Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 10

• With a Mobile Website Like an App, Flipkart Takes a Swipe at Apple: India’s e-commerce start-up Flipkart has worked with Google to make a new mobile website that could eliminate the need for apps, in a move that takes a swipe at Apple’s grip on the mobile experience. On Monday, Flipkart unveiled the website, which it created with the Google team that focuses on the mobile web browser Chrome. The two made a site that supports push notifications, the ability to search for and read information while offline, location-based data and access to hardware features like a smartphone’s camera. While such features have long been available in apps that people download to their phones, they typically have not been prevalent on mobile websites. Flipkart plans to show other companies what it took to build the website — including the hurdles it had to overcome and the weaknesses it found — at Google’s Chrome Developers Conference this month. Google’s parent company is Alphabet.

• Match Is Seeking $3.1 Billion Value in I.P.O.: The Match Group is seeking a valuation of about $3.1 billion as it prepares for an initial public offering. The company, which owns the online dating brands OkCupid and Tinder, said on Monday that it planned to sell 33.3 million shares for $12 to $14 apiece. Those terms indicate an offering size of $433 million and a market valuation of $3.1 billion at the midpoint. In setting these terms, Match begins a roadshow, meeting with investors who will help the company set an official I.P.O. price in a few weeks, based on demand. The media conglomerate that owns Match, IAC/InterActiveCorp, whose chairman is Barry Diller, has been acquiring a number of dating sites over the last few years. As the online-dating industry increased in popularity, legacy sites like Match.com started facing more competition from free models like OkCupid. Mr. Diller’s strategy was to build scale by acquiring a portfolio of brands – now 45 in all – and eventually spin them off under the Match umbrella.

• Google Offers Free Software in Bid to Gain an Edge in Machine Learning: A race is underway toward the future of computer technology with advances in a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. Machine-learning software is trained to handle vast amounts of data, and then learns as it goes, often on its own. Machine learning has been around for a long time, and it has been a crucial technology in the success of Internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook — used in the development of search, ad targeting and product recommendations. But in the last few years, machine learning has made huge improvements in computer vision, language translation and speech recognition, largely by applying the techniques of deep learning, which is inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns. Every major technology company is investing aggressively in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And not just computer companies. Last Friday, Toyota announced it would spend $1 billion for research and development on artificial intelligence in the United States over the next five years. Google announced on Monday a bold step to establish its leadership in the field of machine learning, accelerate the pace of innovation in the field and potentially strengthen its business. It is making the software of its new machine-learning system, TensorFlow, which was developed over years, open-source code. The software will be freely available for outside programmers to use and modify.

• How Pinterest Got the Full Attention of Ad Agency Execs: Better features for marketers and consumers: Pinterest is getting serious about becoming a formidable digital advertising player, and agency executives are taking notice. "What Pinterest has accomplished in the last nine months is the most evolution of any platform," said Chris Tuff, evp and director of business development and partnerships at 22Squared. For comparison, Tuff said it took Facebook four and a half years to build the same kind of sophisticated ad tools that Pinterest is pitching. On Monday, the site launched a search feature that uses photos to comb through millions of product images. For example, someone looking at a picture of a table can zero in on finding similar tables by tapping on the Pin to start a search result without typing a word. Up until now, people have only been able to search on Pinterest with text queries. Marketers won't be able to buy visual search ads like they've been able to with text search ads, which debuted in early 2014. Pinterest hasn't said whether visual search ads were part of its future plans, but that scenario seems likely. The visual-search move should prove popular to users—which will help maintain marketers' attention for the Pinterest ad products that currently exist. In January, Pinterest opened its Promoted Pins advertising business to all U.S. advertisers. Then in May, the San Francisco-based company started offering more targeting and video promos.

• Rackspace Announces Better-Than-Expected Q3 Results, Including Revenue of $509M, Plans $350M Debt Offering: Following the bell, Rackspace announced its third-quarter financial results, including revenue of $509 million and earnings per share of $0.26. The market had expected Rackspace to report $0.20 in per-share profit off revenue of $503.08 million. Down nearly four points in regular trading, the company has swayed both positive and negative following its earnings announcement; investors, it seems, are not entirely sure at the moment how to parse the results. The company’s top line expansion clocked in at 10.7 percent, compared to the year-ago quarter. On the product side of things, Rackspace recently announced, and I’ll quote here to avoid butchering the truth, “Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers.” It has been rumored that Rackspace could entertain the possibility of going Full Dell, and heading private.