Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 28

• Facebook shares soar as mobile drives big jump in ad sales: Facebook smashed investors' expectations with a 52-percent jump in quarterly revenue as it sold more ads targeted at a fast-growing number of mobile users, sending its shares sharply higher after hours. Facebook shares rose almost 12 percent in after-hours trading to $105.32. The company said sales in the fourth quarter rose 52 percent from a year ago, to $5.84 billion, while profit increased to $1.56 billion, more than doubling from $701 million a year ago. For the full year, the company reported $3.69 billion in profit on $17.93 billion in revenue, an increase of 44 percent from 2014. The company has also begun monetizing some of its other units, such as photo-sharing app Instagram, which surpassed 400 million users last year and began selling ads in September. Facebook said mobile ads accounted for 80 percent of total ad revenue in the quarter, compared with about 78 percent in the third quarter and 69 percent a year earlier.The results offer a bright spot in a tumultuous climate for many American technology stocks. Shares of Twitter, Facebook’s most visible social networking competitor in the United States, have tumbled more than 55 percent during the last year. Yelp, the local-review service, is down about 60 percent. LinkedIn, the professional social networking service, is off more than 15 percent. Facebook is a much larger company than many of its peers, yet it is able to keep its growth rate high. The company has notched double-digit jumps in ad revenue and in the expansion of its user base. Facebook now has 1.59 billion monthly visitors, up 14 percent from a year ago. About 1.44 billion of those people visit the site on a mobile device; 1.04 billion visit Facebook every day. 

• EBay's disappointing forecast fuels stock decline: EBay forecast weaker-than-expected revenue and profit for the current quarter and full year, as the e-commerce company struggles against a strong dollar while trying to revamp its core marketplace business. Shares of the retailer fell more than 12 percent to $23.51 in extended trading on Wednesday. The online retailer, which faces intense competition from e-commerce giant Amazon.com, has also been hit by brick-and-mortar rivals like Wal-Mart Stores that are aggressively boosting their online presence. The company said its gross merchandise value, or the total value of all goods sold on its site, rose 5 percent after accounting for foreign exchange impact. In its second quarter without PayPal, eBay's revenue was $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, flat with a year earlier during the crucial holiday shopping season and in line with analysts' average expectations. EBay began testing a paid shipping membership program in Germany last year, responding to shoppers' increased demand for faster delivery. Wenig on Wednesday said there were "no plans for now" to expand the program. EBay derives nearly 60 percent of its revenue from overseas and faces headwinds from a strong dollar.

• PayPal's revenue beats Street view on higher transactions, customers: Revenue rose about 17 percent to $2.56 billion.  Payment processor PayPal Holdings Inc on Wednesday reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue, as new customer additions and payment processing volumes surged, and it announced a buyback of $2 billion of its stock. PayPal said it expects 2016 full-year earnings of $1.09 to $1.14 per share, and revenue growth of 16-19 percent on a currency neutral basis. It expects currency fluctuations to impact net revenue by 3 percentage points during the year. The company's share buyback program was a reminder of the strength of its free cash flow. PayPal ended the year with $5.7 billion in cash reserves. PayPal's net income rose to $367 million, or 30 cents per share, from $286 million, or 23 cents per share. Shares of PayPal, which completed its spin-off from eBay Inc in July, rose 6.4 percent to $33.66 in extended trade.

• Samsung Electronics warns of difficult 2016 as smartphone market peaks:  Tech giant Samsung on Thursday warned of possible weaker earnings this year compared with 2015 due to softer sales of gadgets such as smartphones, a trend that is also hurting rival Apple and major chipmakers. The South Korean firm's warning came a day after Apple shares fell more than 6.5 percent, the biggest percentage drop in two years, as the iPhone maker forecast its first quarterly sales drop in 13 years.

• Qualcomm forecasts weak profit as demand slows for mobile chips:  Qualcomm forecast current-quarter profit below analysts' expectations as demand weakens for its chips used in mobile devices in a slowing market. Revenue fell 18.7 percent to $5.78 billion. The company, whose customers include Apple, said it expected its mobile chip shipments to fall by 16-25 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. Qualcomm also expects 3G and 4G device shipments to decline by 4-14 percent, hurting its licensing revenue. The chipmaker's weak outlook comes a day after Apple forecast its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years and reported the slowest-ever rise in iPhone shipments as the critical Chinese market shows signs of weakness. Qualcomm shares fell 3 percent in extended trading on Wednesday.

• Google ships five million Cardboard virtual reality devices: Alphabet's Google said it had shipped 5 million units of the Google Cardboard viewer, a wearable device that allows users to experience virtual reality through mobile apps. Oculus, the virtual reality company Facebook Inc (FB.O) bought in 2014, started accepting pre-orders this month for its much-awaited headset, Rift, which will ship in first quarter. Google said in November that its video-sharing site, YouTube, supported virtual reality videos. Viewers can watch virtual reality videos using a mobile device and the Google Cardboard viewer. Google said more than 350,000 hours of YouTube videos had been watched in virtual reality.

• Theranos Lab Poses ‘Immediate Jeopardy to Patient Health,’ Says U.S. Agency:  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has decided that Theranos’ Newark, Calif., facility poses “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” A letter sent to the company on January 25th says that the lab has been given 10 days to provide “acceptable evidence of correction.” Specifically, the document cites problems with the laboratory director, the technical supervisor, hematology and the lab’s analytic systems. CMS has not released the laboratory inspection report that led to this letter, so the details of these infractions remain unclear. But the level assigned to these determinations — “Condition-level deficiencies” — are among the most serious that CMS can make. They mean that Theranos’ Newark lab was found to be in violation of accepted professional standards. CMS declined to comment on the letter.