Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 11

• Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience: Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers. Now the company plans to start making money from the vast number of people who are not signed in to the service but may click on a tweet they find through a web search or that is sent to them via email or text — an audience Twitter estimates at more than 500 million people worldwide. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said it has begun showing advertising to some of those casual viewers when they click on the link to a tweet or visit a Twitter user’s profile page. About 60 advertisers are participating initially, with the ads, known as promoted tweets, aimed at people in the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia. But the program, which has been in development for more than a year, is expected to ramp up quickly. These ads, which will be on the desktop web version of Twitter at first, won’t be quite as finely targeted as typical Twitter ads, relying on context, like other pages people have recently browsed, for targeting. Twitter estimates that each of these “logged out” users could be worth $2.50 a year to advertisers, compared with about $4 a year for active users. Wall Street, which has been focused mostly on Twitter’s lack of growth in active users, sees lots of potential in the program, and Twitter’s stock rose almost 7 percent on Thursday.

• GoPro's First Drone, Due Out in 2016, Will Be Called 'Karma': GoPro recently said it will debut its first drone in early 2016, and now the company has announced the brand name—Karma. On Wednesday, the company made the revelation by pushing a one-minute YouTube teaser. The video is a cut-up of the unbranded two-minute clip that GoPro uploaded to the video site on Oct. 28, when it originally disclosed its latest hardware. The longer spot has garnered nearly 4 million views since then. There's not much information about the drone—in terms of what it looks like or how much it will cost—in the video or on its dedicated website. But developing and marketing the product makes a lot of sense since so many GoPro enthusiasts have been attaching the high-def camcorders to drones made by other hardware companies. There are literally thousands of videos from such productions on YouTube.  

• Facebook to Publish Designs for `Big Sur' AI Computer Hardware: Facebook’s use of artificial intelligence, which ranges from tools for image recognition to the filtering of the news feeds for its social network, demands special computing infrastructure. The company recently began building custom servers for its artificial intelligence workload and Thursday announced it would release the designs for that powerful hardware to the world -- for free. The company said the plan to open-source the blueprints of the servers -- called “Big Sur” -- would help other companies and researchers benefit from the incessant tweaking of Facebook’s developers. This follows  Google’s release last month of a software tool for building AI systems named TensorFlow. The servers are built around graphical processing units from Nvidia Corp. GPUs are widely used in artificial intelligence because the chips have far more individual processing cores on them than traditional processors produced by Intel Corp., making them adept at the dumb-but-numerous calculations required by AI software.

• Wal-Mart adds to mobile wallet frenzy with 'Walmart Pay': Wal-Mart launched its own mobile payment service Walmart Pay on Thursday, potentially dealing a sharp blow to the ambitions of a mobile wallet the company had been co-developing with a consortium of retailers. The mobile payments space in the U.S. has seen a flurry of new launches and partnerships in the past year but has failed to gain traction as customer and merchant adoption have been sluggish. CurrentC - whose developers included Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy among others - was likely to prove strong competition to Apple's Apple Pay because it was developed as a single payment solution that could be used at many retailers and integrate their loyalty programs. But years of delay, a data breach and management changes hurt its prospects. An increasingly bigger worry for CurrentC is the end of its exclusive partnership with most of its members, which means they can now accept other mobile payment options at their stores. A survey released by data firm InfoScout found Apple Pay use to be at its lowest rate since the firm started tracking it. Shoppers used it this past Black Friday for only 2.7 percent of eligible transactions.

• Rovio’s CEO Steps Down After Just Over a Year: Last August Pekka Rantala took over the role of Rovio CEO from co-founder Mikael Hed, but just over a year later he’s already stepping down. He’s to be replaced by Kati Levoranta, former chief legal officer for the Angry Birds maker. Rantala says that “I feel now the time is right for me to step aside and move on to new challenges.” Despite being in the role for a relatively short period, Rantala presided over a tumultuous time for the game developer. Last October the company laid off 130 employees, and followed that up with 260 more job cuts in August, more than 30 percent of its workforce. The initial, unexpected success of Angry Birds caused the company to expand in many directions, yet it never managed to follow up Angry Birds with another big hit.