Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 1st

• Where's the lane? Self-driving cars confused by shabby U.S. roadways, Volvo CEO is not amused: Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. "It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!" Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings "crazy," complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars. In other developed countries, greater standardization of road signs and markings makes it easier for robot cars to navigate. In the U.S., however, traffic lights can be aligned vertically, horizontally or "dog-house" style in two columns. Pavement markings use paint with different degrees of reflectivity - or don't exist at all. "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose," said Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails." To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost. Mercedes says the "drive pilot" system found in its recently unveiled luxury E Class 2017 sedans works even with no lane markings. The system - which incorporates 23 sensors - takes into account guard rails, barriers, and other cars to keep cars in their lanes up to 84 miles (135km) per hour, under "suitable circumstances." Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add $4,000 to a car's price.

• Facebook’s Live Video Effort Entices Media Companies: When severe weather passed through the Atlanta area early this month, Brad Nitz, a meteorologist for a local television station, WSB-TV, fed viewers live video updates on the station’s website, as he has done for years. But then he did something new: He turned away from the television camera and addressed an iPhone that was streaming him live — on Facebook. And the station’s social media manager, Jonathan Anker, watched this new Facebook audience swell. At its peak, the stream reached 8,800 viewers at once, and the segment has been played more than 77,000 times in total, far more than the station’s typical online audience. The numbers, Mr. Anker said, were “seriously out of whack, in a delightful way.” Experiences like this have media companies swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago. For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos? How do you reach people on their mobile devices? And how do you get more out of Facebook’s 1.6 billion users? Now, they hope, they have found a key for all three. Yet it is also raising some questions inside the companies about if — and when — they will see any meaningful money come from the push. The feature, called Facebook Live, has largely lived under the radar so far. But it is one of the company’s highest-priority projects, according to three people directly involved with the initiative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Internally, Facebook Live is seen as a way to move beyond hosting conversations about television and live events to becoming a venue for both. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has made Facebook Live one of his pet projects, two of the people said, devoting significant resources and effort to the initiative. Facebook plans to announce a suite of new features and partners in early April and at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco later in the month. Facebook, though, has prioritized getting live video in front of as many users as possible. The company has been eager to talk with media companies about getting started with streaming, but remains vague in conversations about revenue sharing or subscription models. It is pushing a build-first, make-money-later philosophy, one that can be frustrating to media partners, particularly those struggling to navigate broader changes in the online media industry. But whatever the frustrations, they are outweighed by the prospect of reaching Facebook’s huge audience.

• LinkedIn Buddies Up Closer to Lynda.com, Adds Course Recommendations Based on Your Career: LinkedIn is finding more ways to pair its professional network with Lynda.com, the online video library it bought for $1.5 billion last April. The most recent integration: LinkedIn is using data around which jobs are most popular among its users to suggest collections of videos that can help train someone interested in that career. If you were interested in becoming a Web designer, for example, Lynda.com could now recommend a collection of classes to help you learn the skills necessary for that job. Some extra revenue would be great news for the company, and would also help justify the $1.5 billion it paid for the video library last year. It’s one of the reasons LinkedIn is also putting Lynda.com courses on Virgin America flights. LinkedIn stock has fallen by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year, and just this week Barclay’s analyst Paul Vogel downgraded the stock over fear of slowing revenue growth. It’s unclear whether a “shopping list” of videos will actually open any wallets, but it certainly can’t hurt.

• Government report details Theranos quality control issues: A government report released late Thursday accuses Theranos of producing inaccurate test results, of failing to meet its own lab standards and hiring unqualified personnel. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service visited Theranos’ main facilities in Newark, California last November and found the one drop blood test startup’s machines produced wildly inaccurate test results – including one for cancer detection, according to a redacted version of the report put out by the Wall Street Journal. The newly released 121-page report, obtained in full by the WSJ details quality control issues – including the failure to meet Theranos own standards. According to the report, erratic test results were frequent when tested in July 2014, and from February to June of 2015 on Theranos’ proprietary blood test machine Edison. One example – a test to measure a hormone affecting testosterone levels failed 87 percent of the time when run on Edison. It is unfathomable Theranos would be allowed to run test results for the public during this time. and these new details provide an inside look at some very real issues surrounding Theranos as a company, particularly around its code-named Edison technology – the supporting reason for the company’s $9 billion valuation.

