to action. But it would certainly interest any marketer that is looking to increase its click-through rates on the microblogging platform.

• Alibaba has tied up with China's largest loan restructurer to sell bad debt online. Alibaba will cooperate with the biggest state-owned loan restructurer to dispose of more than 4 billion yuan ($645 million) of non-performing assets on its online shopping platform Taobao. China Cinda Asset Management, which announced the tieup with Ma last week, saw profits rise 32 percent to a record in 2014. China’s non-performing loans climbed by an unprecedented 140 billion yuan in the first quarter to 982.5 billion yuan, the most since 2008 and almost the size of Vietnam’s economy. UBS and Standard Chartered are among companies that bought stakes in Cinda before its 2013 public share sale as a stepping stone into the distressed asset market. Cinda’s market value of $23 billion is now larger than KKR’s $19.1 billion. Cinda already sold two bad loans on Alibaba’s retail site Taobao in April for a combined 24.5 million yuan, according to a China Banking Regulatory Commission statement at the time. Four more were auctioned last month for 31.4 million yuan. One of the soured loans auctioned in May was originally from Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. with a clothing company in the eastern Zhejiang province as the debtor. Cinda disclosed details such as the name of the borrower, the principal amount, accrued interest and guarantors of the loan on Taobao. Bidders were advised to look at the loan documents and check the collaterals before auction. Both individuals as well as institutions were allowed to bid. “Alibaba’s online loan auction platform broadens the investor base for bad loans and therefore will lead to better price discovery for distressed assets,” said Liao Qiang, a banking analyst at Standard & Poor’s in Beijing. The legal complexities involved in unwinding such debts and the need to divulge information publicly may limit growth in online auctions, according to KPMG’s Gleave. “Alibaba’s auction site is just a market place,” he said. “Whether that’s a good way to trade bad debts is still to be seen.”

• Yahoo Says Shutting Down Maps Service Site, Other Tools: Maps.yahoo.com will close at the end of June, Amotz Maimon, chief architect at the Sunnyvale, California-based company, said in a blog post. Yahoo will still support mapping as part of other services including search and the photo-sharing website Flickr. Yahoo also is paring back or ending support for other sites and services, including mail support for older versions of Apple Inc.’s iPhone operating system. The company is shuttering market-specific media properties, including Yahoo Music in France and Canada and the home page for the Philippines. In addition, it will end support for creation of Pipes, a Web-content gathering tool. Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is looking for ways to keep costs under control as she works to turn around the company she has led for almost three years.

• Facebook Messenger Ditches Constant Mapping To Lay Groundwork For More Location Features. Facebook is removing the confusing, slightly creepy always-on location sharing feature in Messenger for a more explicit, one-time way to share where you are or will be. Location will no longer be a “second class citizen”, Messenger Head Of Product Stan Chudnovsky tells me. Instead, Messenger has big plans for GPS features, saying “What we’re launching is the foundation of everything that’s coming.” For example, “You might want to make reservations. How are we all getting there? Maybe there’s a transportation service somehow” Chudnovsky hints. When I ask if Messenger might build on Uber’s API to let you instantly book rides, he coyly replied “I didn’t say that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like what you’re saying.” The new design for location sharing in Messenger is rolling out today for everyone on iOS and Android. It banishes the blue arrow and any way to constantly share your coordinates. It’s replaced with a pin button alongside those for sending photos, stickers, or money, or an option in the three-dot More drawer. Tapping it pulls up a map with your current location pinned, which you can send to friends with one more tap. This makes it easy to tell a friend “Here’s where I am, come meet me.” By dragging the map, you can change the pin’s location. That lets you pick a meetup spot. You can also use suggestion of nearby Facebook Places like local businesses, or search for one to set the pin to a specific destination. Chudnovsky says trying to do something similar by opening Google Maps would take “7 taps, 2 app switches, and 150% frustration.”

• Computer Scientists Are Astir After Baidu Team Is Barred From A.I. Competition: A group of researchers at the Chinese web services company Baidu have been barred from participating in an international competition for artificial intelligence technology after organizers discovered that the Baidu scientists broke the contest’s rules. The competition, which is known as the “Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge,” is organized annually by computer scientists at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. It requires that computer systems created by the teams classify the objects in a set of digital images into 1,000 different categories. The rules of the contest permit each team to run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission as they train their programs to “learn” what they are seeing. However, on Tuesday, the contest organizers posted a public statement noting that between November and May 30, different accounts had been used by the Baidu team to submit more than 200 times to the contest server, “far exceeding the specified limit of two submissions per week.” This year, Baidu announced that it had built a custom supercomputer named Minwa with the intention of dedicating it to the image recognition contest. Baidu researchers subsequently made a series of announcements about the success of the computer, including one playing up a result more accurate than an earlier score by Google scientists. On May 4, Baidu posted an article on its technology blog headlined “Baidu Achieves Top Results on Image Recognition Challenge.” The article has since been removed.

• Zomato’s revenue and operating loss more than tripled last year; Meritnation’s growth slowed to a crawl: Zomato, which recently expanded to allow food orders online and has been aggressively expanding overseas with as many as nine firms in its kitty in the past 12 months alone, saw operating revenue rise over three times from INR 30.6 crore in FY14 to INR 96.7 crore last year. Its operating EBITDA loss in the same period also more than tripled to INR 136 crore from INR 41.39 crore in the year ended March 31, 2014. Operating revenue growth for Meritnation was just 6.5 per cent to INR 21.59 crore. However, the firm managed to restrict its operating losses which declined by a fifth to INR 22.72 crore.