Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 14

• Is Acqui-Hiring Dead? Tech Startups Long for the Days of Yahoo’s Binge Acquisitions: Under Marissa Mayer, Yahoo used to be the top company making “acqui-hires,” but such talent acquisitions have fallen out of favor throughout Silicon Valley this year. In 2013 and 2014, Yahoo was the top technology company conducting acqui-hires, an industry term for acquisitions done primarily for the talent, according to research firm CB Insights. Yahoo was tied for third in 2012, Mayer's first year at the company. In 2015, Yahoo has disappeared from the list entirely. When Mayer joined from Google, she was looking for an infusion of technical and entrepreneurial talent to improve the company's mobile and Web services. The fresh blood failed to revive the staid Internet portal, and now Yahoo is considering a spinoff of its core Web business to address investors' tax concerns. "They made acquisitions, and nothing came out of it," said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. "The focus has shifted over the last few quarters to integrate, rather than acquire." Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, declined to comment. The excitement surrounding talent acquisitions has dissipated throughout Silicon Valley, not just at Yahoo. Active acquirers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have started to pull back on buying for talent, CB Insights said. U.S. talent acquisitions have declined 48 percent this year from a peak in 2013, the firm's data show. CB Insights compiled the information from company reports, which wouldn't include undisclosed purchases or those not classified as talent acquisitions. Instead of pursuing costly acqui-hires, many companies have returned to old-fashioned recruitment, said Ben Narasin, a general partner at Canvas Ventures. "All of these top firms need more people, but are you really willing to pay a million-dollar cost of acquisition for a whole bunch of people?" he said. "I think acqui-hiring is dead."

• 2015 Was The Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009: With just 28 technology companies entering the U.S. public markets, 2015 was the worst year for IPOs since 2009, according to Dealogic. This compares to 62 last year and 48 the year before, with 131 “unicorns” opting to remain private longer. The performance of the tech IPOs has also been subpar. Half of the tech companies that have gone public this year are trading below their IPO price, including Etsy which fell 41%. And both Box and Square, went public at market caps that were beneath the valuation of their last private rounds. Companies which had strong fundamentals, like Atlassian, were able to hit the ground running. Fitbit is up 56% since its June IPO and GoDaddy, which is on the verge of profitability, has risen 68%. “2016 may see 2 types of companies go public,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. “One are the good companies with solid fundamentals. The other set of companies are those that get pushed into going public because the private markets close up on them.”

• Adidas’s ‘speedfactory’ hints at the future of shoe manufacturing:  Adidas announced this week that it is setting up what it calls a “speedfactory” in Ansbach, Germany, in an attempt to be at the forefront of manufacturing and offer individualized products that get in customers’ hands quicker. Its goal is to use the latest manufacturing innovations to produce a largely automated process. (From a business perspective, it’s not appealing to shift factories to areas with higher labor costs, unless the operation runs with minimal human labor.) By leveraging recent developments in robotics, Adidas may be able to better serve its customers. In the long run, the model could potentially expand beyond shoes to all goods. For example, after a big sporting event the conversation among sport fans in a given city might center around an athlete’s latest touchdown celebration dance, or a clever quip to reporters. If a company such as Adidas had a factory located near that city, it could rapidly produce and sell related merchandise before the conversation had cooled off.  The first step for Adidas is to produce 500 pairs of concept shoes in the first half of 2016. Those initial pairs will all be one type of running shoes. Down the line Adidas envisions custom-made shoes that might have a sole designed to fit an individual customer’s foot.

• Alibaba Buys Prominent And Vocal Hong Kong Newspaper For $266M In Bid To Influence Media: The Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet giant, is making an ambitious play to reshape media coverage of its home country, taking aim at what company executives call the “negative” portrayal of China in the Western media. As the backbone of this effort, Alibaba agreed on Friday to buy the media assets of the SCMP Group, including one of Hong Kong’s most influential English language daily newspapers, The South China Morning Post. Alibaba is acquiring an award-winning newspaper that for decades has reported aggressively on subjects that China’s state-run media outlets are forbidden to cover, like political scandals and human-rights cases.Alibaba said the deal was fueled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it calls the biased lens of Western news outlets. While Alibaba said the Chinese government had no role in its deal to buy the Hong Kong newspaper, the company’s position aligns closely with that of the Communist Party, which has grown increasingly critical of the way Western news organizations cover China. This coverage, the company said, influences how investors and others outside China regard Alibaba. The company said its shares, which are listed in New York, were being affected by all the negative reports about China. For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth $266 million, the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue. The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning The South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organization that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls. As speculation of a deal began in recent weeks, some critics in Hong Kong had already started to worry about whether Alibaba was seeking to tame the paper’s coverage in order to curry favor with the Chinese leadership. The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland like covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.