• Amazon Expands Buttons for Reordering Essentials -- Like Doritos: Amazon.com Inc. is expanding the number of products available for instant re-ordering through its wireless Dash Buttons, citing high customer demand. After last year rolling out the WiFi-connected plastic tabs that can be mounted to the fridge, washing machine or kitchen cupboard, the online retailing giant is increasing the number of brands that can be re-ordered by pushing a button to more than 100, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. Now Amazon Prime customers who suddenly find themselves low on supplies -- from Trojan condoms to Doritos chips, Energizer batteries, Purina dog food and more -- can hit the button to reorder the product and get it delivered for free. The buttons cost $4.99 each, with the cost reimbursed after the first order through Dash. When the buttons were first introduced in March 2015 they were met with some skepticism as to whether people would want or use them. But Amazon said orders placed through Dash have grown by more than 75 percent in the last three months alone and now take place more than once a minute. 

• Inside the Little-Known Japan Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones: The little-known Japanese company at the center of a legal tussle between Apple Inc. and the U.S. government over the hacking of an iPhone built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the mobile phone security business almost by accident. Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd. worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected in a terrorist attack, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. Neither Cellebrite nor the FBI have confirmed the link, and a spokesman from parent Sun Corp. on Thursday said the company isn’t able to comment on specific criminal cases. Sun, based in a small town of 100,000 southwest of Tokyo, has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan’s pachinko parlors since the 1970s but has often displayed bigger tech ambitions. The Konan, Aichi-based company developed personal computers in the late 1970s, computer games and more recently, iPhone mahjong apps. In 2007, as sales slumped, Sun acquired Petah Tikva, Israel-based Cellebrite. Cellebrite hadn’t ventured into forensics at the time, and the purchase was mainly to add phone-to-phone data transfer to Sun’s fledgling telecommunications business, said the Japanese company’s spokesman Hidefumi Sugaya. When Cellebrite later took on investigative agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation as clients, the business took off, he said in a telephone interview. Today, the bulk of Sun’s mobile data solutions business comes from Cellebrite, said Sugaya. "Although the FBI didn’t get a legal decision that would require Apple to hack around its own security software, it created a situation where they can go to third parties to do that," said Matt Larson, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. "Companies like Cellebrite may have found a niche industry of assisting the FBI unlock personal devices in select cases moving forward." Cellebrite sells hardware and software for extracting data from hand-held devices, even if it has been encrypted or deleted. It employs more than 500 people and has offices in Israel, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Singapore and the U.K., according to its website.Founded in 1999, Cellebrite was bought by Sun Corp. for a reported $17.5 million. 

• Huawei 2015 revenue jumps 37 percent, strongest in seven years: China's Huawei on Friday posted its strongest revenue growth since 2008 as China's adoption of fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology and strong smartphone sales worldwide boosted sales for one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers. The Shenzhen-based company said global revenue rose 37 percent to 395 billion yuan ($61.10 billion) in 2015, slightly above its forecast of 390 billion yuan. Net profit rose 32 percent to 36.9 billion yuan, from 27.9 billion yuan a year earlier, while operating margins dipped to 11.6 percent from 11.9 percent.Revenue in Huawei's carrier business, which competes with Sweden's Ericsson for the top spot globally for telecommunication equipment, increased 21.4 percent in 2015 on strong demand for 4G telecommunication equipment. In Huawei's enterprise division, which builds private networks for companies and organizations, revenue rose 43.8 percent.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 31st

• With $340 million in revenue, Nest is underperforming, and its future at Google is at risk:  Nest generated about $340 million in sales last year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. That’s an impressive figure for a company in the very nascent market of Internet-connected devices. Nest currently sells three products: The flagship smart thermostat; Protect, its smoke detector; and Nest Cam, the home-monitoring video predecessor to Dropcam. But it’s below the initial expectations Google had set for Nest when it bought the startup in 2014 for a whopping $3.2 billion. The company’s sales performance may face even deeper scrutiny inside Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, where Nest now sits, as the hardware maker faces its most critical year ever. Alphabet, whose execs have spoken regularly about controlling costs at the non-Google companies, may become less charitable. And in the meanwhile, Nest's CEO got slammed in a column in TechCrunch for the culture there: though the company currently manufactures three products — its thermostat, a smoke alarm, and its Nest cam (via its Dropcam acquisition) — it has repeatedly delayed product releases and disappointed its customers, particularly given the billing that Nest’s products receive. In one of the more visible cases of customer dissatisfaction, a New York Times reporter said in January that a software bug drained his Nest thermostat’s battery, a discovery he made only when his infant began crying from his chilly bedroom in the middle of the night. Nest’s smart smoke alarm has also been plagued by software glitches. In the meantime, says The Information, Google has moved forward on similar efforts, including its OnHub wireless router and a stealth project to create a competitor to Amazon’s Echo. That Google has done so without Nest’s involvement must be demoralizing to Nest’s current employees, who were presumably drawn to the challenge of helping Nest become one of the world’s great hardware companies. But there’s reason for even more concern going forward: Fadell has created a culture that’s increasingly unlikely to attract the world’s best engineers, which has always been the top priority for its parent company. (Google, in stark contrast, is consistently ranked as one of thebest places to work.) If Alphabet wants to maintain its feel-good reputation, it may be time to part ways with Fadell, or at least to demote him. He’s now had more than two years to prove himself. What Fadell has shown instead is that he’s unable to get out of his own way — or Nest’s.

