Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 1

• Daily Report: The Buy Button Heads to YouTube and Twitter: On Tuesday, YouTube said it would make it easier for advertisers to pair their ads with videos highlighting a particular product. The new feature, available in the coming months, will allow viewers to get directly to a retailer’s site with a single click. No searching required. The new feature seems to be particularly appealing on the many videos of product reviews and tutorials, a type of video that has been growing in popularity on YouTube. It also, as Hiroko Tabuchi writes, brings “a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs.” If there was any doubt about that trend, Twitter put it to rest on Wednesday. As Vindu Goel reports, the company is making it possible to put a buy button in a tweet. “A Twitter user,” he wrote, “can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase.” It has been a big week for new online ad tools and features, several of which have been announced at Advertising Week in New York. As Sydney Ember wrote on Monday, Madison Avenue might still be the heart of the advertising industry, but much of the money — and influence — is coming from Silicon Valley.

• More on the Twitter Buy Button: Twitter Makes ‘Buy’ Button Widely Available: After two years of testing, Twitter is finally making it easy for millions of merchants to sell products through a tweet. The social network announced Wednesday that its “buy now” button will be available to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations. A store that is a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Shopify can use the software to tweet out a link to a product that will show up with a buy button. A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase. (The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information.) Twitter’s expansion of its buy button, which builds on a partnership with the e-commerce platform Stripe announced earlier this month, comes as competing platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly from their services. On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube service announced that advertisers can now place buy buttons in other people’s videos — allowing, say, Apple to offer a way to buy an iPhone from inside a fan’s video showing the unboxing of a new iPhone (yes, there are lot of videos like that). Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, are also testing buy buttons. Facebook isn’t so sure about Buy Buttons. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, said that Facebook studied the behavior of its 1.5 billion users and concluded that buy buttons should not be a high priority right now.

• More on the YouTube Buy Button: YouTube to Expand Shopping Links to More Videos: YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would introduce shopping ads on its videos that let viewers jump directly to retailers’ websites and buy the products featured in the clips. The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in. YouTube’s new ads bring a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced “buy button” functions that let users purchase the products that appear in the millions of posts and photos shared on their platforms each day. Google itself has pushed to become a shopping destination in an increasingly direct challenge to Amazon, currently the web’s de facto shopping search engine. YouTube’s ads seek to tap into the fast growth in product reviews and tutorials posted by users. Susan Wojcicki, the company’s chief executive, announced the change at an advertising industry event in New York. In the last year alone, viewership for product-related clips on YouTube has jumped 40 percent, she said. YouTube users have already uploaded tens of thousands of reviews of a battery-powered self-balancing skateboardlike device that retailers expect to be a hot holiday gift this year. Once the service is available in the coming months, videos from users who opt into the program, and which contain products that match YouTube ads, will display an icon in the top-right corner. Users can click on the icon to view a list of images and prices of the products featured in the video, and to jump to retailers’ websites for more reviews, information and an option to buy. YouTube matches videos with ads based on the video’s content and audience. Similar to YouTube’s AdWords service, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on a shopping ad. The site will test the ads this fall, and will offer the service to AdWords clients in the coming months, it said. For users who upload YouTube videos, the shopping ads could mean a new revenue stream, the sites said. And for viewers, YouTube promises an unobtrusive way to shop as they surf videos.

• What it’s like to ride in a Google self-driving car: Google’s cars have been trained to be extremely conservative in unusual situations. “They understand their own limitations,” said Dmitri Dolgov, principle engineer on Google’s self-driving car project, at a briefing later. “They understand that there’s something really crazy going on and they might not be able to make really good, confident predictions about the future. So they take a very conservative approach.” A few blocks away from Google I got another glimpse of the SUV’s cautious nature. A car, also with a stop sign, arrived at the intersection just after us. The Google car inched forward in two spurts. After a pause we drove through the intersection. We got through it fine, but slower than I expect most drivers would have. Soon we pull back in front of GoogleX’s building, a 14-minute ride in the books. “Manual,” calls out the female voice as our driver took control again, and turned the car off. If I was grading the SUV on our brief trek I would give it a B+. It wasn’t perfect driving, but safe and effective. Of course, our route wasn’t especially difficult. The real challenges come when pedestrians, inclement weather, construction sites and cyclists arrive.

• Microsoft, Google stand down in patent battles: Microsoft and Google have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany. In another sign of the winding down of the global smartphone wars, the companies said the deal puts an end to court fights involving a variety of technologies, including mobile phones, wifi, and patents used in Microsoft's Xbox game consoles and other Windows products. The agreement also drops all litigation involving Motorola Mobility, which Google sold to Lenovo last year while keeping its patents. However, as Microsoft and Google continue to make products that compete directly with each other, including search engines and mobile computing devices, the agreement notably does not preclude any future infringement lawsuits, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed.

• Sources: Jack Dorsey Expected to Be Named Permanent Twitter CEO: Jack is apparently back — for good this time. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has been serving as interim CEO for the past three months, is expected be named the company’s new permanent CEO as early as tomorrow, although that timeframe may change, according to sources. Dorsey will apparently continue to run Square, the payments company he founded where he’s also CEO. [UPDATE: Sources said that it’s not clear if the board has officially voted on Dorsey’s appointment, because it was still settling the status of other key execs this week, most specifically revenue chief Adam Bain and CFO Anthony Noto. Bain is widely expected to become COO, although Noto may also report directly to Dorsey. Both have indicated to the board, said multiple sources, that they want Dorsey in the top job. The Twitter board also has what one source called a “Plan B” of a single serious outside candidate, although every single person I have contacted who has been considered and also contacted by the company’s recruiting firm, Spencer Stuart, said that discussions did not progress very far.] Sources added that there is likely to be some shake-up of the board too, most immediately the departure of Costolo as a director.

• Google Is Acquiring Rich Messaging Startup Jibe Mobile: Google said on Wednesday that it has acquired Jibe Mobile, a messaging startup that specialized in helping carriers build support for native video messaging into their services. The effort, designed to make video chat as ubiquitous and interoperable as text messages, is known as Rich Communications Services, or RCS. Google said it is making the purchase as part of a commitment to supporting RCS as part of its messaging strategy. “SMS carrier messaging is used by billions of people every day and enables people to reach anyone around the world, regardless of their device, carrier, app or location,” Android engineer and “minister of messaging” Mike Dodd said in a blog post. “However, the features available in SMS haven’t kept up with modern messaging apps. Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard for carrier messaging and brings many of the features that people now expect from mobile messaging, such as group chats, high res photos and more.” Financial terms were not disclosed.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, September 30

• Alibaba, Ant Financial invest about $680 million in Paytm, up stake to 40%: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has made a strategic investment in One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, along with its affiliate Ant Financial, which had made its first investment in February 2015. With this, Alibaba becomes a new investor in the Indian online payment and e-commerce firm. Two people aware of the details told ET that the Alibaba Group Holding will pick up about 20% stake through a fresh issue of shares by investing about $680 million(around Rs4,450 crore). The deal has been closed. In February, Ant Financial had picked up a 25% stake for $575 million, of which $200 million came in as the first tranche. The fresh investment by Alibaba Group Holdings subsumes the outstanding tranche of $375 million, and will see Ant Financial's stake being lowered to 20%, one of the people aware of the details said.? Alibaba will now hold around 20%. With this, Alibaba will become the biggest shareholder in the company as it will hold 40% through two entities, and Paytm will be its ecommerce play in India. Under the financial contours of the transaction, existing investor Saif Partners' stake comes down to 30% from 37% while Paytm's founder and Chairman & Managing Director Vijay Shekhar Sharma now owns about 21%, down from 27%.

