Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 23

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• India's government proposes tax benefits for merchants for promoting card payments: Government today proposed income tax benefits for people making payments through credit or debit cards and doing away with transaction charges on purchase of petrol, gas and rail tickets with plastic money. In a draft paper for moving towards cashless economy and reduce tax avoidance, the government also proposed to make it mandatory to settle high value transactions of more than Rs 1 lakh through electronic mode. In order to incentivise shopkeepers, it has proposed tax rebate to them provided they accept a significant value of sales through debit or credit cards. The proposals are aimed at building a transactions history of an individual to enable improved credit access and financial inclusion, reduce tax avoidance and check counterfeiting of currency. “Tax benefits in terms of income tax rebates to be considered to consumers for paying a certain proportion of their expenditure through electronic means,” said that draft proposals for facilitating electronic transactions on which the government has invited comments till June 29. The paper said the tax benefits could be provided to merchants for accepting electronic payments. “An appropriate tax rebate can be extended to a merchant if at least say 50 per cent value of the transactions is through electronic means. Alternatively, 1-2 per cent reduction in value added tax could be considered on all electronic transactions by the merchants,” it added.


• Facebook gaining ground on YouTube in video ads: Facebook is gaining ground on Google's YouTube as an outlet for big companies to market their products via online videos, the fastest growing category of Internet ads, a report published on Monday said. London-based Ampere predicts a new advertising "arms race" between the two rivals, neck and neck in terms of audience sizes with around 1.4 billion to 1.3 billion monthly active users, respectively for Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is morphing from a platform most advertisers use for building general brand awareness to one that can deliver "pre-roll" advertisements that marketing companies prefer for ensuring their messages are actually viewed. Currently, YouTube remains a more flexible marketing platform, offering advertisers the full range of video ads which run before, during or after a video program is shown. Differences in ad formats translate into the rates the Internet platforms can charge advertisers. While YouTube charges advertisers when an advertisement has been viewed, Facebook offers the less advertiser-friendly model of charging once three seconds of the video have been delivered, Ampere noted. Most content providers now use Facebook for branding and awareness purposes, but trial revenue-sharing deals with the National Football League and Fox Sports in the United States pose a serious challenger to YouTube's lead. Online video is now growing faster than any other digital category or subcategory, rising 33 percent in 2014, and is forecast to grow 29 percent a year through 2017, Zenith said.


• Oracle extends cloud offerings, looks to compete with Amazon: Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition with Amazon. "We're prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price," said Ellison in a webcast presentation on Monday, after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle's cloud. The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud. Oracle, which calls its cloud offering the Oracle Cloud Platform, will provide a cost-effective alternative to Amazon, said Ellison. "Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it's one-tenth their price," said Ellison. Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. Oracle's cloud business is growing quickly, running at a rate of about $2.3 billion a year in revenue, based on last quarter's figures. By comparison, Amazon and Microsoft get about $6.3 billion each in cloud revenue per year.


• Tech Titans Come Together To Develop Common Container Standard: Docker, CoreOS, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are now working on a new standard for software containers with the help of the Linux Foundation. Docker may have become synonymous with containers, but it’s not the only container format around and not everybody agrees that it should become the standard format. Docker and CoreOS had looked like they were on a collision course, and having even more container formats wasn’t likely going to help the overall ecosystem. Now, however, the two companies are going to work together with other stakeholders on the Open Container Project (OCP), which will be housed under the Linux Foundation. The OCP is a nonprofit organization that is “chartered to establish common standards for software containers.” The Docker container format and runtime will form the basis of the new standard, and Docker is donating both the draft specifications and the code around its image format and runtime engine to get the project started. The main idea here is that developers should be able to package their applications in a container and be confident that it will run in any runtime, whether that’s Docker, CoreOS’s rkt, or projects like Kurma or Jetpack. That standard should be vendor neutral and development should happen out in the open. Containers are isolated user instances that allow applications to be deployed easily; Docker uses resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces to allow independent "containers" to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines.


• As Quick as a Taylor Swift Tweet, Apple Had to Change Its Tune: Taylor Swift’s victory in a one-day battle against Apple this week showed she has a rare power to influence the music business itself, at a time of deep anxiety among artists big and small about the value of their work. On Sunday morning, Ms. Swift wrote a diplomatic but stern Tumblr post taking Apple to task for not paying royalties on test drives of its new streaming music service, set to open on June 30. “We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she wrote. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” By midnight Sunday, Apple — one of the most powerful companies in the world — had capitulated to the 25-year-old pop star, saying it would pay royalties on all music for the three-month trials. One of its senior executives, Eddy Cue, even said he called Ms. Swift personally to give her the news. The backdrop to that decision was much more complex than the quick exchange might have indicated. For more than a week, independent labels around the world had been complaining about Apple’s proposed terms, saying that even for 90 days, a big drop in revenue from Apple — by far the music industry’s largest sales outlet — could be devastating. But even though Mr. Cue carefully noted in interviews that the company’s decision had been made with those labels in mind, its hurried announcement late Sunday suggested that it was Ms. Swift’s shaming that led Apple to change its tune. “She is the most powerful person in the music industry,” said David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and an advocate for artists’ rights. “She is able to bring the debate to the mainstream.”


• Uber Is Negotiating a $2 Billion Credit Line With Banks: Uber is negotiating a $2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks. The car-booking company that has roiled transportation markets worldwide by letting people hail rides from their smartphones, had initially sought a $1 billion revolving loan before boosting the size as more banks sought to participate, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. San Francisco-based Uber raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt at the beginning of the year from Goldman Sach’s wealth-management clients