• Car-Pooling Helps Uber Go the Extra Mile: One day not long ago, an Uber driver picked up a passenger in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district. Let’s call our passenger Abby, because her real name has been lost to database anonymization, an effort to keep her identity private. Abby needed to go to Noe Valley, a 25-minute drive that might ordinarily have cost about $15. But she had chosen UberPool, the ride-hailing company’s 18-month-old car-pooling program. In the process she had unwittingly initiated one of the service’s more epic recent trips. Unlike a standard Uber ride, in which a single rider starts a one-time trip, UberPool works like a party line for cars. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, describes it as the future of his company — and thus the future of transportation in America. Call up the app, specify your destination, and in exchange for a significant discount, UberPool matches you with other riders going the same way. The service might create a ride just for you, but just as often, it puts you in a ride that began long ago — one that has spanned several drop-offs and pickups, a kind of instant bus line created from collective urban demand. In total, Uber collected about $48 for the ride, of which the driver kept $35. The company had collapsed five separate rides into a single trip, saving about six miles of travel and removing several cars from the road. For riders, the discounts amounted to savings of at least half of a standard Uber trip. For the driver, an hourlong trip with no idle time resulted in steady earnings (Uber drivers make money only when riders are in the car). And though Uber made less from the single ride than it would have from multiple rides, the company benefited by installing itself as a fixture in people’s lives. UberPool may push us to re-evaluate how we think about Uber and its impact on the world.

• People Are Spending Lots of Time, Not Money, on Their Phones: Shopping on mobile phones is growing at its fastest rate ever. But there’s still a huge gap between how much time shoppers spend on mobile websites and apps, and the percentage of total e-commerce sales that happen on these mobile sites. One big reason for this 44 percent gap: Entering in credit card and shipping details on a phone can be a pain, both on mobile websites and in apps. Services like Apple Pay and Android Pay have eliminated a lot of that work in partnering apps, by filling in those details automatically. And as Re/code reported, Apple Pay will be coming to mobile websites soon, too. If the gap between time spent and dollars spent on mobile sites is going to close, these services are going to be a big reason why.

• Elon Musk has a lot riding on his new Tesla: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is poised to reveal his newest creation, the Model 3, at an event on Thursday. Starting at $35,000, the car represents Tesla's first electric vehicle aimed at price-conscious, mainstream consumers. And how it fares is going to have a major impact on Tesla's long-term future as a company — and the future of electric cars more broadly. That's why this unveiling is an incredibly important moment. Back in 2006, Musk laid out this vision in a blog post on Tesla's website: The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model. In other words, this is the endgame. Although the company had focused first on high-end cars — the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, and the Model X — the ultimate goal was to bring the electric car to the masses. So for Tesla to have reached this point is going to be, naturally, a very big deal in the company's history. But that's not the only reason the Model 3 is significant. Tesla's new car is important in a very immediate sense because it offers Tesla a big chance at reversing some of the headwinds facing the company. You may recall that in October, Consumer Reports dinged the Model S for reliability problems, even though the same publication had otherwise issued aglowing review of the vehicle. Meanwhile, Tesla sales may have been affected by low oil prices that could be suppressing demand for electric vehicles, even as internal production issues hindered the company's supply. Not all of that is Tesla's fault, but it has prompted analysts to sour on Tesla's stock. Over the latter half of 2015, shares of Tesla fell roughly 15 percent from about $280 a share to $240. (It's now hovering at $230.) The Model 3 could be Tesla's opportunity to regain momentum.

