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.