Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 23

• Elon Musk's SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket After Launch of Satellites Into Orbit: People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing. “It really felt like it was right on top of us,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX for short, said during a telephone news conference afterward. For SpaceX, the 8:29 p.m. liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was a threefold success. First, it marked the company’s return to flight after half a year. In SpaceX’s last launch attempt, a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station disintegrated. Second, SpaceX’s upgraded design for its Falcon 9 rocket worked flawlessly. The liquid oxygen was chilled to minus 340 degrees Fahrenheit, about 40 degrees colder than on earlier flights, and the kerosene fuel was cooled to 20 degrees instead of 70 degrees. Most significant to SpaceX’s ambitions, however, is that after the second stage of the rocket with the satellites continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around, back to Cape Canaveral. Currently, most rockets are launched just once, the boosters falling back to Earth as expensive junk. Making spaceflight more like air travel, with rockets capable of being refueled and sent up again, is essential for SpaceX’s long-term goal of sending people to Mars. “It’s all the difference in the world,” Mr. Musk said, “absolutely fundamental.”

• Google, Ford in talks on self-driving car partnership: source: Google and Ford Motor Co are in talks about forming a partnership to develop autonomous car technology, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. The extent of a partnership between the second-largest U.S. automaker and search engine giant Alphabet Inc remains under discussion and the precise framework of any effort is unclear but it could include jointly building and developing cars. The two sides have been talking for months, the source said. A partnership between a major automaker and Google could speed the introduction of self-driving vehicles by giving the car company access to Google's wealth of software development while Google would benefit from the industrial and automotive know-how of a firm such as Ford. Fully autonomous cars could eventually prevent thousands of crashes, deaths and injuries, reduce oil use through better traffic management and extend personal mobility to people unable to drive.

• Jet.com Misses Last-Minute Christmas Sales and Shows Downside of Its Model: The heavily funded e-commerce startup began notifying customers 10 days before Christmas that it could not guarantee delivery by the holiday, citing “nationwide shipping delays that have affected many of our shipping partners.” On December 16, Jet.com added an alert to the top of its homepage. The company has still been guaranteeing two-day delivery for items it ships out of its own warehouses, but those are mostly household goods like toilet paper, detergent and packaged groceries that are typically not bought as gifts.While Jet.com is less than six months old, the incident highlights one big downside of its current model compared to Amazon’s. Jet’s pitch is that its large network of warehousing partners helps it choose the most efficient way to fulfill an order, thus stripping out excess costs and passing along discounts of 5 percent to 10 percent to shoppers if they order multiple items at once. But the model also means Jet doesn’t currently have as much control over the experience shoppers have after they complete a purchase for a large number of orders. Some items on Amazon also come from someone else’s warehouse. But Amazon can still guarantee two-day shipping on more than 20 million items through Amazon Prime, thanks to its huge Fulfillment by Amazon program that lets merchants store goods with Amazon for a fee.

• Google Calls Its New Ad Option for App Developers 'an Install-Seeking Machine' Google says developers running "universal app campaigns" across its network are finding them to be more cost-effective than ads run than other digital platforms. The Adwords-based campaign option, which Google introduced in September, allows developers to run a campaign across Google search, YouTube, Google Play store and the Google Display network. A developer designates a target cost per install and budget, and then Google automates where across its platforms the promos should go."Basically, think of it as an install-seeking machine," Anthony Chavez, Google's product management director for mobile ads and Universal App Campaigns, told Adweek. As an example, Google pointed to Sparkpeople, which has 15 million users in the U.S. and Canada for its fitness and dieting apps and has been testing the sytem. Joe Robb, the digital marketing director for the company, said that while the cost per install has been slightly higher than he expected, his team is still spending between 30 and 50 percent less than they do on Facebook. The campaign is also now driving about 20 percent of the company's total downloads.