• Amazon Assembly, Installation Services Bolster Big-Product Sales: Amazon.com Inc. wants to sell bigger things. To do so, the Web retailer has put together an army of workers who can handle everything from mounting flat TVs on walls to assembling treadmills. In the year since it rolled out Amazon Home Services, which also offers professional jobs such as painting, plumbing and yoga instruction, the online store has expanded the service to 30 cities from an initial four. Amazon now offers more than 1,200 services, the Seattle-based company said on Wednesday. It’s part of a push by Amazon to expand beyond products, and also a way to make it easier for consumers to buy big items that require an extra pair of hands to set up. Amazon has also increased its warehouse capacity for large items like furniture and flat-screen televisions. A new shipping hub in Kansas announced last week will be among about a dozen Amazon warehouses specifically designed for big products. Others are in Connecticut and California. Amazon now sells more than 1 million items that give shoppers the option of requesting assembly, installation or other related services, which is boosting the sale of home-improvement products, said Erika Takeuchi, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The most popular services requested are mounting flat-screen televisions to walls and assembling treadmills, she said. Amazon’s home services also include a wide range of offerings that don’t require purchases from the online store. Housecleaning is the third most popular job requested, according to Amazon. Other services include landscaping, gutter cleaning, pet grooming and yoga instruction. But most service requests are tied to a purchase.

• Foxconn unit Hon Hai's Quarterly Profit Slides as Smartphone Demand Wilts: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.’s quarterly profit dropped for the first time in more than three years after the main assembler of Apple’s devices fell prey to slowing iPhone sales and intensifying competition in contract manufacturing. The largest member of billionaire Terry Gou’s Foxconn Technology Group reported a 7 percent slide in fourth-quarter net income to NT$52.9 billion ($1.6 billion), compared with the NT$59.1 billion average of analysts’ estimates. The fall in profit was Hon Hai’s first since the second quarter of 2012 on a comparable basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Hon Hai’s 2015 profit exceeded expectations but it’s grappling with a slowdown in smartphone demand. The Taiwanese company gets half its revenue from Apple, whichwarned in January of its first quarterly sales decline in over a decade as China decelerates. The iPhone maker has since launched a smaller and cheaper version of its marquee device, which investors are counting on to rejuvenate the business. Gou is seeking to broaden Foxconn’s remit, transforming the contract manufacturer into a company that also makes key electronics components and devices. Hon Hai and several other Foxconn affiliates on Wednesday announced a deal to take control of Sharp Corp. for about $3.5 billion, adding the Japanese supplier of displays for smartphones to Gou’s corporate empire. Researchers at IDC predicted in December that global smartphone growth will dip below 10 percent this year for the first time. 

Daily Tech Snippet: March 30

• Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China: China’s government said on Monday that it would take steps to more strictly manage websites in the country, its latest push to set boundaries in the wider Internet. A draft law posted by one of China’s technology regulators said that websites in the country would have to register domain names with local service providers and with the authorities. It was not clear whether the rule would apply to all websites or only to those hosted on servers in China. Chinese laws can be haphazardly enforced and are usually vague, and because the new rule is only a draft, analysts said they expected the regulator, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, to specify later to whom the law would apply. If the rule applies to all websites, it will have major implications and will effectively cut China out of the global Internet. By creating a domestic registry for websites, the rule would create a system of censorship in which only websites that have specifically registered with the Chinese government would be reachable from within the country. If the law applies only to sites hosted in China, it would still represent a consolidation of power by Beijing. Forcing registration with Chinese entities is likely to create a new boom in domain-name service registrars. At the moment, Alibaba operates China’s primary domain-name service provider, called Wan Wang. The new rule would also enable the Chinese government to keep closer tabs on the real identities of website operators. It would also help Beijing assemble a registry of important websites if China wants to break away from the global registry that unifies the Internet, Mr. Creemers said. The new rules are the latest in a string of measures taken by the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping to assert control over the Internet. This year, regulators created rules to block foreign companies from publishing online content in China without the government’s consent. Regulators also shut down the social media accounts of the sharp-tongued tycoon Ren Zhiqiang.

• Google Fiber is officially adding phone service for $10 a month: Many people can already buy TV and Internet service from Google Fiber. Now, the company that brought gigabit speeds to Austin and Kansas City is moving deeper into the telecom industry by offering its own bundled telephone service. For $10 a month, Google Fiber customers soon will be able to buy an add-on known as Fiber Phone — a service that, according to a company blog post, appears to mimic much of the functionality of Google Voice. Voicemail on Fiber Phone can be automatically transcribed and sent to your email. You'll get unlimited domestic calling, as well as international calls at Google Voice's rates. And you'll have access to one phone number that can be set up to ring all of your phones — whether landline or mobile. A series of leaked emails in January first uncovered Google Fiber's plans to move into phone service. But now the decision is official: Fiber Phone will roll out gradually across all of the company's existing markets. The company declined to name the initial launch markets, saying those details will come later. The service comes with a little black box that sits beside your home phone. It has both ethernet and phone jacks, and will work with most handsets except for old rotary phones, according to Kelly Mason, a company spokesperson. Google Fiber's effort to draw in phone customers highlights how the company is becoming more like traditional service providers even as many telecom companies are looking to become more like Internet content firms. Even providers of cellphone service have been shifting their focus away from voice and toward the more lucrative provision of mobile data. Reports this week suggest T-Mobile may soon unveil new phone plan options that eliminate voice service entirely to give you a bigger bucket of data. Fiber Phone fits within these trends in that it would help customers add some cloud-based functionality to their home phones. But it's not immediately clear why consumers would pick Fiber Phone over Google Voice. The two services share many of the same features, but Fiber Phone carries a subscription cost and requires an at-home installation that you don't need with Google Voice. In this respect, Google Voice might be considered a "better" service.

