Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 7

• Mother-Son Team Demo Translate For Code: Meet Roslyn Scott and Dalton Scott, a mother and son team who just demoed a neat idea for making code more accessible, here at the Disrupt London 2015 hackathon. Their hack, called the Human Code Project, uses several IBM Watson APIs, including its Natural Language Classifier, to power a search interface for translating JavaScript code terms into plain English. It’s designed much like a language translation interface, so someone who’s trying to understand what a piece of code is doing can search for a particular Javascript word or phrase within that code to see a definition of what a term such as ‘onclick’ might mean in that particular context. The interface returns a percentage breakdown of how confident the system is in its definition for that term. During the hackathon they uploaded a training document to Watson, and created two classifier sets — one for definitions of code terms and one for phrases, explains Roslyn.

• Some Twitter Users Call Foul as It Switches Moments and Notifications Buttons: Twitter moved Moments for Web and Android viewers yesterday to where the Notifications button once was, causing considerable consternation among faithful users. In a nutshell, many in the Twitterati—thanks to muscle memory—are reflexively tapping the Moments button by accident when they want to check their notifications. Numerous tweets accuse the company of tricking users.  San Francisco-based Twitter has declined comment. But the move raises the question—as a few of the tweets above hint at—about whether or not the social media company is happy with the metrics that Moments has been getting so far. The end of the fourth quarter is near, and newly re-appointed CEO Jack Dorsey would certainly like to tell Wall Street investors during the next earnings call that Moments is drawing a big crowd. Twitter has made Moments a centerpiece development since Dorsey came back to the helm. Additionally, Digiday reported this week that Twitter's ads for Moments, called Promoted Moments, have an asking price of $1 million. So it stands to reason that Twitter needs Moments to scale in order to make such a purchase worth it for brands. 

• Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers as Its Transportation Ambitions Grow: Amazon goes to great lengths to get packages into customers’ hands as quickly as possible — even if it means employing drones. Those efforts will now include putting thousands of Amazon-branded trucks on the road. The ever-ambitious online retailer planned to announce on Friday morning that it had purchased “thousands” of trailers — the part of a tractor-trailer that stores the cargo — to make sure it had the shipping capacity to move products on time as its North American business continues its rapid growth. The trailers won’t be used to deliver packages to customer doors. Instead, they’ll be utilized to transport items from one Amazon warehouse, known as a fulfillment center, to another, as well as between fulfillment centers and sort centers, where Amazon organizes orders by zip code to be delivered to local post offices. A spokeswoman stressed that Amazon would continue to rely on existing trucking partners, which own and drive the tractor portion of the vehicles that will tow the Amazon trailers. The announcement comes as Amazon’s North American retail business is growing at its fastest clip in several years. Revenue for this unit grew 35 percent in the third quarter, fueled by product assortment expansion in categories such as apparel and the growth of Amazon’s hugely popular Prime membership program. The trucking announcement marks the latest initiative aimed at taking more control over how quickly the company can get goods into the hands of its customers. While Amazon continues to utilize trucking partners to move goods within its warehouse network, and UPS and FedEx for package delivery to customer doors, it is increasingly unveiling initiatives to take over more of these functions. Former employees say the goal is to someday be able to circumvent UPS or FedEx entirely, in large part so that snafus like the one that caused late deliveries during the 2013 holidays don’t happen again. One guess on why Amazon only wants to own the trailer at this point: If it owned the tractor, it would have to register as a commercial trucking company and incur the insurance costs and liability risks that come with that. By sticking with just the trailer body, Amazon potentially saves money and avoids other potential headaches. That said, some reports suggest Amazon may eventually go all the way and own the trucks, too.