• Google Unveils New Chromecast, Other Devices to Connect Smartphone and TV: Google on Tuesday revealed two new Chromecast streaming devices — one for televisions, another for speakers — along with a new tablet computer and a pair of new devices from the company’s Nexus line of Android mobile phones. Much like Apple, Google is pushing a future where televisions become a vessel for the Internet and channels are replaced with apps. But instead of having separate devices for music and TV, Google has tried to position the mobile phone as the center of everything — a kind of remote control for life.Enter Chromecast, Google’s popular streaming device that beams content from mobile phones to TVs via the Internet. The idea is pretty much the same as Apple TV, but Apple TV costs $149 and is essentially a small computer with lots of storage for apps to run on a television. Chromecast costs $35 and is just a waypoint between TVs and phones. The field of streaming devices has become crowded — Amazon and Roku make similar products. To distinguish itself from those stick-shaped competitors, Google’s new Chromecast is about the size and shape of a silver dollar. Google also announced that it had sold 20 million Chromecast devices and that it was now compatible with thousands of apps, including Netflix and HBO Now. For a company whose spotty hardware record includes Google Glass, the much-maligned Internet glasses, and Nexus Q, a streaming device that was never released, Chromecast is a huge success. So Google is expanding it. On Tuesday, the company also announced Chromecast Audio, a new line of Chromecast devices that plug directly into speakers and receive music sent from a phone. Google simultaneously announced a new partnership with Spotify, the popular music-streaming app that is in a battle with Apple’s new Apple Music offering.

• Hands-On With Google’s New Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X Smartphones: Google announced its newest pair of Android smartphones, the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X. This is the first time since the Nexus line was launched, in 2010, that Google is releasing two phones at once. Each is targeted at a different segment of the market, but they both share a number of critical features for wooing customers. The 6P is Google’s new flagship, the successor to last year’s Nexus 6. The original Nexus 6 was made by Motorola (owned by Google at the time, though since bought by Lenovo) and was met with mixed reactions from critics and customers. It was big, the camera wasn’t as good as those in competing phones, and it was roughly twice the price of its own predecessor, the Nexus 5. The 6P is the first Nexus phone made by Chinese company Huawei, and it tries to fix what was wrong with the 6 while bringing a few new things to the party. The smaller Nexus 5X, manufactured by LG, is just over five inches long and has an ultrasensitive camera that is designed to work better indoors, where people take most of their pictures. It starts at $379 for an entry-level phone without a contract. The other larger phone, the Nexus 6P, which is made by Huawei, is 5.7 inches and starts at $499. Both phones use a new kind of charging cable, called USB Type-C, that powers up more quickly and has a symmetrical charging port so people won’t have to fumble to figure out which way to plug it in. Nexus runs what Google calls the “purest” form of its Android operating system. The devices come with a few Google apps but are otherwise free of so-called bloatware — software loaded onto a device by a phone maker — that can slow the device. Also, Nexus products receive monthly security updates and come with the latest version of Android, making them a kind of showcase for new Google products.

• The ‘Oh, Shit!’ Moment When Growth Stops: Most high-growth businesses stare down periods when growth unexpectedly slows down or stops altogether. At some point, that stomach-churning moment has visited the leadership of most of the companies I’ve advised. We also faced it at OpenTable, eBay and Reel.com when I was managing them. And it has reputedly happened to a number of today’s mightiest Internet businesses as well, including the likes of Amazon and Facebook. CEOs at high-tech businesses work hard to keep as much growth going for as long as possible. Investors — both public and private — tend to value growth over everything else during most investment cycles, and the recent cycle has been no exception. Growth is where all the action is, and to where all the money flows. The reason for this is that the majority of returns are driven by a handful of companies that “break out.” And a business can’t get big enough to break out if it isn’t growing. Entrepreneurs’ reactions to these moments fall into one of two extremes: There is the preternaturally calm CEO who resolves to watch the metrics closely to see if they change; he or she is concerned that a hint of panic will cause the rest of the team to panic, so they “Zen it out” as best they can. Then there is the CEO who freaks out, setting off alarm bells that reverberate throughout the entire building and continue ringing in every single employee’s ears. Which approach do I advocate? The freak-out, of course! Why? Because the unexpected slowing of growth in a “growth” business presents an existential risk to the company. Growth rates over a company’s history tend to move only one way over time (down); even in hypergrowth companies, growth rates tend to fall to earth … which is why I’ve referred to this effect as “gravity.” Once gravity takes hold, it’s very hard to reaccelerate the growth of the business. Slowing growth portends a strong possibility that the company will never again experience prior levels of growth going forward. There are precious few examples of this happening on a sustained basis: Amazon accomplished it during 2010-2011, contributing to its value today. We accomplished this during my tenure at OpenTable, leading to a fourfold growth in market cap over six quarters. But growth will never resume magically. If CEOs can figure out what exactly happened to cause that slowdown, it presents them with the opportunity to try to correct what went wrong.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 29

• Google launches ad format linked to Gmail: During a presentation on Monday, Google announced a product that will let marketers target ad campaigns to consumers using their email addresses. The program, called Customer Match, lets companies upload a list of customers’ email addresses gleaned, for example, from its loyalty membership program. The company can show specific ads to these customers when they are signed into Google.

• Exclusive: Airbnb to double bookings to 80 million this year - investors: Airbnb is expected to double its nightly bookings this year, investors familiar with the company's performance said, a sign that the home and room renting site's battles with regulators have yet to dent its rapid global growth. The website is expected to have about 80 million nights booked this year, up from about 40 million in 2014, according to the investors, who declined to be named. This pace of growth is expected to continue or accelerate, the investors said. The company says it has more than 1.5 million listings - homes, apartments, guest rooms, even houseboats and tree houses - in more than 34,000 cities in 190 countries. "It's a global phenom," said Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures who made an early personal investment in Airbnb in 2010. "(It) is going to continue to grow at a substantially higher rate than other businesses."

• Uber’s Chinese rival Didi Kuaidi invests in Ola: Didi Kuaidi, which competes with Uber  for a slice of China’s taxi-hailing market, has invested an undisclosed amount in India’s largest cab aggregator Ola. The investment is said to be part of the recent $225 million funding round led by Ola’s existing investors Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global Management and Japan’s SoftBank.  Ola claims to complete more than 750,000 daily rides in the country while Uber claims to offer around 200,000 rides. Ola has set an ambitious target of reaching one million drivers on its platform in three years. Currently, it has over 100,000 drivers, a number that has grown from 10,000 a year ago. Didi Kuaidi was formed after China’s largest taxi-hailing firms – Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache – merged in February this year. Till date Didi Kuaidi has raised $4.4 billion in seven rounds of funding from marquee investors such as Alibaba, Temasek Holdings, Tencent Holdings and others.

• Yahoo to spin off Alibaba stake despite no U.S. tax ruling: Yahoo said on Monday it would proceed with the planned spinoff of its stake in Alibaba even though the IRS has declined to rule on whether the transaction would be tax free. Yahoo's shares rose 4 percent to $28.71 in extended trading. The Web search company said earlier this month the IRS had denied its request for a private letter ruling on whether the spinoff of its stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant would be considered tax free. Based on Alibaba's Monday close of $59.24, Yahoo's 384 million shares of Alibaba are worth $22.75 billion. The value of the stake is slightly less than Yahoo's market capitalization of about $25.98 billion based on 941 million shares outstanding on July 31 and Monday's close. Many analysts say Yahoo's core business is worth close to nothing without its Asian assets. As of Monday's close, Yahoo's shares have declined a little more than 45 percent this year. Alibaba's shares have fallen nearly 45 percent over the same period.

• Apple iPhone 6s Breaks First-Weekend Sales Record: On Monday, Apple said it had sold more than 13 million new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus devices since they became available for sale on Friday, a record for first-weekend sales. That was up from the 10 million iPhones sold last year during the first weekend that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were sold. Any increase in sales was most likely helped by the geography of the markets where the new iPhones became available. This year, the iPhones went on sale in a dozen countries and territories, including China, which is one of Apple’s biggest markets. Last year, China was not among the countries that sold the iPhone on the first weekend, apparently because the devices had not received approval from Chinese regulators. Adding China to the product introduction more than doubled the initial market size, according to Walter Piecyk, an analyst at BTIG Research. Jan Dawson, the chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, said he also expected first-weekend sales to be higher than last year because the period for ordering the new iPhones before their sale date was longer than that for the previous generation of the device. The sales numbers slightly outpaced some Wall Street estimates. Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital, projected that Apple would sell 13 million phones on the opening weekend, and he said that Wall Street had expected that Apple would sell about 12 million. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray had predicted sales of 12 million to 13 million. First-weekend sales help indicate overall iPhone demand, an important measure given that the device accounts for the majority of Apple’s revenue. The initial sales also are a marker for how well the new smartphones may do during the end-of-year holiday season, which is typically the most significant sales period for consumer product companies. This year, UBS estimates that Apple will sell 78.4 million iPhones in the December quarter, up four million from last year, while FBR predicts the sale of 77 million iPhones.

