Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 13

Ellen Pao resigns as Reddit chief executive: Ellen Pao has resigned as interim chief executive of Reddit, the popular online message board, following widespread user criticism of the way she was running the company. Reddit announced the change Friday afternoon in a company post, saying that the resignation was "by mutual agreement." Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder and original chief executive. Pao, who had been at the company only eight months, came under withering criticism for firing a popular employee, Victoria Taylor, the company’s director of talent. Taylor was beloved among Reddit's powerful moderators, who don't work for the company but have complete editorial control over the thousands of niche discussion sections on virtually every topic, including cute animals and depression. Reddit's message boards draw about 160 million active users. Taylor was also a rare, public female face at Reddit and in tech world. Amid the vitriol directed at Pao, many users pointed out the irony that Pao would have let go a prominent woman at Reddit right after losing a bruising, high-profile gender discrimination suit earlier this year. After Taylor's dismissal, moderators revolted, shutting public access to hundreds of discussion boards over several days. Users also circulated an online petition, that has gathered more than 200,000 signatures, calling for Pao to step down. Pao posted an apology this week for the way the Taylor firing was handled. On Friday, she released a statement on Reddit saying that she resigned because "the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles."

Carmakers to tech partners: Keep your hands off our data: Carmakers are limiting the data they share with technology partners Apple and Google through new systems that link smartphones to vehicle infotainment systems, defending access to information about what drivers do in their cars. Auto companies hope that the vehicle data will one day generate billions of dollars in e-commerce, though they are just beginning to form strategies for monetizing the information. Apple and Google already make money from smartphone owners by providing a variety of products and services, from digital music to targeted advertising, and connecting phones to car systems will almost certainly extend their reach. But as infotainment systems such as Apple's CarPlay and Google's Android Auto become more widespread, auto companies hope to keep tech providers from gaining access to a wealth of potentially profitable information collected by computer systems in cars. Some auto companies have specifically said they will not provide Apple and Google with data from the vehicle's functional systems - steering, brakes and throttle, for instance - as well as information about range, a measure of how far the car can travel before it runs out of gas. Auto companies hope to profit from in-vehicle data in a variety of ways, including the provision of travel planning services and auto repair and service information they hope will bring drivers to dealerships. They also expect to work with insurance companies, providing information that would allow insurers to base their rates on a driver's behavior behind the wheel.

Across Asia, investments in technology start-ups have risen to levels comparable to the United States.: In the first six months of this year, 46 Asian start-ups, including Apus, have had fund-raising rounds of $100 million or more, just short of the 48 in North America, according to the research firm CB Insights. The focus of investors in Asia — China and India in particular — reflects an increasingly decentralized reality in global technology investment. Asian banks, private equity firms, venture capital funds and hardware and Internet giants are all willing to invest in domestic start-ups. And American investors are increasingly willing to back Asian players with advantages in their home markets. China and India have two of the world’s largest smartphone markets, and investors are particularly interested in finding ways to make money from these giants. Small hardware companies that use their knowledge of China’s electronics supply chain to make sensors and novel devices like drones are also drawing attention — realms of technology not yet dominated by the current power players in the industry, namely Apple, Google and Microsoft. In India, the two largest investments were made by the American hedge fund Tiger Global Management and the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Alibaba and its finance affiliate Ant Financial invested $575 million in the Indian mobile commerce company One97, while Tiger made a $500 million investment in India’s leading e-commerce site, Flipkart. Tiger Global has yet to make an investment in the United States this year and has focused 82 percent of its new investments in India at companies in their early stages, according to a June report from CB Insights. “India is one of the youngest countries, and their mobile penetration is low,” said Michael Dempsey, an analyst for CB Insights. “With more than a billion people, why wouldn’t it be one of the next major tech hubs? That’s what investors are thinking.”

Can SoundCloud Be the Facebook of Music?: SoundCloud has 150 million registered users, up from 10 million in 2011, and claims 175 million total listeners a month. According to ComScore, its traffic across desktop and mobile rose 14 percent in May from a year earlier, and 142 percent from two years ago. The audience skews younger than Spotify’s and Pandora’s. While SoundCloud has become a familiar feature of the digital landscape, it’s barely registered in most coverage of the Grand Streaming Wars of 2015, in which Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora Media, and others scrap for earshare. Then again, 8-year-old SoundCloud has a different mission. Its content is a creator-driven free-for-all: Anybody can upload a song (or other audio) and use SoundCloud’s tools to get it out there. Aspiring musicians, mainstream artists, DJs, podcasters, and others have uploaded 100-million-plus tracks and clips, creating a YouTube-like sprawl of unpredictable content.For listeners, SoundCloud is less like a music collection or radio station than an audio-based social network.