• Instagram’s New Algorithm Means the Free Ride May Be Over for Brands: Instagram is testing a new algorithm, which means the company is (or soon will be) choosing which posts users see in their feed and in what order. That could be a good thing for users. It means that, if the algorithm works, you should see the best photos and videos every time you open the app. For brands, though, especially those that rely on the app to reach their customers for free, the algorithm news is less than stellar. Influencers are getting nervous too. That’s because an algorithm gives Instagram control over what you see, but also what you don’t see. The fear among some brands is that the new Instagram algorithm will relegate their posts to the sidelines. What happened with Facebook is this: It originally encouraged brands and businesses to build followings for their Pages, and even offered ad units specifically intended to acquire more “fans.” The idea was that more followers meant more people would see the company’s posts in their feed, so brands paid willingly to acquire them. Then Facebook slowly pulled the rug. Little by little it changed its algorithm until posts from brand Pages were seen by just a fraction of users who followed the Page. In 2012, Facebook announced organic posts only reached 16 percent of a Page’s fans, and encouraged brands to pay to sponsor their posts instead. Brands are bracing for a similar change with Instagram.

• No One Wants to Be ‘the Next Square’ Anymore: Makers of once-prominent credit card readers are retrenching or outright folding after Square’s disappointing IPO. A year ago, being known as the “Square of Canada” was a badge of honor. Payfirma Corp.’s smartphone-compatible credit card readers were in high demand, and local investors supplied the Vancouver startup with $13 million in funding. Like Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer of Square Inc. (and Twitter Inc.), Payfirma CEO Michael Gokturk said he was aiming for “hypergrowth.” Gokturk doubled his staff to 80, including a chief operating officer formerly of Intuit Inc., and started talking about an initial public offering. But by November, being the “Square of” anywhere suddenly wasn’t such a hot title. That month, Square sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at about $2.9 billion, less than half its private valuation from a year earlier. In the runup to the IPO, analysts began questioning whether the card-reader maker should really be priced like a high-flying tech company. Its stock price is hovering around $13, right where it was after its first day of trading. “Now that they started going through the rigors of a public market, you can see that their market is actually quite limited,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “It’s going to be much harder going forward for companies that try to emulate their model to raise capital.” 

• Snapchat Adds Voice, Video Calling to Mobile Messaging App:  Snapchat, operator of a popular social-messaging app, released an update that steps up competition with Facebook Inc., owner of rival mobile communication services Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Los Angeles-based Snapchat bolstered its chat function with multimedia features including voice and video calling and digital stickers. Called Chat 2.0, the feature emulates "face-to-face communication," while making it easier to switch between video chatting, texting and calling, Snapchat said Tuesday in a blog post. WhatsApp introduced voice calls last year, but users are still waiting for video calling. Facebook’s Messenger communications app added this video capability in April. Last week, Fortune reported Snapchat acquired Bitstrips, a Toronto-based maker of personalized avatars or "bitmojis." Snapchat declined to comment on the acquisition, which Fortune said was worth about $100 million. The deal suggests Snapchat will make its stickers more customizable in the future.

• Spotify Expected to Sign $1 Billion Financing Deal: Spotify is about to close on a $1 billion deal that would double the amount of financing the music-streaming company has raised since its founding a decade ago, people briefed on the matter said Tuesday. The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which allows Spotify’s investors to change their securities into equity at a future date, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet public. By using convertible debt, Spotify obtains the funds, without needing to change its valuation. The terms of the debt, however, may put pressure on the company to go public sooner. The company had an equity value of $8.4 billion last year. Funds associated with the private equity firm TPG as well as the investment firm Dragoneer put in $750 million of the $1 billion, with the rest coming from other institutional investors, the people said. The transaction, which was placed by Goldman Sachs, is expected to close on Friday, they said. The terms give the investors the ability to convert to equity at a discount to an initial public offering price, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The discount increases if Spotify waits longer than a year to do so, they said. The coupon payment on the debt would also continue to rise over time, the people said. The deal is similar to the one that Goldman Sachs arranged for Uber in January 2015. The ride-hailing company raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt. Should the company not go public within a certain time, the interest rate on those securities would climb. TPG Special Situations Partners, an $18 billion fund within TPG that does transactions other than leveraged buyouts, participated in the deal, as did TPG Growth, which has invested in other start-ups like Uber and Airbnb. Spotify may use the funds for acquisitions, investments and international expansion, the people said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 29