• Samsung to finally pay Apple $548 million in patent dispute: Samsung fought until the bitter end to avoid paying Apple, but the company now says it will finally hand over the more than $548 million it owes for infringing the patents and designs of its biggest smartphone rival. In papers filed in federal court in San Jose, California on Thursday, Samsung Electronics said it will make the payment by Dec. 14 if Apple sends an invoice on Friday. Asked if it had done so, Apple declined to comment on Friday. The payment comes after a U.S. appeals court last May reduced a $930 million judgment against Samsung by $382 million, stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple patents and copying the look of the iPhone. Another trial over remaining damages relating to some of Samsung's infringing products in the case is set to go ahead next spring. Even though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. had authorized damages to Apple in May, Samsung again appealed the final figure to the same court, and was rebuffed twice more. Now agreeing to pay, Samsung told the San Jose court that it expects to be reimbursed if it eventually succeeds in a forthcoming appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over its liability for copying the patented designs of the surface, bezel and user interface of the iPhone, which accounted for $399 million of the total award.

• All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy - Online Odd Job Site Fiverr In Focus Over Fake Reviews  : The holiday online shopping season has begun, and that means reading lots of online product reviews. Some of these reviews are helpful, others are not. And many are fakes — raves or pans from people who have never actually used the product. Where do fake reviews come from? In this column, a close-up look at one notable source. Q. Starting in early November, and over the course of a week, the Facebook business page for the company where I work, Long’s Jewelers, was hit with 200 one-star reviews. Many of the reviews arrived in a matter of minutes, and all were left without comment. They were bogus reviews that were composed by a freelance spammer, who we believe was paid by one of our competitors. Our average customer rating on our Facebook page fell from 4.8 stars to 2.3 stars. We contacted Facebook, which at first refused to help. I wrote a post on a marketing website, asking for the community’s aid, and then released a statement asking for the public’s assistance. My pleas went viral enough to compel Facebook to re-examine the issue, and it has since taken down nearly all of the purchased reviews. Through a bit of sleuthing, I found that the reviews came through a website called Fiverr, where people offer to perform odd jobs for $5 and up. Leaving negative reviews is apparently one of those jobs. Fiverr banished the person who wrote these particular sham reviews, but hundreds of other people are still on the site, offering a similar service. Fiverr, which started in 2010, is based in Israel and hosts thousands of people performing tasks in hundreds of categories. The sellers use pseudonyms, for some reason, and most gigs, as they are called, are perfectly legitimate, even delightful. “I will create a 16-line song about anything,” reads a gig by Tylerbarks. “I will write message in beach sand at sunrise,” reads another by Batykefer1. But the Haggler rummaged around Fiverr and quickly found dozens of people offering to post positive reviews to Facebook, different Google sites, the Apple App Store, iTunes and elsewhere. None said anything about trumped-up negative reviews, but fabricated raves are nearly as bad — or perhaps just as misleading, though perhaps not quite as malicious.

• Google Ventures Owns Part of Several Unicorns, but the Biggest (and Trickiest) Is Uber: The venture firm has $2.4 billion under management and has invested in 300 companies, a number of which have secured billion dollar valuations (a.k.a. unicorn status). According to new figures released on Sunday, the VC shop added 39 new startups in 2015, including significant bets in commerce (Jet.com), biotech (Editas) and agricultural software (Farmer’s Business Network), a new terrain. Most investments during the year, nearly a third, went into life sciences and health companies, followed by consumer and enterprise startups. It is hard to anticipate that any of these investments will be bigger than Uber — in dollars sunk in or payout. In 2013, Kara Swisher reported that Google Ventures spent $250 million for 1.8 million Series C-1 preferred shares in the ride-hailing app startup. At a then $3.5 billion valuation, that put its stake just north of 7 percent. (Google Ventures declined to comment on this or the size of any other investment stakes.) Uber is now reportedly en route to a valuation of $62.5 billion. Its many subsequent rounds since 2013 have likely diluted Google Ventures’ share, although a source familiar with the deal terms says not by much. Even at the low end of analyst estimation, around 2 percent ownership, the Google Ventures share would, at Uber’s current valuation, hit fivefold return. And who knows how Uber will climb before an IPO. Increasingly, however, it’s a sticky situation. As Uber balloons, many of its ambitions — in mobile app integrations, mapping and self-driving cars — are aimed squarely at Google. The startup is partly driven, several sources said, by a concern the search giant could one day clobber it. Google should be worried if it can’t.