Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 15

• Amazon overtakes Flipkart as most visited Indian e-com site: comScore: E-commerce giant Amazon Inc said on Monday it has become the most visited e-commerce site in India beating local rival Flipkart in the month of October citing comScore data. It said Amazon.in clocked 30 million unique visitors during the month ahead of Flipkart.com, Jabong.com and Snapdeal.com

• E-Commerce  Retailers in India Battle Devil They Spawned: Deep Discounts: Discounts and cashback offers helped India’s top e-commerce companies from Flipkart to Snapdeal sell a record $11 billion of goods this year online. As the freebies start to hurt, they are questioning a strategy they now find too hard to dump. While scrapping rebates may bring the focus back to profitability from valuations, it may be easier said than done for an industry built on a foundation of cut-price sales. The real dilemma faced by Narayanan and his peers is: Who will blink first? 

• China's Baidu says to develop self-driving buses within three years: China's top online search firm Baidu Inc said it aims to put self-driving buses on the road in three years and mass produce them within five years, after it set up a business unit to oversee all its efforts related to automobiles. The unit will also include its initiative in partnership with BMW AG to develop an autonomous passenger vehicle, which may also be put into mass production within five years, a spokesman told Reuters on Monday. Self-driving cars have emerged as a new battlefront for tech majors globally. Alibaba Group Holding says it will launch its first car in a partnership with China's SAIC Motor Corp, while U.S. tech heavyweights Google and Apple are also developing autonomous cars.

• Creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram Launches Free Version of Wolfram Language: For nearly three decades, Stephen Wolfram has built software technology that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations. Wolfram Alpha, his question-answer technology, is available on its own website and serves up many of the answers for Apple’s voice-controlled digital assistant, Siri. His approach to this artificial-intelligence challenge was both innovative and idiosyncratic, and characteristic of Mr. Wolfram, who earned his Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20 and soon after received a MacArthur “genius” award. Wolfram Alpha, he explains, is a “knowledge-based system,” which computes answers from its storehouse of knowledge rather than today’s prevailing technique of determining statistical probabilities from poring through vast amounts of data. His Wolfram Language is similarly a tool for what he calls “knowledge-based programming.” And Mr. Wolfram wants to make his technology and his software philosophy available to far more people, including newcomers to computing, like students and children. So he has decided to make a version of the Wolfram Language and development tools available as a free cloud service. To help, he also has published a book, “An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language,” which is free to read online. Wolfram Language is already one of the programming languages distributed with the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that can be plugged into a computer monitor or television and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. The most popular model is $35. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British charity founded in 2009 to further basic education in computing to young people of all income levels. Its nonprofit company, Raspberry Pi Trading, sells the inexpensive, general-purpose computers.

• Have iPhone Sales Finally Peaked? Analysts Predict a Slump Ahead: Is Apple’s iPhone finally reaching its peak? In the past few weeks, a slew of analysts have predicted that sales of Apple’s best-selling product may slump in 2016, based in part on supply chain issues and partly on weaker demand, especially from saturated developed markets. Apple’s growth is increasingly dependent on demand for iPhones, while iPad tablet sales decline and adoption of the Apple Watch remains modest. Morgan Stanley lowered its forecast for iPhone unit sales and now estimates a drop of 6 percent in fiscal 2016, according to a Dec. 13 note. The decline is due to higher prices in international markets, excluding China, and maturing smartphone penetration in developed countries. China is the only market with year-over-year iPhone demand growth in the December quarter, according to the report.

• Why Glass Is Critical to the Future of Tech: One material has emerged that is probably second only to the processor when it comes to the importance of delivering a great user experience in all types of devices, especially mobile ones. That material is the glass screens on billions of feature and smartphones in the market today. Putting glass screens on a table top and turning it into a huge interactive screen could change the way many people interact with their digital content. Making glass walls that can show off all types of video and content, and applications that can be touched to activate them, is exciting. Imagine a glass screen on your refrigerator, or a glass mirror in the bathroom that delivers a touch-based gateway to all of your digital “stuff,” and you begin to see the role glass will play in a much broader way in the near future.