• U.S. Says It Has Unlocked iPhone Without Apple: The Justice Department said on Monday that it had found a way to unlock an iPhone without help from Apple, allowing the agency to withdraw its legal effort to compel the tech company to assist in a mass-shooting investigation. The decision to drop the case — which involved demanding Apple’s help to open an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the Decembershooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people — ends a legal standoff between the government and the world’s most valuable public company. The case had become increasingly contentious as Apple refused to help the authorities, inciting a debate about whether privacy or security was more important. Yet law enforcement’s ability to now unlock an iPhone through an alternative method raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of security in Apple devices. The development also creates potential for new conflicts between the government and Apple about the method used to open the device and whether that technique will be disclosed. Lawyers for Apple have previously said the company would want to know the procedure used to crack open the smartphone, yet the government might classify the method. A second law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reporters in a conference call said that a company outside the government provided the F.B.I. with the means to get into the phone used by Mr. Farook, which is an iPhone 5C running Apple’s iOS 9 mobile operating system. The official would not name the company or discuss how it was accomplished, nor would officials say whether the process would ultimately be shared with Apple.

• Oculus Rift Review: A Clunky Portal to a Promising Virtual Reality: Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion two years ago, released its much-hyped Oculus Rift system on Monday. With a headset, camera and game controller, the system, which costs $1,500 when bundled with a powerful computer, is the first virtual reality product of its kind to reach consumers, before similar ones coming this year from HTC and Sony. Over the last week, I tested the Rift and many pieces of content for the system to see how true Mr. Zuckerberg’s words might ring. I can report that while the Rift is a well-built hardware system brimming with potential, the first wave of apps and games available for it narrows the device’s likely users to hard-core gamers. It is also rougher to set up and get accustomed to than products like smartphones and tablets. The Setup: The Rift works with technology that some might find anachronistic: a Windows PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse. With many people shifting away from desktop computers toward laptops, tablets and smartphones, finding a place to install the Rift and those other components may be a challenge. If you purchase the Rift, you had better have thick skin. The aesthetic of the headgear — it looks like a pair of black ski goggles with air traffic controller headphones built into the sides — is not designed to get you a date. And since wearing the Rift makes users less aware of the outside world, videos and photos of them donning the contraption — and taken without their knowledge — may end up on Instagram or Facebook. I became a subject of ridicule when my partner was watching TV and I crouched in the middle of the living room while playing the dead space pilot game. The Rift has other consequences for the mind and body. I felt mentally drained after 20-minute sessions. My eyes felt strained after half an hour, and over a week I developed a nervous eye twitch. Oculus recommends Rift owners ease into the headset: Use it a few minutes at a time initially, then gradually increase the amount of time. All Rift users should take short breaks after every 30 minutes of use, the company said. The headset may also leave lasting impressions, or what I call “nerd paint,” on your face. After a long session, the Rift left two sets of parallel horizontal lines under my eyes. When it comes down to it, I don’t disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is just the beginning of virtual reality. With about 30 games and a few apps available at Rift’s introduction, there isn’t much to do with the system yet. Oculus will eventually need a larger, more diverse set of content to transcend its initial audience of gamer geeks.

• Pandora Media's founder returns as CEO; shares fall: Online music streaming service Pandora Media Inc (P.N) appointed founder Tim Westergren as its chief executive to replace Brian McAndrews, who left the company on Monday, sending its shares down 10 percent. Pandora, whose shares had fallen 32.5 percent in the last 12 months, faces stiff competition from Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. "I'm sure the stock performance was a factor in McAndrews' departure," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told Reuters. Pandora last month reported disappointing fourth-quarter results with active listeners of 81.1 million at the end of December, a slight fall from a year earlier. The company had said it planned to invest $345 million in 2016 to expand its paid subscription service and enter new markets, with an aim to achieve $4 billion in revenue by 2020. It reported revenue of $1.16 billion for 2015. "McAndrews was pretty ambitious, and my guess is that Westergren will be a bit more deliberate, so we will likely see a slower roll out of their international expansion," Pachter said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 28

• In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage: It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares? Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them.  Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more. But a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage. Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average. But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually. Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years. Yahoo is not alone. Mr. Colby conducted a cost-benefit analysis of 26 companies buying back stock versus using that money to invest in a business. He found that McDonald’s was another problematic example. Since 2008, McDonald’s has allocated almost $18 billion to buybacks. This has helped produce 4.4 percent increases in annual earnings per share over the period. To equal that growth in overall earnings, the company would have had to generate just a 2.3 percent return on the money it spent buying back stock, Mr. Colby estimated. Last November, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded McDonald’s unsecured debt rating, citing its plans to increase its borrowings in part to fund future buybacks.

