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.