Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 21 2016

• Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future: There’s a little parlor game that people in Silicon Valley like to play. Let’s call it, Who’s Losing? There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there’s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding. So which of these five is losing? A year ago, it was Google that looked to be in a tough spot as its ad business appeared more vulnerable to Facebook’s rise. Now, Google is looking up, and it’s Apple, hit by rising worries about a slowdown in iPhone sales, that may be headed for some pain. Over the next couple of weeks, as these companies issue earnings that show how they finished 2015, the state of play may shift once more. But don’t expect it to shift much. Asking “who’s losing?” misses a larger truth about how thoroughly Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft now lord over all that happens in tech. Who’s really losing? In the larger picture, none of them — not in comparison with the rest of the tech industry, the rest of the economy and certainly not in the influence each of them holds over our lives.  Indeed, the Frightful Five are so well protected against start-ups that in most situations, the rise of new companies only solidifies their lead. Consider that Netflix hosts its movies on Amazon’s cloud, and Google’s venture capital arm has a huge investment in Uber. Or consider all the in-app payments that Apple and Google get from their app stores, and all the marketing dollars that Google and Facebook reap from start-ups looking to get you to download their stuff. This gets to the core of the Frightful Five’s indomitability. They have each built several enormous technologies that are central to just about everything we do with computers. In tech jargon, they own many of the world’s most valuable “platforms” — the basic building blocks on which every other business, even would-be competitors, depend.

• Alibaba Teams With Nvidia in $1 Billion Bet on Cloud Computing: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will work with Nvidia Corp. on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and plans to enlist about 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform during the next three years. The arm of China’s biggest e-commerce operator, known as AliCloud, will boost investment in data analysis and machine learning, it said in a statement Wednesday. AliCloud is staking $1 billion on the belief that demand for processing and storage from governments and companies will boost growth during the next decade as its tries to compete with Amazon.com Inc. in computing services. The investment also reflects Alibaba’s own appetite for information processing as China’s online-retail market grows to 10 trillion yuan ($1.5 billion) by 2020, according to Bain & Co. The push into of cloud computing, where software and services are provided to customers via remote data centers the size of American football fields, prompted Alibaba to open its second data center in Silicon Valley in October and prepare its first in Europe. AliCloud is now extending its scope beyond basic cloud-computing services. It co-founded a quantum computing laboratory with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help secure its data centers and develop machines capable of even faster calculations. The company will team up with Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia to provide customer support in the areas of deep-learning and high-performance computing, AliCloud said in a statement. AliCloud generates revenue mostly by charging clients a fee for using its computing infrastructure. For now, it contributes a mere sliver of total revenue, with computing and Internet infrastructure accounting for 3.1 percent of sales in the June quarter according to data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, Amazon Web Services’ revenue rose a better-than-expected 78 percent to $2.1 billion in the third quarter.

• News Corp denies rumors of Twitter bid: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp said rumors about the company's interest in buying microblogging site Twitter Inc or building a stake in it were untrue. Twitter's shares, which rose as much as 14 percent on Wednesday, pared some gains and closed up 4.1 percent at $17.38. The stock rose from a record low after unconfirmed chatter about News Corp's interest in Twitter circulated on Wednesday. The rumors intensified after a CNBC segment, tech website Re/code said. The social media site was evaluated as a takeover target because of the company's shrinking stock price

• How Amazon Is Slowly Building a World in Which It Takes Very Little Effort to Shop  'Replenishment' service nabs GE, other brands: If you use all of Amazon's technologies in the near future, you almost won't have to leave your home. And you won't even have to push buttons to get your household needs fulfilled. The Seattle-based retailer today revealed that General Electric, printer brand Brother and glucose-monitor player Gmate Smart are the latest brands to partner with Amazon Dash Replenishment. The 3-month-old program lets appliances and gadgets order products without any help at all. For instance, GE's washers that utilize what's called "smart dispense technology" can be programmed to automatically order detergent when the owner is running low on his or her go-to brand. You don't even need to push one of those Amazon Dash buttons the e-commerce giant unveiled in April. Essentially, the Replenishment system will send the order through your Amazon Prime account via its namesake mobile app—think items you always need like dog food, coffee beans or grounds, ink cartridges (when it comes to Brother), blood-sugar testing strips (for Gmate Smart), water filters for purifying pitchers, dish-washing soap, etc.  No effort required, and if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gets his way with drones, very little human energy will be spent on delivering such items to your home. A new commercial world is emerging, indeed. Other brands that were already a part of Dash Replenishment include Whirlpool (for its high-tech dishwashers) and hand sanitizer Purell. The initiative builds on Amazon Echo, the 11-month-old speaker system with voice-control technology that lets folks order goods just by talking into the device.