• As Online Data Theft Escalates, Banks Look to Retailers to Bear the Losses On Sept. 1 last year, the website Rescator, known as the “Amazon.com of the black market,” alerted its customers that huge quantities of stolen debit and credit card data would go on sale the next day. “Load your accounts and prepare for an avalanche of cash!” the website urged. The next day, two batches of cardholder data were reportedly sold, according to legal documents. The website claimed the cards were 100 percent valid and working. Demand was so high that the website temporarily crashed. Over the next few days, several more batches of card data were sold. On Sept. 8, Home Depot issued a news release admitting its data systems had been breached. By then, the damage had been done. Approximately 56 million sets of card data had been stolen, some of which were sold on the black market and remained valid for several days. At a small credit union in California, fraudulent charges of more than $100,000 were posted in just three minutes after the card information was sold on the black market. A bank reported $300,000 in suspicious charges in two hours to the security blog Krebs on Security, which connected Home Depot with the stolen cards before the retailer did. A year later, the full tally of the Home Depot data breach remains unknown. Some estimate the fraudulent charges total well into the billions of dollars. Over the last couple of years, retailing has been a rich hunting ground for online criminals. They hacked into numerous companies, including Neiman Marcus, Sally Beauty and the crafts store Michaels. But the orchestrated theft at Target in late 2013, followed a few months later by the Home Depot data breach, eclipsed all of the others. So far, there have been no arrests in the Target and Home Depot breaches. As the size and scope of such attacks at retailers has grown, so have the losses, which have been largely shouldered by financial institutions. Now some small banks and others want Home Depot and those companies that suffer data breaches to pay.

• Google Virtual-Reality System Aims to Enliven As Tech Majors Eye Education: As part of a class last year on “Romeo and Juliet,” Jennie Choi, an English teacher at Mariano Azuela Elementary School in Chicago, took her sixth-grade students on a tour of Verona, the Italian city where Shakespeare’s play transpires. During the excursion, Ms. Choi asked her class to examine the variegated facade of a centuries-old building, known on tourist maps as “Juliet’s House,” where the family that may have been the inspiration for the fictional heroine once lived. She also encouraged her sixth graders to scrutinize the deteriorated tomb where they could imagine the Juliet character had died. But the students did not have to leave their Chicago classroom to take in the play’s Italian backdrop. Instead, as part of a pilot project for a new Google virtual field trip system for schools, Ms. Choi’s students tried out virtual-reality viewers — composed of cardboard and a cellphone — while their teacher used an app to guide them through stereoscopic vistas of the Italian town. The introduction of Google’s virtual-reality kits for classrooms highlights the growing importance of the education sector to major technology companies — and the mounting competition among them. In 2006, for instance, Google introduced Apps for Education, a bundle of cloud-based email, calendar and document-sharing products available free to schools. Now, 45 million students and teachers around the world use the apps, the company said. Microsoft has also developed a substantial school audience for its email, search, calendar, Skype and other software. This month, Microsoft introduced several new products for education customers, including a note-taking app called OneNote Class Notebook. But the advent of Google Expeditions is also indicative of an industry strategy shift. Some leading tech companies have recently made a decision to focus on designing products specifically for classroom use, rather than simply modifying their existing consumer or enterprise products and then marketing them to schools. Last year, Google introduced Classroom, a free app that teachers can use to create, collect and comment on student assignments. This month, Facebook announced that company engineers were working with Summit Public Schools in California on software to customize learning to individual students. Google engineers similarly worked with teachers to develop virtual-reality field trips based on course curriculums

• Academia Pushes A New Kind of Peer Review For Research With ‘Sessions’: For several years, Richard Price has had a quixotic dream to make cutting-edge academic research universally available to everyone. “I want a world where a 19-year-old kid in China can access a paper he’s interested in about lithium ion batteries on his phone on the subway and it’s validated by others and it’s in his own language,” Price said. Price has amassed 25 million users on his platform, Academia, which disseminates and validates research papers. Now he’s trying to take it to the next level with a feature called Sessions, which is a form of peer review that exists entirely online on Academia. “If you speak to academics, they will complain about the publishing system,” he said. “It can take 12 months to get the peer review done. Our grand vision for the publishing experience is that an academic should be able to get work published in 24 hours that is already peer reviewed by two people.” Academia has been trialling ‘Sessions’ with a select number of members but now it’s fully rolled out, with as many as 6,000 sessions going on simultaneously every day. Sessions allows select groups of academics to privately discuss a working paper for 20 days. It tries to mimic the dynamics of a conference where a researcher discusses their work with a select peer group in a question-and-answer session. Price said that there were a couple of features that were absolutely necessary to make this work. One is that it’s private, so that comments are not searchable on Google and academics have the ability to respond to critics personally before they revise their work. The other is that it’s not just a comment box at the bottom of PDF. Sessions’ comments are on the right-hand bar of the page and they are annotations that refer to specific sentences of paragraphs (kind of like Medium’s commenting format). There is also a time limit of 20 days so that there’s pressure for other academics to respond quickly. Lastly, Academia is its own distribution network and it can pull in other relevant researchers to comment on a person’s paper. Instead of cold-calling or e-mailing dozens of people, an academic can reach out to other researchers who have high author or paper rankings. Conceptually, Academia’s Paper Rank is comparable to Google’s Page Rank with citations and linking built in as a form of validation. The company, which has 26 employees, has raised around $18 million from investors including Khosla, Spark Capital and True Ventures.

• Are Marketers Finally Getting the Hang of Location-Based Mobile Ads? Essence talks up lessons from Google work: Until recently, location-based advertising has remained a small part of mobile ad budgets, primarily because it's difficult to pinpoint the exact person with the right type of ad on the fly. So, it was interesting that during an Advertising Week panel this morning about programmatic advertising, Essence digital agency and mobile advertising company xAd talked about their recent work for Google's search app (which also won Adweek's Media Plan of the Year award) as an example of how some initial hiccups led to successful place-based mobile ads. To promote Google's search app, Essence ran a campaign that pulled in 23 bits of custom data—including weather, time, location and photos—for each ad impression to show how Google search results are personalized to particular users. According to Essence, the campaign generated a 53 percent engagement rate and boosted brand awareness by 9 percent. That said, it was also the first time Essence ran a campaign pulling in multiple pieces of data in real time, causing plenty of logistical problems early on. For example, just because the campaign was targeted toward cities including London, it didn't mean the ads were actually served to people in London. With those learnings under the agency's belt, Christina Yoo, associate programmatic media director at Essence, talked about how a new version of the location-based campaign is now using better targeting tactics alongside programmatic buying. "In the beginning, one of our biggest problems was getting accuracy at scale," Yoo said. "We want to have these perfect [location-based] experiences for the individual, but we also want to make sure that the information that we're getting is accurate." After blanketing Google's ads based on a phone's latitude-longitude, the Essence and xAd teams drilled down into specific groups of consumers, targeting the ads by polygons—mapped plots of land—and mini data profiles about consumers. The mobile promos were also bought through programmatic private marketplaces.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September 28

• Facebook, eyeing TV dollars, rolls out new ad products: Facebook introduced a slate of new advertising products on Sunday, most of which are aimed at luring television advertisers onto the 1.5-billion user social network. The advertising options, most of which will also be available on Facebook-owned Instagram, are designed to take advantage of the social network's strengths on mobile devices. It has the world's most popular smartphone app and generates more than three-quarters of its $10 billion-plus in annual ad revenue on phones. On television, advertisers can buy ads based on how many people they will reach, an approach Facebook has adopted to ease the transition between television spending and digital spending. In addition, it can target highly specific audiences, such as women aged 18 to 35 years old who have shopped on a specific website, which TV cannot do. Among the new products are "brand awareness" ads, which aim to reach a large number of people to promote a company's name and brand, such as Coca Cola. Advertisers will also be able to poll users on mobile phones about whether they saw an ad -- a feature that used to be available only on desktop computers -- and they can use a format that allows them to display multiple videos at once that users can scroll through.

