Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 29

• Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future:  Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges — and elite institutions in particular — have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs’ lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures. As a result, colleges — and elite institutions in particular — have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs’ lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage. Some of that spirit was on display at Rice in October. In an engineering department design lab, teams of students in the university’s global health technologies program were working on assignments to develop products for real clients — many of them for hospitals in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, seeking low-cost medical devices.

• LinkedIn Rival Viadeo Exits China: Viadeo, the French rival to LinkedIn, is to exit China in order to focus on becoming a profitable business. In a further cost-cutting move, it will also shutter its data center in California and migrate to the cloud. The company moved into China eight years when it acquired local professional social network Tianji.com, but that site will cease to exist on December 31. Viadeo claims that Tianji has 25 million users, but it has struggled to attract the “very considerable development resources” necessary to drive it forward in “China’s fiercely competitive market”. Viadeo had planned to use one-third of the proceeds from its 2014 IPO to develop Tianji.com, but the listing didn’t raise enough capital and the firm wasn’t able to pull in money from private investors. Post-China, Viadeo said it will refocus on its home market of France and other French-speaking countries, while putting great emphasis on its B2B sales model. Viadeo’s foray into China was a fascinating one, since it doubled down on the country in 2011, a time when Twitter and Facebook were heavily linked with opening local operations there. The company two-sided play — having a global site (Viadeo.com) and a China-only one (Tianji.com) — was a model that both of the U.S. social networks had reportedly shown interest in. In contrast to Viadeo’s troubles in China, LinkedIn seems to be finding some success there. The U.S. social network opened a joint-venture with Sequoia China last year. LinkedIn China isn’t a totally separate site, but it does block some content from China based on the country’s web censorship regulations.

• Facebook Pitches Free Basics to India as Net Neutrality Activists Clash With Facebook: Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers for the country to allow a free Internet service that has stirred controversy and invited questions from regulators. Facebook’s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care, and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Yet activists say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites. The backlash in India centers on net neutrality, the principle that all Internet websites should be equally accessible. Critics accused the world’s largest social networking company of favoring a limited swath of the Internet and excluding rival services. And Facebook’s broader Internet.org initiative, including Free Basics, is seen as an effective way to draw more users onto a social network already used by over a billion people. Zuckerberg’s Facebook is spending billions of dollars on Internet.org, including projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. The billionaire co-founder has said Facebook or its partners will not make money off this initiative and that the goal is to bring Internet access to the developing world and alleviate poverty. “This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics,” Zuckerberg wrote in an opinion piece in the Times of India. “If people lose access to free basic services they will simply lose access to the opportunities offered by the Internet today.” This month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India asked in a “consultation paper” whether telecommunications service providers should be allowed to charge different pricing for data usage on websites, applications and platforms. The initial comment period for the Indian consultation paper ends Dec. 30. Activists have argued that Free Basics is a “land grab on government property” and that with data rates in India already being low, eventually “everybody will be on the full and open Internet.”

• TVF and AIB, Stars of India’s Online Video Scene Struggle to Make a Living: It’s not just the streaming video services that are struggling to make a profit in India. Even the country’s most popular YouTube stars have trouble making a living from digital video. The Viral Fever, a troupe of actors that creates TV-style episodic comedies, has one of the country’s most popular channels on YouTube, with about 1.3 million subscribers. Its most recent series, “Pitchers,” focused on a group of young tech workers trying to decide whether to form their own start-up. But the ad revenue from YouTube is so low that the group, known as T.V.F., has turned to sponsors like Kingfisher beer and Pond’s cold cream for funding to create its shows. T.V.F. also makes corporate videos and does live comedy shows at Indian colleges to help pay the bills. All India Bakchod, a four-man comedy troupe, has had similar challenges. The group has produced videos making fun of topics like Bollywood, Indian weddings and politics and has nearly 1.5 million followers on its YouTube channel. About two months ago, A.I.B. finally hit the big time, when Star India, a group of television channels owned by 21st Century Fox, began airing a weekly news satire show starring the group on its Hotstar app and on TV. Mr. Joshi said that A.I.B. essentially breaks even on video production costs and makes extra income from branded content it creates for Red Bull, Xbox and Quiksilver.