• Microsoft Apologizes After Twitter Chat Bot Experiment Goes Awry: Microsoft apologized after Twitter users exploited its artificial-intelligence chat bot Tay, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks in what the company called a “coordinated attack” that took advantage of a “critical oversight.” The company will bring Tay back online once it’s confident it can better anticipate malicious activities, he said. “A coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack,” Lee said, without elaborating. The company introduced Tay Wednesday to chat with humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. Some users quickly tried to see how far they could push Tay.   In less than a day, Twitter’s denizens realized Tay didn’t really know what it was talking about and that it was easy to get the bot to make inappropriate comments on any taboo subject. People got Tay to deny the Holocaust, call for genocide and lynching, equate feminism to cancer and stump for Adolf Hitler. The worst tweets quickly disappeared from Twitter, and Tay itself also went offline “to absorb it all.” Some Twitter users appeared to think that Microsoft had also manually banned people from interacting with the bot. Others are asking why the company didn’t build filters to prevent Tay from discussing certain topics, such as the Holocaust. The bot was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and meant to entertain and engage people through casual and playful conversation, according to Microsoft’swebsite. Tay was built with public data and content from improvisational comedians. It’s supposed to improve with more interactions, so should be able to better understand context and nuances over time. The bot’s developers at Microsoft also collect the nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status of anyone who chats with Tay.

• Uber profits elsewhere support 'sustainable' spending in China: CEO: Ride hailing app company Uber Technologies Inc is generating more than $1 billion in profit a year in its top 30 cities globally, and partly using that money to bankroll its expansion in China, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in an interview. The company said in February it was losing more than $1 billion a year in China's red-hot ride hailing market, where it is battling large local incumbents to win customers. Kalanick said China was the company's most intense market, but also a crucible for new ideas that it has exported to other markets, and that its investment here was sustainable. "If you took our top 30 cities today, today they're generating over $1 billion in profit a year, just our top 30 cities. And that profit multiplies every year because we're growing," he said on the sidelines of the Boao Forum in the Chinese island province of Hainan. Other cities among the 400 where Uber operates were also profitable, he added.

• Snapchat Is Buying Bitstrips, the Company That Turns You Into an Emoji: Snapchat is buying Bitstrips, the company behind the Bitmoji app that lets you create an avatar of yourself to share on social media and over text, according to a source familiar with the deal. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who first reported the news, said Snapchat is paying “in the ballpark of $100 million” for the company, which was founded in 2012. It quickly became popular on Facebook, as users created and shared cartoon versions of themselves in a bunch of different settings. It’s not entirely clear why Snapchat wants Bitmoji, but it feels like a good fit for the company, which has a number of other fun features to help users spruce up their photos and videos. Snapchat allows users to put emojis on photos and videos they send, and has generated a lot of buzz for facial filters that let people distort their faces into different animals or characters. (Facebook just bought a similar company two weeks ago.) Personal emojis are a logical fit in that regard.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 24

• The Uber Model, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Translate: Other than Uber, the hypersuccessful granddaddy of on-demand apps, many of these companies have come under stress. Across a variety of on-demand apps, prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down. Here is what we are witnessing: the end of the on-demand dream. That dream was about price and convenience. Many of these companies marketed themselves as clever hacks of the existing order. They weren’t just less headache than old-world services, but because they were using phones to eliminate inefficiencies, they argued that they could be cheaper, too — so cheap that as they grew, they could offer luxury-level service at mass-market prices. So do a lot of other apps offering services across a number of industries. They are super convenient, but the convenience comes at a premium, which seems here to stay. Some of these services could make for fine businesses, but it is hard to call them groundbreaking. After all, paying extra for convenience isn’t really innovative — it is pretty much how the world has always worked. Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used its growth to keep cutting its prices and expand its service. Uber shifted from a convenient alternative to luxury cars to an alternative to taxis to, now, a credible alternative to owning a car. But Uber’s success was in many ways unique. For one thing, it was attacking a vulnerable market. In many cities, the taxi business was a customer-unfriendly protectionist racket that artificially inflated prices and cared little about customer service. The opportunity for Uber to become a regular part of people’s lives was huge. Many people take cars every day, so hook them once and you have repeat customers. Finally, cars are the second-most-expensive things people buy, and the most frequent thing we do with them is park. That monumental inefficiency left Uber ample room to extract a profit even after undercutting what we now pay for cars. But how many other markets are there like that? Not many. Some services were used frequently by consumers, but weren’t that valuable — things related to food, for instance, offered low margins. Other businesses funded in low-frequency and low-value areas “were a trap,” Mr. Walk said.