• YouTube Is Prepping Its Subscription Launch: Two Services, One Price: YouTube, which spent the first 10 years of its life as a free service, is getting ready to start selling tickets. Google’s video site appears to be finalizing launch plans for its long-in-the-making subscription service, and industry sources say they’ve been told to expect a launch near the end of October. A blast email from YouTube to content owners, telling them they have to agree to new terms by Oct. 22 or their “videos will no longer be available for public display or monetization in the United States,” helps support that timeline. But YouTube, which floated the idea of a new subscription service nearly a year ago, has never publicly committed to a timeline. Last spring, YouTube executives were telling content owners they were aiming for a mid-summer launch. It’s possible the launch could keep slipping, even beyond 2015. Note that we’re referring to a single service, not multiple ones. Sources say that’s because YouTube intends to bundle two different services into one offering: An update of its music service, which it launched in beta as YouTube Music Key last fall, and another service, yet to launch, that will give users the ability to watch anything on YouTube without seeing ads. Video industry sources say Google has told them it intends to charge $10 a month for the combined offering. It’s hard to imagine how YouTube will make money at that pricing, since its music service was supposed to cost $10 on its own, with the music labels and other copyright owners pocketing the majority of that.

• India Replaces China as Next Big Frontier for U.S. Tech Companies: Two years ago, India’s rise as a digital nation was hard to imagine. Internet penetration was modest, mobile phone networks were glacially slow, and smartphones were a blip in a sea of basic phones. Since 2013, however, the number of smartphone users in India has ballooned and will reach 168 million this year, the research firm eMarketer predicts, with 277 million Internet users in India expected over all. India already conducts more mobile searches on Google than any country besides the United States. Yet “we are barely scratching the surface of availability of Internet to the masses,” said Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, who emigrated from India to the United States 25 years ago.  India and its 1.25 billion residents have become the hottest growth opportunity — the new China — for American Internet companies. Blocked from China itself or frustrated by the onerous demands of its government, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as start-ups and investors, see India as the next best thing. The increasing appeal of India, now the world’s fastest growing major economy, was underscored in recent days. During a meeting in Seattle on Wednesday with American technology executives, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was unwavering on his government’s tough Internet policies. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on the other hand, was on a charm offensive during his own American tour. After a stop in New York City, he headed to Silicon Valley, where he visited Tesla and attended a dinner with tech chieftains like Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google. On Sunday, Mr. Modi participated in a town hall discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive. He also planned to drop by Google and Stanford University, mingle with entrepreneurs and address a sold-out arena of 18,000 people in San Jose, Calif., before heading back to New York to meet with President Obama on Monday. ”For India to keep making progress, it needs to be a leader online,” Mr. Modi said during the Facebook event. He acknowledged that tech companies like Facebook were not connecting people out of pure altruism, but he told Mr. Zuckerberg, “I hope this will not just be something to enhance your company’s bank balance.” The overall message to Silicon Valley from Mr. Modi, who posts regularly on Twitter and Facebook: Help India become an Internet powerhouse.

• Solving the Amazon Puzzle: In a battle of tech titans, some investors may have reason to prefer Bezos over Brin and Page. Which company is a better investment, Google or Amazon.com? Conventional wisdom suggests Google, which turns huge profits, enjoys better gross margins, and has a far lower price-to-earnings ratio. Yet Amazon’s stock has returned 62.6 percent in the past year, compared with 9.6 percent for Google. That’s a phenomenon Steve Hanke, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Ryan Guttridge, a fellow there, have named the “Amazon Puzzle,” and one they say they’ve figured out. The key is hidden in asset turns, or how effective companies are at getting revenue out of their investments. Asset turnover is defined as sales divided by total assets; the higher the number, the better. “Google is just abysmal, and Amazon is really good,” says Guttridge, who once worked for legendary stock picker Bill Miller at Legg Mason in Baltimore. How abysmal? Try 0.54 in 2013, 0.55 in 2014, and 0.53 so far this year, versus 2.05, 1.88, and 2.12 for Amazon, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Guttridge and Hanke credit Amazon’s cash flow–focused CEO, Jeff Bezos. Bezos has a salary of just $81,840 a year, though he gets a further $1.6 million to cover his personal security. Beyond that, he receives nothing atop the return on the 18 percent of Amazon that he owns. It’s the same stock shareholders own. He makes money only if the stock goes up and must keep shareholders happy or be held accountable. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, while they earn only $1 a year in salary, control classes of stock outside investors can’t touch. That puts Google’s lucrative search and YouTube services further out of reach of the little guy. And that’s why Guttridge is betting on Bezos. “You buy equities because you expect to benefit from the free cash flow of the business,” he says. “With Amazon, you have a clear line between asset turns and cash flow.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 24

• Coming Soon to Checkouts: Microchip-Card Payment Systems: Starting next month, retailers that haven’t upgraded their payment systems to read E.M.V. microchips — the small, metallic rectangles that are increasingly prevalent on the front of American charge cards — will bear the financial liability for some fraudulent charges. (Gas stations have an extra two years to make the switch for charges from their fuel pumps.) E.M.V. stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the companies that created the standard in the mid-1990s. The new technology is a significant change from the current system, under which card issuers absorb most of the losses for in-person transactions made with counterfeit or stolen cards. Banks and merchants lost an estimated $16.3 billion last year globally on fraudulent transactions, and America has been their biggest problem spot. The country accounts for nearly half of the global losses, despite generating only 21 percent of the worldwide transaction volume, according to the Nilson Report, an industry researcher.Visa drew a line in the sand four years ago: American merchants would have until October 2015 to update their systems or absorb the losses themselves. Other major card networks quickly adopted the same deadline. Just days before the deadline, few merchants are ready. A handful of national retailers — most prominently, Walmart and Target — have invested in E.M.V.-ready terminals and spoken publicly about the switch, but many others have stayed silent. Around 27 percent of American merchants will be ready to process E.M.V. cards next month, according to a survey conducted this month by the Strawhecker Group, a consulting firm for the payments industry. For small sellers, the readiness rate is even lower. Banks and industry groups estimate that one in five will have their new systems running by Oct. 1. Both systems will continue to be available during a lengthy transition period.

• SoftBank Drops on Decline in Alibaba Stake’s Market Value: SoftBank Group Corp. dropped to the lowest in two years as the market values of its biggest U.S. holdings, Alibaba and Sprint, plunged. Billionaire Masayoshi Son’s mobile carrier and Internet investment company fell as much as 6.9 percent to 5,835 yen, the lowest since July 2013. The slump came on the first Japanese trading day after the lockup on Alibaba shares was lifted one year after its initial public offering.SoftBank has more than 1,000 investments, and its three biggest shareholdings of Alibaba, Sprint and Yahoo Japan Corp. have dropped by 700 billion yen ($5.8 billion) over the past 10 days to 8.7 trillion yen. Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier also slumped with rivals on concerns that revenue may weaken after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the nation’s mobile-phone rates were too high. Alibaba fell for a fifth day Wednesday in New York, slumping to as low as $59.68, compared with its IPO price of $68.

• Pandora says has paid $500 million in artist royalties in past year: Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc said it paid nearly $500 million in artist royalties over the past 12 months, bringing the total to more than $1.5 billion in about 10 years. "It took us nearly nine years to generate the first billion dollars in royalties, and just over a year to increase that total by 50 percent," Chief Executive Brian McAndrews said in a statement on Wednesday. Pandora gets revenue from advertising and paid subscriptions.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, September 23

• The Risk of a Billion-Dollar Valuation in Silicon Valley: Deep inside a Silicon Valley unicorn lurks a time bomb. It is a peculiarity of venture capital financing that the engine that pumps money into a promising start-up can later cause the same start-up to self-destruct. With all the hoopla and debate over sky-high valuations of technology start-ups, it is worth keeping in mind that the switch that helps to drive those surging valuations can also be turned off. The “bomb,” so to speak, is known as a liquidation preference. In every financing round, the money that a venture capital firm invests is not given freely. The firm and the start-up will negotiate terms of protection. Negotiable terms include voting rights, seats on the start-up’s board and assurances that a future fund-raising won’t unduly dilute the venture capital firms’ stake. The liquidation preference is among the most important of these protections. This feature provides that the venture capital firm’s investment will be repaid before the founders and employees are rewarded. If the firm has particular leverage, it can negotiate an even more protective form, known as the senior liquidation preference, which provides that the firm will be paid not only before the common stockholders but also before anyone else who bought preferred stock in earlier rounds. These provisions apply in a sale but not in an initial public offering of stock. The idea is to ensure that even if the investment does not perform well, the venture investor will still get back its initial money. According to a recent survey by the law firm Fenwick & West of 37 unicorns — private companies with valuations of $1 billion or more — every investment had a liquidation preference. Higher valuations create higher expectations, and failure to meet them can set off a downward spiral and a forced sale. In that event, the venture capitalists are paid first, leaving “unicorpses” in their wake and the founders with nothing. And don’t expect I.P.O.s to save these companies. Some unicorns, like Honest Company, have terms that require minimum I.P.O. prices for the V.C. investors that they just won’t be able to meet anytime soon. As these valuations go up and down, remember that reaching a $1 billion valuation is not all good news for a start-up. Instead, it can simply mean that the newly foaled unicorn has made a Faustian bargain.

