Daily Tech Snippet: Friday August 28

Uber China closes $1 billion fundraising round at $7 billion valuation: sources: Uber’s China arm has closed its $1 billion fundraising round early, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, with investors still hopeful for the U.S.-based ride service despite strong domestic competition in the car-hailing market. The deal was oversubscribed, said the second source directly familiar with the fundraising. According to a fundraising document seen by Reuters last week, this round values Uber China at $7 billion, with the unit planning to list on the mainland by 2020.

One Billion People Log In to Facebook for First Time: For the first time, a billion people used Facebook in a single day on Monday. Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, observed the occasion with a post on his Facebook page, saying that one out of seven people on Earth logged in to the social network to connect with their friends and family. The one billion figure is different from the daily user numbers Facebook discloses each quarter when it reports its financial results. Those are the average number of daily users, counted over a 30-day period. Facebook had 968 million daily active users in June. Most people on Facebook live outside the United States and Canada.

YouTube gets super serious about gaming videos: Enter player two: YouTube stepped into the world of game-streaming Wednesday with the official launch of YouTube Gaming -- its answer to Amazon's popular gaming site, Twitch. The new section of YouTube allows gaming companies and everyday gamers to share live or recorded videos about the games of the moment. It also gives YouTube an official home for video game content as the business of watching other people play video games continues to gain popularity. Google first announced it would launch YouTube Gaming early this summer, ahead of the industry's big Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show, known more widely as E3. The debut comes a year after Google lost a bidding war with Amazon to buy Twitch, the Web's current leader in video game streaming. Amazon bought Twitch last August for nearly $1 billion dollars. Twitch is Google's main competition here. But YouTube isn't starting from scratch: it already has a huge amount of gaming content across its site. The company boasts "billions" of views across its site and says that time its users spend with gaming videos is up 75 percent in the past year. ZEFR, a technology firm that crunches YouTube data, estimates that videos of the walkthrough genre of what is known as "Let's Play" has garnered 40 billion views in the lifetime of YouTube.

Shazura: A More Efficient Way to Search Images: While most image-search software finds photos using keywords or phrases, Shazura’s binary system behaves more like the human brain, visually matching images that look the same with greater speed and efficiency. Pérez de la Coba, an electrical engineer by training, began coding Shazura in 2011 out of frustration. She’d snapped a photo of a pair of shoes she wanted but had trouble finding them online with existing image-comparison services such as Google’s. Upload a file, outline what you want to search for, and Shazura’s algorithm converts the image to a lengthy “numeric signature” containing extensive descriptive information. The number for a willow, say, is distinct from that for a cypress, or a green bag from a blue one. By cutting out the intermediary translation steps, Shazura sifts through a customer’s image database more quickly and accurately and uses less computing power than traditional search engines. Without having to rely on keyword tags or extensive if-then instructions, Shazura can make large-scale image searches much easier for government agencies, advertisers, or social networks, says Pérez de la Coba. Shazura has raised $1.2 million from investors and so far the 10-employee company has licensed its technology to clothiers El Corte Inglés and RichRelevance.

Facebook's Instagram adds new photo sizes to keep users, attract ads: Instagram has added new layout options in addition to its signature square for pictures and videos in a bid to attract more advertisers and to stop users defecting to more flexible services such as Snapchat. The move is the first major alteration to the photo-sharing, social media service since Facebook Inc bought it for $1 billion in 2012, and addresses the wishes of many of its 300 million users, who have been constrained by the square format. One in five photos and videos posted on the service do not fit the square format, Instagram said in a blog post. "Friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end," it said. From Thursday, Instagram's web-based service and its mobile apps running on Google Inc's Android system and Apple Inc's iOS will allow portrait and landscape formats, giving both users and paying advertisers more options. The move should help Instagram in its battle with newer rivals such as Snapchat for users in the fast-moving messaging and media-sharing market. At the same time, it should attract more advertising revenue for Instagram, which said in June it would open its platform to all advertisers by the end of the year, rather than just to select brands. Instagram is expected to generate nearly $600 million in advertising revenue by the end of this year and $2.8 billion in 2017, according to projections from research firm eMarketer.

Apple is closing in on Fitbit: Apple, which launched the Apple Watch in June, is within striking distance of leader Fitbit Inc in the wearable devices market, market research firm IDC said. Apple shipped 3.6 million Apple Watches in the second quarter of 2015, just behind Fitbit's 4.4 million wearable fitness and health trackers, IDC said. The Apple Watch, which sports many health-related features and apps, is seen as the biggest rival to Fitbit's trackers. Shipments of wearable devices more than tripled to 18.1 million units in the second quarter, IDC said. "It's worth noting that Fitbit only sells basic wearables - a category that is expected to lose share over the next few years, leaving Apple poised to become the next market leader for all wearables," the IDC report said. Fitbit Inc's stock market listing in June got a rousing response from investors, with shares jumping as much as 60 percent. They closed at $38.40 on Wednesday, nearly double their IPO price.