Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 8

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• China stocks are 8% down this morning; Alibaba stock is at its lifetime low: China's securities regulator said there was "panic sentiment" in mainland stock markets on Wednesday, acknowledging the recent increase in irrational selling, Reuters reported. Shortly after, the People's Bank of China said it will closely watch stock market direction and guard against systematic regional financial risks. The comments did little to soothe investor worries about tumbling mainland equities, with the Shanghai Composite sinking more than 8 percent in early trade on Wednesday. In US trading, Alibaba was traded at its lifetime low.


• Worldwide spend on gadgets will fall year-on-year this year for the first time since 2010: According to a new forecast from Gartner, shoppers worldwide will spend less on gadgets in 2015 than they did in 2014 — the first drop since 2010. Analysts from Gartner still predict we'll spend a total of $606 billion in 2015. But it's still a decline of 5.7 percent compared with 2014 — lower than Gartner had forecast just three months ago. So what's behind the softer sales? Its because sales of desktops, tablets and smartphones are all slowing. Fewer people are buying desktop computers in Western Europe, Japan and Russia. In addition the tablet market is reaching its saturation point, and that analysts expect users to upgrade their tablets an average of once every three years — far less than smartphones. Sales of mobile devices such as smartphones as well as of high-end laptops will continue to grow, the firm said. Still, even within that bright spot, there is some hint of a slowdown. The rates of first-time smartphone buyers in China, one of the world's fastest-growing and most important mobile markets, have slowed.


• Alibaba boosts Singapore Post stake, invest in SingPost's e-commerce unit: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is investing about $206 million to expand its holdings in Singapore Post and its e-commerce subsidiary, the two companies said in a statement. SingPost is seeking to boost its e-commerce business to offset weak postal revenues, and last year an Alibaba unit bought an over 10 percent stake in SingPost for $249 million. In the latest deal, Alibaba said it was buying an additional 5 percent stake in SingPost for S$187.1 million. Alibaba will also invest up to S$92 million to buy a 34 percent stake in Quantium Solutions, a SingPost subsidiary that provides e-commerce logistics across the Asia Pacific. Alibaba is currently the second largest shareholder in SingPost after Singapore Telecommunications


• Music streaming firm Saavn raises $100M from Tiger Global, others: Saavn (South Asian Audio Video Network), a US-based Indian music streaming firm, has raised $100 million in Series C funding from existing investor Tiger Global Management and others. The company will use the money to improve product development efforts and to speed up customer acquisition. Saavn is said to be preparing for the launch of a video streaming service. The company claims to be adding one million users every month. Earlier this year, Saavn had appointed former Google executive Mahesh Narayanan as COO. Last year, Saavn added Twitter-powered radio station to its service. It also entered into licensing agreements with Warner Music and EMI Music that helped it add 800,000 tracks from international artists.


• ClipMine Improves Videos With Crowdsourced Tagging And Annotations: So this happens to me pretty often: I pull up an online video that I want to watch, only to be taken aback when I realize that it’s 10 or 20 or 30 minutes long. It’s particularly frustrating when there’s just one section or just one quote that I’m looking for. I end up skipping around trying to find that one bit — not exactly a great experience. A new startup is trying to fix that. With ClipMine, you get searchable videos, with a table of contents. For example, here’s a curated collection of videos related to startups. With each video, not only can you see an outline of all the big topics covered and jump to the section that interests you, you can also search for every time something gets mentioned (though your success will depend on how thoroughly the video has been tagged and annotated). To be clear, ClipMine isn’t trying to build its own video player. Instead, it sits on top of players like YouTube. You can also install a plugin to see the ClipMine player anywhere you see YouTube videos.