• Instagram Hits 400 Million Monthly Users, Mostly Outside U.S.  Instagram has passed 400 million monthly active users, mostly by adding people in countries outside the U.S. That compares with Twitter Inc.’s 316 million and Pinterest Inc.’s 100 million. Instagram’s number increased from the 300 million mark reached nine months ago, according to the company. Facebook has 1.49 billion monthly active users. More than 75 percent of Instagram’s users live outside the U.S., with most of the new participants coming from Brazil, Japan and Indonesia, the company said.  As it expands, the photo-sharing application has started to ramp up its advertising business, taking advantage of Facebook’s network of tools and marketers to increase its offerings and global reach. At the beginning of this month, Instagram advertised in eight countries. By the end, they’ll be making money in more than 200, the company has said.

• The tech behind how Volkswagen tricked emissions tests: Volkswagen isn’t hiding from its emissions cheating scandal, which the company now says affects some 11 million diesel cars worldwide. “Let’s be clear about this: Our company was dishonest with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board and with all of you,” Volkswagen U.S. chief Michael Horn said Monday night. “In my German words, we have totally screwed up.” Thanks for finally coming clean, VW. But how exactly did the technology behind Volkswagen’s so-called defeat device actually work? Regulators allege that Volkswagen installed software into its cars that allowed the autos to circumvent EPA tests. But that still doesn’t explain how VW vehicles were able to determine when they were being subjected to an emissions test in the first place. To understand more about how Volkswagen cheated, we have to know a bit about the EPA’s testing process. When carmakers test their vehicles against EPA standards, they place a car on rollers and then perform a series of specific maneuvers prescribed by federal regulations. Among the most common tests for passenger cars is the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule (UDDS), which simulates 7.5 miles of urban driving. In the first 505 seconds of the test, the driver pushes the car to highway-level speeds. The second phase of the test looks more like what you’d see in stop-and-go city traffic. In all these tests, the driver has to stay within two miles per hour of the required speed at any given moment. Along the way, the testers collect emissions data. There's a dizzying array of other tests that cars sometimes face. There’s a test to simulate aggressive driving, which tops out at some 80 miles an hour, and a test that simulates urban driving on a hot summer day, with the air conditioning on full blast. There’s a cold-start test, where you begin the test with everything in the car turned off. There’s a hot-start test. There’s something called a New York City cycle, which simulates driving in a busy downtown area where you never get above 30 mph. And then there’s the Federal Test Procedure, a 30-minute test that mixes various elements of the other tests. In the end, the detailed requirements for each test gave Volkswagen the advance knowledge it needed to teach its cars when to behave more cleanly. By measuring how long the engine was running, the vehicle’s speeds, and even seemingly esoteric factors, such as the position of the steering wheel and barometric pressure, Volkswagen vehicles could understand they were being tested and so adjusted their engine performance to pass the tests, according to the EPA. Using a special engine setting for vehicle tests isn’t all that unusual, according to Consumer Reports. Most new vehicles do something similar because otherwise vehicles might interpret some of the testing procedures, like traction issues from being on rollers, as dangerous. But the problem here is that the EPA says the carmaker used its testing mode in an inappropriate attempt to beat the system.

• Quirky, an Invention Start-Up, Files for Bankruptcy:  Quirky, an ambitious crowdsourced invention start-up, which raised $185 million from investors that included General Electric and leading venture capital firms, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The failure of the company, based in New York, will surely raise questions about how far the crowd-based model of innovation and product development, made possible by the Internet, can go. Other companies are using crowdsourcing to make physical goods, from Threadless for T-shirt designs to Local Motors for automobiles. None, though, were doing it as broadly and across as wide a range of products as Quirky. The company said on Tuesday that it was seeking protection from its creditors while it arranged a sale of “substantially all its assets.” Quirky said that it already had an initial bid of $15 million for its Wink subsidiary, which was created last year. Wink makes software so that an array of Internet-connected home devices, as varied as thermostats and door locks, can be controlled from a smartphone app. Quirky had some success, with revenue rising sharply last year to about $100 million. But the scale of its ambitions — managing a sprawling community of inventors, transforming raw ideas into product designs, and orchestrating manufacturing and distribution — proved daunting and too costly.

• The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip and Print Is Far From Dead: Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print. As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business. Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy. Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago. E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television. E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper. The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.

• Payments Businesses Are Damn Hard: The Cover App Edition: Cover, a young payments app, is accepted in 350 restaurants in four cities. It has processed more than $10 million in transactions since the beginning of the year. But it will record, at most, just $150,000 in revenue in 2015 after passing on a big cut of its fees to other financial institutions, its founder says. So go the economics of a young payments business. And so ends Cover’s life as a stand-alone company. Founder Mark Egerman said today that his startup has sold to European competitor Velocity in a small deal, after passing on taking on more venture capital under less-than-great terms. “Payments is really a hard business,” Egerman said flatly. Cover allows diners to pay for a meal by pressing a few buttons in a smartphone app at partnering restaurants instead of handing over a credit card or cash. The company generates revenue by charging restaurants 3 percent of the price of each meal. But, like many payment processing businesses, Cover passes along about two-thirds of that fee to banks and other financial institutions behind the scenes. So on a $100 meal, Cover’s cut is $3, but it only keeps $1 for itself. Then it has to pay for all of its expenses. If that doesn’t sound sustainable for a small, venture-backed company, that’s because it’s not. (Cover has raised about $7 million.) Cover’s fate underscores how hard it is to build sustainable payment-processing businesses without enormous transaction volume, and why even much bigger payments startups such as Square and Stripe are diversifying their product offerings to beef up profit margins and create new e-commerce markets. Square processes more than $30 billion in brick-and-mortar transactions each year, charging merchants a 2.75 percent fee for each transaction. Like Cover, it passes on about two-thirds of that fee to other financial players in the payments ecosystem, including banks and credit card companies. To supplement this business as it readies for an IPO and to live up to its $6 billion valuation, the company has unveiled a host of products to create new revenue streams with better profit margins. Its cash-advance business, Square Capital, was doling out $1 million a day as of August. It is also selling software products to merchants through monthly subscriptions — another avenue to move past the minor margins of the payments business. Stripe, the online payments company, has said it processes billions of dollars in payments, but it already has a $5 billion valuation. Its one and only revenue source is still the 2.9 percent cut it takes of most transactions, plus a flat 30-cent fee. It, too, is looking for new areas of growth from new types of commerce.

