Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, July 14

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• Brands Hope You Like Them Enough to Pin Them at the Top of Your Facebook News Feed: An update to Facebook's news feed allows users to select a group of preferred friends, whose posts will always appear at the top of the home page. Facebook is billing the feature as an extra layer of personalization on top of what the news feed algorithm selects for users automatically, based on their behavior. In addition to selecting best friends, Facebook also gives users the ability to choose from the list of pages they've “Liked” for retail and consumer brands, news organizations, or interest groups. The ones that make the cut will also appear at the top of a user's news feed, along with family and best buds. The feature gives hope to marketing executives who felt burned by an overcrowded news feed that meant even fans rarely saw their updates. Some companies had been paying Facebook to advertise their pages and increase “Likes,” an expense that made less sense if people weren't seeing the posts. Now a user who designates pages as important will “see any new stories they’ve shared since your last visit to Facebook at the top of News Feed, with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the top,” according to Facebook. “You can scroll down to see the rest of your News Feed normally.”


• In a Major Shift of Emphasis, Out-Gunned Rackspace Seeks Growth in Microsoft Cloud Partnership: Rackspace Hosting will sell support services to customers running on Microsoft’s Internet-based Windows Azure service, in a major shift of emphasis for the cloud-computing company. The partnership announced Monday means people can pay the San Antonio, Texas-based company to set up, manage and support technology rented from Windows Azure, or for support services on top of their existing Microsoft cloud deployments. Rackspace will continue to operate its own web-hosting and cloud services supported by its data centers and will let customers mix and match their IT between the two companies’ facilities. The shift is part of a broader one for Rackspace as it seeks to make more money out of its support organization. Revenue growth slowed the past two years to about 17 percent annually and the company’s stock fell the most in eight months in May after it released a second-quarter sales forecast that was below analysts’ estimates. Rackspace support services will start at $1,500 per month, Engates said, and customers should save from 40 percent to 70 percent by using the company’s services rather than doing the same support tasks in-house. Microsoft is the first of multiple partners. Providing support services on top of Amazon.com Inc.’s market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud is “the headline” of the strategy, Pichler said. Larger cloud companies have outspent Rackspace on infrastructure for the best part of a decade. Microsoft spent $5.5 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 2014, compared with $435 million for Rackspace. The three companies each deploy millions of servers, versus the estimated 100,000 that Rackspace has under management. While Rackspace generated $1.79 billion in 2014 revenue, Amazon’s cloud subsidiary, for example, brought in $1.57 billion in its most recent quarter, up 49 percent from a year earlier.


• Wal-Mart to Counterattack Amazon’s ‘Prime Day’ With Web Sale: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is cutting prices on thousands of products this week in a counterattack to Prime Day, an event Amazon.com Inc. is using to promote its subscription service. Wal-Mart will begin the sale on July 15, the same day as Amazon’s much-publicized promotion. During Prime Day, Amazon will offer special discounts to members of its service, which costs $99 a year. As part of the effort, Wal-Mart also is lowering its minimum purchase for free shipping to $35 from $50. The move marks an escalating battle between Wal-Mart’s e-commerce site and Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Wal-Mart also has been developing its own competitor to Prime that will cost $50 a year, half the cost. But it won’t have the same speed of delivery as Prime or some of the other perks, such as Amazon’s streaming video and music services. Wal-Mart’s promotion this week is separate from that push, and the deals are available to all customers. Fernando Madeira, president of Walmart.com, took a dig at Amazon in a blog post on Monday, saying that Wal-Mart’s discounts won’t just be for people who pay for a membership.


• Shares of China's ZTE set to rise over 30 percent on share buyback: Shares of Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp were set to surge more than 30 percent in early Tuesday trade after the board approved an A-share buyback plan estimated at no more than 1 billion yuan ($161 million).


• Uber resumes payments through credit card in India: Beginning today, ride sharing app Uber Technologies Inc has resumed accepting credit card payments in India. Uber’s app has been tweaked for the two-factor authentication (2FA) flow that the Reserve Bank of India mandates for all card-based payments, the company said in a press statement. This feature is available to all Android users immediately and will be extended on the iOS platform in the coming weeks. Uber had stopped accepting payments through credit cards (issued in India) and debit cards seven months ago after it was pulled up by the RBI. As a safety measure, RBI requires all credit and debit card transactions to undergo a two-step process for honouring payments. Typically, a user swipes or enters the credit/debit card information in the first step and then has to enter a password in the second step. Uber followed only one-step authentication and directly billed users at the end of the ride, which fell foul of RBI rules. The San Francisco-based company had tied up with mobile wallet firm Paytm to sidestep the 2FA compliance requirement. Uber will continue to accept Paytm payments, it said.


• Netflix Hits A New All-Time High Ahead Of Its Stock Split And Q2 Earnings: Netflix’s shares popped nearly four percent today to an all-time high of $707.61. The new record comes a day before the company splits its shares on a seven-for-one basis, and two days before it will report earnings. Shares in the online video streaming and content shop have been on a tear, roughly doubling so far this year. Netflix is now worth north of $40 billion. Driving the bull run in Netflix has been its share split, which has proved quite popular with investors, and recent strong analyst sentiment on the company. New price targets can sometimes move prices closer to targets, of course. At risk for Netflix is the heavy weight of high expectations. On the heels of its split, if Netflix borks its earnings, investors will be merciless. Also in the cards for Netflix is simply how richly it is valued. The company has, according to Yahoo Finance, a forward price-earnings ratio of more than 200. That implies that investors are quite willing to pay for tomorrow’s profits today when it comes to Big Red.


• As Ad Tech consolidates, firms that could be acquisition targets: InMobi tops list: AOL reportedly in talks to buy mobile ad network Millennial Media for $300 million to $350 million, which would let AOL sell ads within thousands of apps and give it access to more data and better targeting tools. But industry players said there are other mobile companies up for grabs. 1. InMobi is one of the first choices to replace Millennial on a list of lucrative, independent mobile players. Google supposedly had its eye on the India-based network earlier this year, but CEO Naveen Tewari claims he wants to keep the company independent. InMobi's a bit bigger internationally than it is in the U.S., but it's acquired companies like Overlay Media—a data scientist team that zeroes in on targeting—to build up its ad offerings. Verve, xAd and NinthDecimal all put a different spin on working the location data that bounces off of phones for advertisers. Sam Bloom, general manager of interactive at Camelot, contended that the players risk being outpaced as digital powerhouses Facebook, Google and Yahoo build their own geo-targeting technology. "My sense is some of these [smaller] guys will just crumble," Bloom said. "While [location has] been unique for a period of time, I don't think that's the case any longer. Over time, the smaller guys will get beat because the bigger guys have bigger sales forces."