Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 9

• Square Takes an IPO Bullet for All of the Overpriced Unicorns: Square announced plans on Friday morning to price its IPO at $11 to $13 a share, meaning an IPO in that range would value the company at much less than the valuation it secured in its last round of private financing. If the company prices at $13, Square would carry a value of about $4.2 billion based on the approximately 323 million shares it says will be outstanding. Square, Jack Dorsey’s payments company, was valued by private investors at about $6 billion in its last round of private financing, according to insiders. To be sure, Square’s bankers could increase the price range before the IPO if they get feedback from investors that demand is higher than expected. But the range would have to jump a fair bit to even match what Square thought it was worth in its last round of funding.

• Verizon Says Time Is Right for Kids to Get Smartwatches: While smartwatches have yet to really become a hit for adults, LG and Verizon say the time is right to strap them onto little kids. Verizon has started selling two new GPS-connected wearables that allow parents and kids to stay in contact and also to alert parents when their children leave a predefined area.The $125 GizmoGadget aims to mimic the look of adult smartwatches and has a touchscreen interface, apps and a choice of different themes and watch faces. It also features a pedometer and the ability for kids and parents to exchange text messages with emojis, voice clips or preset messages. GizmoGadget allows kids to call one of nine preset phone numbers. The more basic GizmoPal 2, which sells for $55, has LED lights to alert kids when a caregiver is calling.

• NYT VR: How to Experience a New Form of Storytelling From The Times: Today, The New York Times takes a step into virtual reality. NYT VR is a mobile app that can be used — along with your headphones and optionally a cardboard viewing device — to simulate richly immersive scenes from across the globe. To start, The Times Magazine presents three portraits of children driven from their homes by war and persecution — an 11-year-old boy from eastern Ukraine named Oleg, a 12-year-old Syrian girl named Hana and a 9-year-old South Sudanese boy named Chuol. “This new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own,” writes Jake Silverstein, editor of the magazine.

• Why There's Still a Market for Online Ads No One Sees: Earlier this week the ad tech company AppNexus announced what it described as a major innovation: It would allow advertisers to pay only for those digital ads that are actually seen by people. To those uninitiated in the ways of programmatic advertising, this might seem like table stakes. Given all the talk about sophisticated tracking and targeting associated with digital ads, finding out which ones get viewed should be simple. But most industry studies estimate that only about half of digital ads are seen by real people.  AppNexus is not the only company trying to change that. Last month Google said advertisers using the Google Display Network wouldn’t be charged if their ads weren’t seen by people, and this week it began allowing third-party auditors to double-check Google’s own claims about the viewability of ads on YouTube. Facebook recently made a similar move. With the ad tech companies getting in line, it would seem the days of paying for digital ads no one sees are almost over.

• Google Acquires Fly Labs To Join Its Google Photos Team: Today, Google acquired Fly Labs to join its Google Photos team. The company aimed to help people edit videos and photos and it sported 3 million downloads over the past 18 months. Their suite of apps (Tempo, Fly and Crop) will be made available for the next three months. You’ll still be able to use them, but there will be no more updates.

• Indian startups cut jobs as funding slows down: “I don’t know what is going to happen now,” said Ankit Agarwal (name changed), a TinyOwl sales person who was sacked last week. His words summarise the predicament of around 1,700 persons who lost jobs in the Indian startups in the last three months. “We got a mail on Tuesday saying there will be a meeting to discuss future plans. We first thought it had something to do with our half-yearly appraisals,” Ankit explained how he and 24 others at TinyOwl’s Pune office lost jobs. He did not want to reveal his real name, fearing it would affect his future job prospects. After much publicised 36-hour drama involving gherao of a co-founder, police intervention and local politicians’ entry into the startup’s premises, the sacked employees managed to get their full and final settlement that 15 of their colleagues who were fired in the previous month have not got yet. However, all of them will have an uncertain Diwali since their frantic job searches are met with stoic ‘we-will-get-back-to-you’ responses. The actual number of job cuts could be even higher than the estimated 1700 lay-offs across well-known internet startups such as Housing, Zomato, TinyOwl and LocalBanya, as many such cases go unreported. Firings and shutdowns happen rather routinely among many 50-100 employee startups.