Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday September 16

• Want to Donate to a Political Candidate? Now There's a Tweet for That Twitter said it had partnered with Square Inc., a mobile payment company, to give U.S. political candidates a way to collect donations through tweets. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square, is running both companies after taking an interim CEO job at Twitter, making their cooperation on the donations tool convenient. "This is the fastest, easiest way to make an online donation, and the most effective way for campaigns to execute tailored digital fundraising, in real time, on the platform where Americans are already talking about the 2016 election and the issues they are passionate about," Jenna Golden, head of Twitter's political advertising sales, said in a post on the company's website. The new service comes after a U.S. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2012 that cleared the way for donations by text message and as candidates seek ways to increase the number of small donations from supporters.  Twitter's service allows a user to select a donation amount, pay with a debit card and submit information required by the FEC. Square charges a 1.9 percent transaction fee, according to its website. Twitter doesn't take a cut of the donation, according to the social media company. Campaigns can pay to promote tweets soliciting donations to specific users.

• Facebook weighs a "Dislike" button: Facebook’s famous “like” button, with its silhouette of an upturned thumb, will soon be accompanied by an alternative: a way to “dislike” a post. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Facebook was “very close to shipping a test” of a dislike button. He suggested that the new button would probably be more nuanced than a simple thumbs-down option. His comments nevertheless raised the possibility that Facebook, the world’s largest forum for self-expression, could soon become a less friendly place. The prospect of a new dislike button has been polarizing among Facebook users. As for Facebook’s business — selling ads — a dislike button could cut both ways. It could increase the level of engagement that people have with posts, and therefore the number of ads they eventually see. But a dislike button could also be disconcerting to marketers, who prefer their messages to be surrounded by happy emotions. Over all, it’s probably a good thing to enable people to express feelings and emotions that they can’t express through a like button,” Ms. Williamson said. “But Facebook needs to be careful as to how they enable that capability with regard to advertising and all the potentially inflammatory discussions that could occur online.” Mr. Zuckerberg clearly has such concerns in mind. He stressed that Facebook would test the new button before introducing it broadly, and refine it based on user feedback. “Hopefully we’ll deliver something that meets the needs of our community,” he said. Facebook’s decision to experiment with a new button came after much deliberation. In December, Mr. Zuckerberg told a similar meeting of users that the company had been working on the idea but had not figured out how to add a dislike button “so that it ends up being a force for good and not a force for bad.”

• Hewlett-Packard to Cut About 30,000 Jobs, About 10 Percent of Work Force: About 10 percent of the jobs at the current HP, or perhaps 30,000 of its 300,000 employees, will be eliminated, company officials said. “We’re looking forward to operating as two industry-leading companies,” said Ms. Whitman, HP’s chief executive, speaking at a meeting of financial analysts. “You’ll see us doing more pruning of businesses that don’t fit.” Ms. Whitman became the head of HP in 2011. As part of a restructuring announced in 2012, 54,000 jobs have been cut at the company. The new cuts are on top of that. In November, Ms. Whitman will become the chief executive of HP Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell things like computer servers, data storage, software and services to business. The other company, called HP Inc., will focus on printers and personal computers. Ms. Whitman has said the division will enable both businesses to react faster to changing markets. The big job cuts will come from HP Enterprise, in particular jobs at call centers and other service centers in developed countries. HP plans to automate many of the jobs, and build out positions in countries like India and Costa Rica. The services business had been largely dependent on just a few customers, and in 2014 it lost important accounts.

• Salesforce Plans to Give Customers Amazon-Type Analytics: Salesforce.com was one of the early giants of the cloud-computing revolution. Now it wants to be at the center of two of the next big things — big data and so-called computational intelligence everywhere. Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce, is expected to make its “Internet of Things Cloud” a centerpiece of the company’s customer conference in San Francisco this week. Mr. Benioff, who has been skilled at predicting and positioning his company on major tech trends, sometimes with mixed success, hopes he can give nontechnical companies automated customer service and recommendations, the kind of activities done by computing-intensive companies like Amazon. If successful, Salesforce’s Internet of Things could vastly increase the amount of personalization we now see in many products and services. It could also justify the company’s highflying stock price, by making it much more attractive to its own customers. The Internet of Things is a term for online data from machines about their behavior. This service would combine data from devices like sensors and smartphones with customer information already inside Salesforce, like personal profiles and previous transactions. In one example from Salesforce, an insurance company would get data from a car’s bumpers and airbag indicating a collision, and could then send to its customer’s phone messages about current coverage, nearby tow trucks and service centers. Salesforce hopes to bring that capability to thousands of companies, which work with millions of customers. Nothing like that has been done before, let alone in a way that people skilled only in basic spreadsheets could manage. That means Salesforce has to build a powerful sorting and computing technology, and a series of customizable templates that can be easily used in a lot of different businesses. No major company has successfully done that.

• Snapchat is going to charge for extra replays. Snapchat announced a new plan for making money Tuesday — it's going to let you pay for extra replays. According to the company's blog, the ephemeral messaging service wants to let you get a tiny bit more permanent. Users already get one free replay per day, but now Snapchat will let users pay 99 cents for up to three additional chances to see a snap again. "We’ve provided one Replay per Snapchatter per day, sometimes frustrating the millions of Snapchatters who receive many daily Snaps deserving of a Replay," the company said in an official blog post. "But then we realized — a Replay is like a compliment! So why stop at just one?" According to Snapchat, the replays work like this: you can use a replay on any snap you receive but, crucially, can only replay any single snap once. To this point, Snapchat has made its money off advertising, and has not previously charged users for any part of its service. The company, which reportedly turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, has been valued at roughly $19 billion on private markets. But a recent report from Gawker, citing leaked financial documents, indicated that Snapchat had generated just $3.1 million in revenue last year.

• Target Teams With Instacart to Challenge Amazon on Groceries: Target is teaming up with Instacart Inc. to offer same-day delivery of groceries and household items for $3.99 in its hometown of Minneapolis as the big-box retailer rolls out an alternative to Amazon.com’s $299-a-year Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. Target will be Instacart’s second-largest retail partner by revenue, behind Costco, significantly expanding inventory for the San Francisco-based startup as it positions itself as the antidote to Amazon for brick-and-mortar retailers. Instacart delivery charges start at $3.99 per order, depending on its size. Even as sales of books, electronics and clothing shift online, shoppers still prefer supermarkets for food. Companies expect that grocery sales may move to the Web as well and are experimenting to find the best approach. Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, has promoted its grocery delivery service with free 30-day trials in some markets. Google last week announced plans to begin testing a delivery service for groceries and fresh food later this year in San Francisco and one other city.