• Groupon to Cut About 1,100 Jobs Worldwide:  Groupon, operator of a daily deals website, said it would cut about 1,100 jobs globally as it restructures outside North America. Groupon is shutting operations in Morocco, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay after exiting Greece and Turkey, the company said in a separate blog post on Tuesday. Groupon, which had about 11,800 employees globally at the end of December, said that it expected to complete the job cuts, mainly in sales and customer service, by September 2016. A strong dollar has hurt companies with a large presence in markets outside the United States. Markets outside North America accounted for about 43 percent of Groupon’s revenue in 2014. The company said in April it would sell a 46 percent stake in its South Korean business as part of its turnaround efforts. “I think it’s actually a good thing for investors to hear that they’re taking some more cuts out of their international operations,” Topeka Capital Markets analyst Blake Harper said. Groupon, once the leader in the online coupons market, has also been struggling to boost sales as competitive deals on online marketplaces operated by Amazon and eBay make its coupons less attractive to shoppers. The company has started selling products on its website. Groupon said it expected to incur pretax charges of up to $35 million, including $22 million-$24 million in the third quarter, related to the job cuts.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 22

• Uber’s Carpool Version, UberPool, Lands in India Before Palo Alto: Uber’s taking UberPool global, testing it soon in Bangalore, India. This is one of the first times the company has offered its carpooling version in another country (it’s also in France). Funnily enough, India will have access to UberPool before many suburban Uber markets in the United States like Palo Alto and San Jose. It’s possible the company plans to focus UberPool in dense cities, where it’s more likely to find matches between passengers heading the same way, instead of sprawling suburbs. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said recently at the Salesforce conference that UberPool isn’t as profitable as its original UberX service. UberPool in India might face some major challenges. GPS and mapping tools are a different beast in the South Asian country, where the city landscape changes daily, roads start and stop in unexpected places and businesses launch and disappear unexpectedly. With a population of 4.3 million — by comparison, San Francisco is at 1 million — Bangalore is known for major traffic issues. UberPool requires picking up people from different destinations quickly and efficiently so carpooling doesn’t add too much more time to a person’s commute. It’s a tough enough problem in the U.S.; navigating the maze of streets and traffic in India might be even harder. Uber will also be taking on its competitors — sources tell Re/code that Ola Cabs is launching its carpool version, Ola Share, in five cities soon. Long distance travel app BlaBlaCar, which offers a more traditional form of carpooling, is already live in India.

• Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over Profit: Many technology start-ups aim to become “unicorns,” the companies that get valued at $1 billion or more on their way to probable vast riches. Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen have no interest in that. As co-founders of Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding website that lets people raise money to help fund all manner of projects, including cooking gadgets and movies, Mr. Strickler and Mr. Chen could have tried to take their company public or sell it, earning millions of dollars for themselves and other shareholders. Instead, they announced on Sunday that Kickstarter was reincorporating as a “public benefit corporation,” a legal change they said would ensure that money — or the promise of it — would not corrupt their company’s mission of enabling creative projects to be funded. Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013. Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the public (such as Kickstarter’s mission to “help bring creative projects to life”) and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact. Kickstarter’s move builds upon its decision last year to become a B Corporation, a voluntary designation certified by a nonprofit group called B Lab. To become a B Corp, companies must meet rigorous environmental and social-responsibility standards, which they report annually to shareholders — though taking on the status has no legal impact. Other companies, including the e-commerce site Etsy, which went public in April, and Warby Parker, the eyeglasses retailer, have also opted to become B Corps.

• China cyber espionage is more than an irritant, must stop: U.S. U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice on Monday issued a stern warning to China before President Xi Jinping's visit that state-sponsored cyber espionage must stop, calling it a national security concern and critical factor in U.S.-China relations. "This isn't a mild irritation, it's an economic and national security concern to the United States," she said during remarks at George Washington University. "It puts enormous strain on our bilateral relationship, and it is a critical factor in determining the future trajectory of U.S.-China ties." President Barack Obama and Xi are expected to have an intense back-and-forth about the issue when the Chinese leader comes to the White House this week. "Cyber-enabled espionage that targets personal and corporate information for the economic gain of businesses undermines our long-term economic cooperation and it needs to stop," Rice said.

• Zumper: One-Third Of San Francisco’s Rent Is Attributable To VC Funding: Zumper, a venture-backed startup that focuses on creating a more efficient and transparent apartment rental marketplace, ran a study of housing costs in tech hubs across the United States. They’re arguing that one-third of San Francisco’s rents are attributable to venture capital funding. Last year, venture firms invested $49 billion across the United States. The vast majority of it, or 78 percent, went to just 10 American cities. The company looked at 3 million active listings across the United States last year. The study, done by the company’s housing economist and MBA student Andrew Duboff, isolated for factors including population, median household income, median home values, rental housing vacancy rates, and impact of local rent control ordinances. The Zumper study did not account for zoning regulations. “It was tough to isolate an apples-to-apples comparison for zoning regulations, so we ended up not including it,” said Devin O’Brien, who heads up marketing for Zumper. “That being said, vacancy rates does include a lot of this as a secondary measure. However, at the end of the day, we had an adjusted R-squared correlation of 0.83 for venture capital investment. It’s very strong.” Another study last year from UC Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti and University of Chicago’s Chang-Tai Hsieh argued zoning regulations are incredibly costly to the American economy. They found that if highly-productive cities like New York City, Boston and San Francisco had a more elastic housing supply, it could add 9.5 percent to the U.S. GDP.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September, 21

• Apple's iOS App Store suffers first major attack: Apple said on Sunday it is cleaning up its iOS App Store to remove malicious iPhone and iPad programs identified in the first large-scale attack on the popular mobile software outlet. The company disclosed the effort after several cyber security firms reported finding a malicious program dubbed XcodeGhost that was embedded in hundreds of legitimate apps. It is the first reported case of large numbers of malicious software programs making their way past Apple's stringent app review process. Prior to this attack, a total of just five malicious apps had ever been found in the App Store. The hackers embedded the malicious code in these apps by convincing developers of legitimate software to use a tainted, counterfeit version of Apple's software for creating iOS and Mac apps, which is known as Xcode, Apple said. Palo Alto Networks Director of Threat Intelligence Ryan Olson said the malware had limited functionality and his firm had uncovered no examples of data theft or other harm as a result of the attack. Still, he said it was "a pretty big deal" because it showed that the App Store could be compromised if hackers infected machines of software developers writing legitimate apps. Other attackers may copy that approach, which is hard to defend against, he said. Researchers said infected apps included Tencent's popular mobile chat app WeChat, car-hailing app Didi Kuaidi and a music app from Internet portal NetEase. The tainted version of Xcode was downloaded from a server in China that developers may have used because it allowed for faster downloads than using Apple's U.S. servers, Olson said.

• Cheap robots may shift car making from China to U.S.: Magna CEO. The falling cost of intelligent robots may help repatriate some car manufacturing work away from low-cost locations like China back to factories in Germany and North America, Donald Walker, Chief Executive of auto supplier Magna told Reuters. Rising wages in China and the cost of importing heavy components like electric car batteries into Europe may lead established car makers to introduce more highly efficient automated manufacturing closer to home, Walker told Reuters in an interview at the Frankfurt auto show. "If you have a high labor, easy-to-ship part, it has already gone, for the most part, to a low-cost jurisdiction," Walker said about the evolution of assembly work in the car manufacturing business. "A bigger issue is how fast do you have intelligent robotics replace manual labor everywhere in the world," Walker said. By 2025 the total cost of manufacturing labor is projected to fall between 18 and 33 percent in countries which already deploy industrial robots, including South Korea, China, the U.S. Germany and Japan, a study on advanced manufacturing technologies by the Boston Consulting Group showed.

• Amazon Wins First Emmy for 'Transparent': Jeffrey Tambor and Jill Soloway delivered Amazon.com its first major Emmy awards for the show “Transparent,” as the online retailer went toe-to-toe with Time Warner’s HBO in the comedy categories. Tambor plays the patriarch of a Los Angeles family who reveals to his children that he has long felt he’s a woman and is going to begin to dress like one. Soloway created “Transparent” and won an award for directing, one of 11 nominations the show received.

• From EyeEm, Technology to See and Tag Photos:  A little-known German start-up may have just made it a lot easier to search for photos online. EyeEm, a photo-sharing service started in 2011 that has drawn parallels to Instagram, announced new technology in Brooklyn on Friday that uses a sophisticated algorithm and machine learning to analyze the details of online photos. The technology, called EyeVision, automatically scans images and tags them with certain keywords, from “landscape” and “New York” to the perceived emotions of people in each photo, which makes them easier to find through web searches. While other companies have tried similar techniques to categorize online images, the German start-up’s efforts — which comes after roughly three years of development — are based on analyzing millions of photos already shared on EyeEm’s photo-sharing social network. The company has roughly 15 million users compared to about 300 million on Instagram. Combined with the company’s machine-learning techniques, EyeEm’s search algorithm adapts over time to better understand what is part of each uploaded image, making it easier to find specific photos online, according to the company’s chief executive.

