Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, July 16

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• Google Unveils Buy Button on Ads in Mobile-Commerce Push, Ties Up With Flipkart, Ebay on Deep Links: Google Inc. is testing a feature to let consumers purchase products by clicking through advertisements, seeking to expand options for mobile retail sales. The Internet-search company’s service, Purchases on Google, will let people using smartphones click on select search ads that take the users directly to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google, according to an e-mail. The tools will work with a “limited number of retailers” for now, the company said. The company also announced an effort to alert smartphone users to information such as sales and loyalty programs at nearby stores, through its Google Now program. Google is expanding information on product ratings in ads and giving users more data on local inventory, as well. The Mountain View, California-based company will make it simpler for ads to drive consumers to shopping apps, rather than to retailer’s websites. EBay and Flipkart, an e-commerce site based in India, are among the early partners in the initiative, which uses a technology called deep links.


• Facebook Adds Buy Button Integration As It Continues To Reinvent Pages: It’s been over a year since Facebook started testing its buy button in ads on the newsfeed, and it appears that the company is now ready to take the service to its next logical progression with dedicated shops on Pages where users can browse for and purchase items. This is a pretty major step in Facebook’s marked plans to take over ecommerce and turn pages into destinations where users can go to grab the information they need and make quick orders. With Facebook’s recent efforts of adding business hours and OpenTable integrations, it’s clear that the shop feature is the next step towards making Pages a more visible part of the user experience. The newsfeed has dominated how users have absorbed information from businesses on Facebook for the past decade. Now, it seems the company is ready to revitalize Facebook Pages and transform them into commerce destinations where users can not only quickly grab business info, but as of today, also buy stuff. Today, Facebook made a pretty clear statement that Pages is shifting to become a major priority for them in terms of user traffic. BuzzFeed reported that the company had recently started testing shops with ‘buy buttons’ inside of Facebook Pages.


• More Fizzle Than Sizzle on Amazon’s Prime Day: Has Amazon Prime Day been everything it was advertised to be? The reaction online at the halfway mark has been less than effusive, with the Twitter hashtag #PrimeDayFail gaining traction Wednesday alongside complaints of lackluster merchandise, paltry discounts and all-around disappointment. The day seemed to start with excitement. But shoppers were quickly grumbling about a less-than-stellar lineup. Others were underwhelmed by the discounts. Clunky navigation on Amazon was an issue. When the deals were good, shoppers reported being put on endless wait lists. Some shoppers even said their Prime Day experience drove them to other shopping sites, including Walmart. An Amazon spokeswoman said the much-deplored, confusing “Join wait list” button simply meant that all available discounts had been placed in customers’ carts. But if those customers didn’t complete their purchases within 15 minutes, that discount was passed on to the next customer in line. The wait list, she said, often allowed Amazon to secure more inventory. After long wait lists for Bose headphones on Wednesday morning, Amazon added more units to the sale, she said.


• Netflix Posts Mixed Results, but New Memberships Surge - Shares up 10% on Earnings: These are heady times for Netflix. On Wednesday, investors even looked past a 63 percent drop in second-quarter profits to send shares in Netflix surging nearly 10 percent in after-hours trading, on news that it added a record 3.3 million global streaming members during the second quarter, eclipsing expectations. There are reasons for caution. The big falloff in net income Netflix reported on Wednesday underscored the huge level of investment required to execute its strategy of pressing deeper into original programming and aggressively moving overseas. Netflix has warned investors that it doesn’t expect to break even globally until the end of 2016. The company has said that it will deliver material global profits after that period of expansion. Total revenue was $1.6 billion in the second quarter, up 23 percent from the period last year.


• Intel Earnings Surpass Forecasts, Driven by Data Centers: Overall for the second quarter, Intel reported net income of $2.7 billion, or 55 cents a share. That was down $100 million from a year earlier, but was the same in per-share terms because Intel has bought back a lot of its stock. Net income was also lifted by a lower tax rate. Revenue fell 5 percent, to $13.2 billion. Intel has been working on making a new future for itself by investing more in chips for data centers and Internet-connected products for industry — and some of those investments are paying off. Sales of chips for data centers rose 10 percent from a year earlier. In total, data center, Internet of Things and high-level memory chip sales were 40 percent of revenue and 70 percent of profits. Intel reported on Wednesday that second-quarter revenue from chips for PCs fell 14 percent.