Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 3

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• Twitter Pushes Ads With A New Button Atop Mobile Users’ Profiles: Twitter’s latest push to monetize its service has led to the rollout of a new “Twitter Ads” button, which is now prominently appearing on user profile pages on both the iOS and Android client applications. The newly added button, which some users may have initially mistaken as a shortcut to Twitter analytics, is found right next to the “Edit profile” button, the account switcher and the Settings icon. By clicking on the Ads button, users are offered the ability to manage their Twitter ad campaigns while on the go. That’s a different tactic–and perhaps a more overzealous one–than the one Facebook took when it introduced a way to manage Facebook ads via smartphones earlier this year. The company launched a dedicated Facebook Ads Manager App which not only allowed current advertisers to track the way their ad campaigns were performing, but actually brought the creation process itself to mobile phones. Here, users could write ad text, upload photos, and even target their desired audience right from the app itself. Not everyone is happy with the change, which some Twitter users are calling “desperate,” or “ugly.” And it’s hard to find fault with those sentiments. If you’re not currently running a Twitter ad campaign, the feature does nothing more than let you know that this button serves as a place where you can manage an ad campaign in the future – it doesn’t go so far as to allow users to actually get started building their first campaign from the app itself.


• Twitter Launches "Personas", Aiming To Make It Easier for Advertisers to Target Audience Niches: Twitter wants to make targeting easier for advertisers, so today it unveiled a feature called "personas," which lets brands target groups of consumers based on whether they have college degrees, are parents, make more or less than $100,000 or run small businesses, to name a few. More specifically, marketers can not only target college grads but also pinpoint such alums based on their gender, location and interests. Advertisers could piece together similar targeting parameters on Twitter in the past, but now they can build more precise campaigns with just a mouse click or two. The San Francisco-based tech company is leveraging ongoing partnerships with data companies Acxiom and Datalogix to bring such targeting options to the table. The development is reminiscent of Facebook's people-based marketing product moves of 2014, when it rolled out "Audience Insights" and other similar products. Personas and the campaign insights are now available to advertisers, globally.


• Yelp Sale Process to Stall as Founder Decides to Wait; Stock Slumps: Yelp, which hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to find a buyer, has temporarily decided not to pursue a sale. The consumer-review website has had several interested suitors but isn’t pursuing a transaction in the immediate future. The firm may pursue a deal again if co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Stoppelman changes his mind, one of the people said. Yelp dropped 12 percent in afternoon trading in New York, giving the company a market value of about $2.8 billion. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported in May that Yelp was working with a bank to explore a sale. Yelp hired Goldman Sachs after receiving takeover interest.


• Xiaomi reports sequential sales fall, putting full-year goal in doubt: China's top smartphone maker Xiaomi on Thursday reported semi-annual sales that for the first time were lower than the previous six months, jeopardising its full-year target and hinting at a slowdown in its mainstay domestic market. The firm said it sold 34.7 million handsets in January-June versus 35.0 million in July-December - the first sequential fall since the company began disclosing six-month figures in 2013. For 2015, it aims for minimum sales of 80 million smartphones. Smartphone shipments in China - where Xiaomi is No. 1 - fell in the first quarter for the first time in six years, though it was unclear whether the drop signalled the start of a downward trend, researcher IDC said in May. Beijing-based Xiaomi has been expanding overseas to relieve the pressure at home, focusing on India, Southeast Asia and, from next week, Brazil.


• Venture Investment In Healthcare Declines Through Q2 After Record 2014: After a record-breaking year of growth in 2014, venture capital investors in healthcare seem to have settled into a groove. They invested roughly $2.8 billion in healthcare technologies through the second quarter of 2015, down from $3.3 billion over the same period last year, according to a study from Startup Health. Nearly $6.8 billion went into healthcare technologies that year, up from $3 billion the year before. Driven by twin engines of government legislation and technology innovation around wearable devices and data, venture capital investments in healthcare went up like a rocket in 2014. Now, the industry seems to be catching its breath a bit. Investments in healthcare technology actually held steady in the second quarter at $1.8 billion after a $500 million decline year-on-year in the first quarter. An examination of some of the companies that have raised the most money and successfully exited: Zenefits and Oscar Health , which are tackling the regulatory changes brought on by the Affordable Care Act, raised more than respectable $500 million and $145 million rounds, respectively. While Nant Health, a company using big data analytics for genomic sequencing, and HealthCatalyst, which uses data to track health across populations, both scored big with their own big rounds of $200 million and $70 million. On the wearables side, the FitBit public offering proved that even public markets were interested in the wearable health opportunity.