• Gentex transforms rear-view mirror into high-tech vision system: Gentex Corp is broadening its role from a traditional Michigan-based auto parts maker to a supplier of high-tech vision systems that eventually could be integrated into self-driving cars. General Motors Co will be the first automaker to use a new rear-view mirror developed by Gentex, on the 2016 Cadillac CT6 sedan. The car goes on sale early next year and the mirror will be offered at extra cost. At the flip of a switch, the full display mirror converts into a video display that provides a panoramic view behind the vehicle. Called the Gentex Full Display Mirror, it incorporates a rear camera and software that transforms a prosaic piece of hardware into a platform for more advanced safety technology, marketing director Craig Piersma said. While relatively young tech-focused suppliers such as Mobileye NV have become investor favorites as the auto industry ramps up development of advanced driver assistance systems - the building blocks for future self-driving cars - Gentex has quietly been turning out 30 million rear-view mirrors a year. Founded in 1974, Gentex is one of the world's largest suppliers of auto-dimming automotive mirrors, but it also has steadily beefed up its capability as an electronics manufacturer, expanding its expertise in cameras and displays. Among its products is the camera-based SmartBeam system that automatically switches headlamps from high to low beam. It also provides collision and lane departure warnings and vehicle and pedestrian detection.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 18

• Facebook Just Made 2 Big Changes to Appease Advertisers on Viewability - Offers premium option and third-party verification: Facebook today introduced a premium buying choice that should quell some of that unease, offering marketers the option to pay for ads only when the entire unit appears on a viewer's screen.  Until this change, advertisers were charged as soon as any piece of an ad appeared on a Facebook user's screen. Now they will have the option to require full visibility before being charged at a higher per-view rate (which hasn't yet been announced). The development is part of a two-tiered announcement today by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant, which also revealed that it has tapped digital-measurement company Moat to check how often advertisers' promos are seen on Facebook. While Moat is among several viewability-focused vendors that are accredited by the Media Ratings Council, inking this deal—which likely involves considerable sums of money in the near future—with Facebook appears to be the latest sign that Moat is leading its niche.  What's more, Facebook is reversing its stance against using an independent verifier for ad viewability. The move appears to be largely in response to huge companies like Unilever, Kellogg's and WPP banging the drum for better measurement tools in not only recent years but recent hours. Just yesterday, WPP chief Martin Sorrell called out Facebook's viewability standards while speaking at Dmexco in Cologne, Germany.

• Ad Blockers Shoot to the Top of iPhone App Store Chart After Debut Day: After the inaugural day of Apple’s latest operating system version, which permits new extensions for blocking content in Safari browsers, two apps that do just that shot to the top of the paid downloads. Peace, a $2.99 ad-blocking app created by former Tumblr engineer Marco Arment, currently sits at first place in the iOS paid apps, bumping Microsoft’s Minecraft. A similar app, Purify, built by developer Chris Aljoudi, is at fourth place. A third, Blockr, is the 28th most popular, as of Thursday morning.The apps, once activated, strip ads and tracking cookies out of the Safari browser on iPhones, but not other browsers, like Google’s Chrome, or within apps. Apple enabled them with iOS 9, which debuted on Wednesday. Publishers, particularly smaller ones, have worried that Apple’s move may spark an uptick in mobile ad blocking, curbing critical display ad revenue. It has been less of a concern for big ad-supported tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, since their bread and butter, in-stream ads within apps, won’t be affected by the blockers. Google, however, does make its cash from ads within the Web. The search giant has found a way to keep (read: paid for) its profitable text ads from being killed in previous popular content-blocking tools like AdBlock Plus. It’s not clear if Google has worked out a similar fix for these new iOS apps. 

• Shopify Surges After Partnership With Amazon: Shopify Inc. soared after the Canadian software maker teamed up with online retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. to help merchants create their own online stores. The shares rose 23 percent to $35.55 at the close in New York on Thursday. The stock has about doubled since going public in May. Amazon advised the users of its own Amazon Webstore software to move their online stores to Shopify, before it shuts down the Webstore service. Shopify merchants will be able to use Amazon’s payments system and warehouses, and the companies are working to let Shopify merchants list their products on Amazon.com, according to a statement. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. For Shopify, the deal advances plans to let its more than 175,000 merchant customers sell goods on as many platforms as possible. The company already has similar arrangements with Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

• Amazon Updates Its Fire TV and Tablet Offerings: The company on Thursday introduced new versions of its Fire TV products, which plug into television sets to stream content over an Internet connection. Notably, customers can now buy a Fire TV streaming stick or set-top box with a remote control that can find content to watch using voice commands, similar to the new Siri-powered Apple TV unveiled last week. Amazon’s voice-controlled assistant is named Alexa. This assistant first appeared in Amazon’s wireless speaker, the Echo. You’ll be able to speak commands like “Alexa, play ‘John Wick’ ” to play a movie or “Alexa, how’s the weather tomorrow?” to load the weather forecast on the TV. But unlike Apple, which raised the starting price of its new Apple TV to $150 (up from $70 for the previous model), Amazon is holding its prices steady. You can get the latest stick for the same $40 as before; the Fire TV streaming stick with a voice remote is $50. The Fire TV set-top box with the new remote is the same price as the previous model: $100. And in another sign of how serious Amazon is about competing for attention in the living room, the retail giant is also bundling the Fire TV set-top box with a game controller for $140. In addition, Amazon has added some cheap tablets to its Fire product family. It is offering a low-end Fire tablet for $50, which can also be bought as a six-pack for $250. This inexpensive tablet has a seven-inch screen, can play movies and load books, apps and games. On top of that, Amazon introduced two new tablets with high-definition screens, called Fire HD, which come in eight inches for $150 and in 10.1 inches for $230. (By comparison, Apple’s latest tablets cost $380 to $800.)

• As Search Matures, Baidu Tries to Move Offline: Baidu is spending an estimated $2.5 billion on e-commerce projects this year as its profits dwindle. Baidu runs China’s primary search engine, but with the PC search business maturing and the economy slowing, Chairman Robin Li has been looking to diversify. In the past two years, he’s pushed Baidu deeper into the kinds of e-commerce businesses dominated by China’s other two big Internet companies, Alibaba and Tencent. During that time, Baidu’s invested almost $1 billion in more than a dozen websites and apps specializing in everything from food delivery to laundry pickup, from booking a doctor’s appointment to reserving a slot at a karaoke club. The goal is “transforming the company from connecting people with information to connecting people with services,” says Li, who’s committing $3.1 billion more over the next three years to just one of Baidu’s investments, Groupon look-alike Nuomi.com. But as it commits more money to e-commerce expansion efforts, its profit margins have fallen by half since 2012, to 28 percent in its most recent quarter. So while Baidu is tapping its $12 billion in cash to widen its e-commerce footprint, it’s also trying to attract big-name partners. The company paid an undisclosed amount for a minority stake in Uber in December, and fast-food chain Ajisen announced in July that it’s investing $60 million in Baidu’s takeout service, which launched last year and has about 8 percent of China’s market. Borrowing from Amazon.com’s strategy, Li is also expanding Baidu’s entertainment offerings. Its video service, IQiyi, signed a deal with Paramount Pictures in July for local streaming rights to 800 of the studio’s titles, including the Transformers and Terminator series. Baidu has a ways to go before its new ventures pay for themselves. Investment bank Jefferies estimates that Baidu’s profit will fall more than 12 percent this year, to about $1.8 billion, while the company spends $2.5 billion on its e-commerce-centric expansion. Baidu’s Nasdaq-listed shares have dropped 28 percent in the past six months, and Li says he may consider delisting from the U.S. in favor of his home market. But, he says, “We need to be patient and give our U.S. investors some time. I hope they will be able to appreciate us more.”

