Daily Tech Snippet: 11 January 2015

• Zuckerberg Plea for Free Web in India Wins Support in Review: A majority of Indians who submitted comments to the nation’s telecommunications regulator said they support Facebook Inc.’s Free Basics plan that would allow free Web access. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that 1.35 million responses in support of the plan -- or 56 percent of all comments -- came from Facebook’s @supportfreebasics.in, according to a report on the agency’s review of different pricing for data services. It received another 544,000 responses from @facebookmail.com, with most backing Facebook’s plan, the regulator said, without providing a percentage. Comments either supporting or opposing differential pricing were “basically template responses" and "identical in nature," the regulator said Saturday on its website, without explaining how the views would be used in the review. The agency’s chief, R.S. Sharma, told The Hindu newspaper in an interview published Jan. 1 that such responses were "not helpful at all" and didn’t represent meaningful input. The regulator has appealed to respondents and Facebook to solicit more detailed opinions. Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers last month for the country to allow a free Internet service. 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. Industry groups say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites.

• Aerodrome Is The First Commercial Airport For Drones: Aerodrome is working with the City of Boulder, Nevada, to launch the first commercial drone airport — the Eldorado Droneport. It’s one of only a handful of FAA-appointed UAS test sites in the United States. The plan is to offer training, maintenance and other support functions for the commercial drone industry, as well as for individual drone pilots. The company already operates teaching facilities in Detroit, Michigan and Henderson, Nevada.

• Israel’s Best-Performing Tech Stock Hasn’t Sold a Single Product: Occupying a small, second-floor space in the same office park as 3D printing giant Stratasys, a tiny Israeli upstart is trying to sell investors on a future in which physical objects materialize with the press of a button. Nano Dimension is nowhere near achieving that goal, yet somehow has become Israel’s best-performing technology stock in 2015. While Stratasys lost nearly three-quarters of its value last year, the much smaller Nano Dimension rallied 261 percent. Not bad for a company with no customers or revenue. This little 3D printing shop, with 44 employees and a market cap of 193 million shekels ($49 million), has become a source of hope for Israeli entrepreneurs struggling to secure venture capital. That’s because Nano Dimension took an unorthodox route to raise about $18 million and become a public company, while managing to avoid the long, costly process of an initial public offering.  Nano Dimension found its way onto the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange using what’s known as a reverse merger. This involves a private company taking over a public one, bypassing the formalities of an IPO. “We’re selling shares like any other public company,” said Amit Dror, the chief executive officer of Nano Dimension. “It’s just that it happens to be that our case is a public company that’s pre-revenue.”

• China Setting Up Fund for Its Electronics Industry:  A Chinese technology regulator said on Friday that it would cooperate with a bank to set up a $30 billion fund to support the country’s huge electronics supply chain. The creation of the new fund underscores China’s ambitions to expand its tech capabilities and also signals how those ambitions are being threatened by slowing growth and recent market turmoil. Official accounts of the fund did not make clear precisely how the money would be spent. But given the recent weakness in Chinese manufacturing and lower-end electronics manufacturers, it may be intended as a form of stimulus to the tech industry. The terminology used in media accounts signals China’s bold technology ambitions. Reports about the new fund said it would be used to build a “strong manufacturing country” and an “Internet power.” A report in state-run media said the fund was created to address problems faced by small and medium enterprises that have come under pressure or folded recently because of a lack of funding. The report made reference to recent factory closures, specifically pointing out the closing in October of Fu Chang Electronic Technology, a supplier to the telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE. The fund will be created through a partnership between an industry group controlled by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ping An Bank. Signaling the importance of the initiative, the signing ceremony was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, which is often used to host visiting dignitaries, and was attended by representatives of many of China’s largest technology companies, including Lenovo and Alibaba, according to an official release. The new fund seems to resemble a separate multibillion-dollar fund, announced in 2014, to provide financing and enable acquisitions to increase the size and sophistication of the country’s semiconductor industry.