• Startups are piggybacking on text messaging to launch services. Conventional wisdom holds that intricately designed mobile apps are an essential part of most new consumer technology services. But there are signs people are getting apped out. While the amount of time U.S. smartphone users spend with apps continues to increase, the number of apps the average person uses has stayed pretty much flat for the last two years, according to a report Nielsen published in June. Some 200 apps account for more than 70 percent of total usage. Product Hunt, a popular website where people post ideas for new tech services, recently compiled a list of more than 40 “apps without an interface,” most of which use text messaging to do things like schedule meetings, sell T-shirts, or process restaurant delivery orders. In August, Facebook introduced M, a digital personal assistant built into its messaging service that allows people to text requests for a dinner reservation or for the perfect baby gift. The service, which is being tested by a small number of users in California, hints at Facebook’s ambitions to transform its own messaging app into a kind of proprietary Internet where people spend all their time instead of bouncing around among different apps. The social media giant appears to be emulating China’s WeChat, which has embedded a broad range of services into its mobile messaging product. The simplicity of text-based services often obscures deep complexity. Most companies still struggle with what’s known as natural language processing, so what may appear to be impressive feats of automation are actually being done by old-fashioned humans. Facebook’s M service uses artificial intelligence to field requests, but people perform the actual tasks. Magic, a text-based concierge service that inspired excitement in startup circles when it was introduced earlier this year, does the same.

• Alibaba's Wipeout Leaves Investors Questioning What Comes Next: Alibaba looked like a sure thing a year ago when it pulled off the largest initial public offering ever. It had a lock on China e-commerce as the economy was surging and consumer spending was steadily rising. Shares soared 76 percent from the IPO price in just two months. Then it all crumbled. Alibaba came under fire from a China government agency, it cut deals that baffled investors and it replaced its chief executive as growth slowed. Most important, China’s economy turned wobbly, jeopardizing the rise in consumer spending Alibaba needed. Its stock slid down, down, down to the IPO price and then below. The sure thing was no such thing. What now? Investors who watched $128 billion in market value disappear shouldn’t expect a reprieve any time soon. Atlantic Equities’s James Cordwell, the top-ranked analyst covering the stock, predicts the slowing Chinese economy will undercut e-commerce transaction growth until at least 2016. The many deals Alibaba has negotiated will take time to pay off too. “All the operating metrics seem to be pointing in the wrong direction,” said London-based Cordwell, who topped Bloomberg Absolute Return rankings for his calls on Alibaba and also recommendations across the portfolio he covers. “Until investors feel some comfort in that slowdown bottoming out, it will be hard for the stock.”

• Adobe revenue, profit forecast miss estimates, shares slip. Adobe Systems Inc's lower-than-expected revenue and profit forecast for the current quarter overshadowed a strong rise in net subscriptions for its Creative Cloud software suite, sending its shares down 3.5 percent in extended trading. Revenue rose 21 percent to $1.22 billion. Net income rose to $174.5 million, or 34 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $44.7 million, or 9 cents per share, a year earlier. Up to Thursday's close of $80.31, Adobe's shares had risen about 11 percent this year. The company also said on Thursday that David Wadhwani, head of its digital media, was leaving to pursue a CEO opportunity. Adobe has been switching to web-based subscriptions from traditional licensed software to help attract more predictable recurring revenue. Recurring revenue had reached 73 percent of total revenue, Chief Financial Officer Mark Garrett said in a statement. The company said it added 684,000 Creative Cloud net subscriptions in the quarter ended Aug. 28, compared with the 640,000 net additions that analysts had expected, according to research firm FactSet Street Account.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday September 17

• Oracle earnings disappoint: Revenue falls 1.7%, Stock down 2.8%: Oracle Corp's sales fell more than expected in the first quarter, hurt by a strong dollar and a continued drop in licensed software sales and the company warned revenue could fall in the current quarter even on a constant currency basis. Oracle's revenue declined 1.7 percent to $8.45 billion in the quarter ended Aug. 31, missing analysts estimates for the third quarter in a row. The company said sales increased 7 percent on a constant currency basis. However, it forecast revenue to range between a fall of 2 percent to growth of 1 percent in the current quarter. Oracle's shares fell as much as 2.8 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Sales of Oracle's cloud-computing software and platform service rose 34 percent to $451 million. Sales of traditional software licenses fell 16 percent to $1.51 billion. Like its rivals such as SAP, IBM and Microsoft, Oracle is striving to boost Internet-based software sales to head off fast-growing competitors such as Salesforce.com. But, analysts have said Oracle's cloud software business has not been growing fast enough to make up for declines in the 38-year-old company's licensed software business due to reasons ranging from slow customer adoption to tough competition.

• Lyft Announces Deal With Didi Kuaidi, the Chinese Ride-Hailing Company: The pink mustache is coming to China. And it will receive a warm welcome — not a snub — from its new hosts. Lyft, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing start-up that has its drivers affix a striking pink mustache logo to their cars, announced a partnership with Didi Kuaidi, China’s pre-eminent ride-hailing company, that will allow the American company to operate in China for the first time. The cross-border deal will also let Didi Kuaidi operate in the United States. Lyft’s partnership with Didi Kuaidi offers a somewhat novel approach to international expansion. Didi Kuaidi, which comprises China’s two largest ride-hailing start-ups, will let Lyft users from the United States find rides in China using the Lyft app. Didi Kuaidi will fulfill those ride requests using its drivers, while Lyft users will not have to leave the app to download or sign up for any new services. Didi Kuaidi will have much the same agreement with Lyft for its users. Chinese users entering the United States can find a ride using the Didi Kuaidi app, with those rides being fulfilled by Lyft. The partnership between the two companies is perhaps the clearest sign yet of the race to conquer different parts of the world in the global ride-hailing industry. The handful of major companies in the business of providing car rides have raised giant sums of money — some into the billions of dollars — and are using the money to open in new markets and release new product offerings. Nearly all of these companies have their eye on Uber, the huge on-demand ride company that has raised more than $7 billion in venture capital and is valued at more than $50 billion. Over the last five years, Uber has exploded in growth to more than 300 cities across 60 countries. China, in particular, has recently been a hotbed of contention and competition for ride-hailing start-ups. Uber has earmarked more than $1 billion for its aggressive push into Asia — and particularly China — and is spending millions in subsidies to attract drivers and riders to its service with lucrative promotions. Still, Uber’s presence in China is dwarfed by that of Didi Kuaidi, which controls 80 percent of the overall ride-hailing market in China. 

• Apple Acquires Mapsense, a Mapping Visualization Startup: Apple’s steady stealth campaign to rival Google in maps continues apace. This month, the company acquired Mapsense, a San Francisco startup that builds tools for analyzing and visualizing location data, according to multiple sources. Apple paid somewhere between $25 million and $30 million for the Mapsense 12-person team, which will now join the Cupertino company, according to two sources. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a statement. Mapsense was formed in 2013 by Erez Cohen, a former engineer for the data science company Palantir Technologies. The company’s offering lets users slice and dice graphical models of maps that hold huge sums of data. It’s cloud-based, naturally. The company launched its developer platform in May, noting that it was welcoming customers from the financial sector, advertising, government and Fortune 500 firms. That same month, Mapsense raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst with other backers including Amplify.LA and Redpoint Ventures. Over the years, Apple has quietly scooped up several location-services companies, including HopStop, a crowd-sourced maps tool, in 2013 and Coherent Navigation, a GPS company, this past May.

• BlaBlaCar, a French Ride-Sharing Start-Up, Is Valued at $1.6 Billion: BlaBlaCar, the French ride-hailing start-up, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $200 million, primarily from United States investors, which valued the company at $1.6 billion. The funding comes as the Paris-based company, which was founded in 2006 and aims to connect people who want to split the cost of long-distance journeys, has expanded beyond its European roots into a growing number of emerging markets like Turkey, India and Russia. With roughly 20 million users spread across three continents, BlaBlaCar is hoping to follow in the footsteps of other on-demand services like Uber, the ride-booking company, and Airbnb, the vacation rental website, to expand its international operations. BlaBlaCar has so far mostly skirted controversy, unlike companies like Uber, which has faced protests from many regulators and taxi associations. That is because BlaBlaCar does not allow drivers to profit from the ride-sharing service. People can only split the cost of long-distance travel, say between Paris and Marseilles or Moscow and St. Petersburg. The French start-up says the average ride in Europe costs roughly $25 per person, significantly less than the region’s costly high-speed trains. The funding comes as the Paris-based company, which was founded in 2006 and aims to connect people who want to split the cost of long-distance journeys, has expanded beyond its European roots into a growing number of emerging markets like Turkey, India and Russia.