• Why you should be skeptical that any video is real: Be careful about believing what your eyes are telling you. Researchers have shown how a video of a person talking can be altered in real time to change what a speaker appears to be saying. In a new video, the scientists show how they edited YouTube clips to change mouth movements. The system uses a webcam to track one person’s facial expressions, and then applies them to the face of the person in the target video. The software creates a 3D representation of a subject’s face, which can then be swapped with the 3D representation of another face. The process works even if one subject has facial hair or a different skin tone. But it won’t work if a person’s long hair blocks his or her mouth. Currently the researchers are considering commercializing the technology for use in TV shows that are re-released in a different language. Editing actors’ facial movements to match the audio should make the dubbed programs seem more natural, even if what’s onscreen is actually fake.

• Square Teams Up With Facebook to Offer Ads That Can Be Gauged: On Wednesday, Square announced a new integration with Facebook. Under the integration, small businesses that use Square to process payments can buy and target Facebook advertising using Square’s software. Square will make subscription fees off the new product. Small businesses can benefit from the move because Facebook ads bought through Square’s platform are directly connected to sales activity and data, Square said. That will allow business owners to understand whether their Facebook ads are working to attract new and repeat customers. The Facebook ad integration is just the most recent new line of business for Square, which went public in November. When the company began in 2009, it focused on providing a square credit card reader that easily attached to smartphones and tablets, giving small, cash-only businesses the ability to accept credit cards. Square takes a small percentage of each transaction, a fee it splits with credit card companies and other financial intermediaries. But as Square has grown, the company has diversified from that payments processing core, which some analysts and investors have criticized for having overly thin margins. Square now offers cash advances to merchants through Square Capital, scheduling with Square Appointments and food delivery with Caviar. The company has also begun offering other subscription-based products to businesses, like an email marketing service linked to sales history. The new Facebook advertising integration was spurred by an acquisition of talent and technology from a start-up called LocBox a few months ago. Square hired Mr. Mehta and his colleagues from LocBox, which specialized in online marketing for small and local businesses, to work on similar advertising technology at Square. The new lines of business still account for far less revenue than Square earns by processing payments. But Square believes that as more small businesses begin adopting its full array of products, these nascent revenue streams will grow. Two weeks ago, Square reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, posting a 49 percent revenue increase to $374 million for the fourth quarter from a year ago, with sales from its software and data products more than tripling.

• Why I’m skeptical about Apple’s future: Facebook is set to release its virtual reality headset, Oculus, next week. It will be big and clunky, expensive, and cause nausea and other problems for its users. Within a few months, we will declare our disappointment with virtual reality itself while Facebook listens very carefully to its users and develops improvements in its technology. Version 3 of this, most likely in 2018 or 2019,will be amazing. It will change the way we interact with each other on social media and take us into new worlds — like the holodecks we saw in the TV series Star Trek. This is the way innovation happens now. You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released. Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection. Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers — believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed. He ruled with an iron fist and did not tolerate dissent of any type. People in one division of Apple also did not know what others in the company were developing, that is the type of secrecy the company maintained. Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the ’90s and Microsoft in the late 2000’s. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007. Since then, it has been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors—as with the iPad and Apple Watch. Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features.  It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well.

• Shopify Doubles Down on ‘Buy’ Buttons Despite Sluggish Start: Last year certainly wasn’t the year of the “Buy” button that some envisioned, but Shopify is betting that 2016 could be. The e-commerce company, which makes software that small businesses use to sell products online, is expanding the number of online sales channels its customers can sell through as shopping on mobile devices booms. The new channels include product discovery app Wanelo, home design site Houzz and coupon app Ebates; Shopify said that more are on the way. “This is a continued bet on distributed commerce,” said Satish Kanwar, Shopify’s director of product. The expansion follows Shopify’s previous work to let its merchants start selling directly on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, in addition to their own sites. But shopping on Pinterest got off to a slow start last year, and e-commerce efforts on Twitter and Facebook are still in early stages.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 23

• Uber-Ola battle goes from the streets to court: Uber alleges Ola employees are making bookings on its platform by creating fake accounts, seeks Rs50 crore in damages; Ola denies the charges. Uber alleged that Ola is intentionally causing it to lose sales. Uber alleged in court that Ola’s employees are making bookings on Uber’s platform by creating fake accounts and then cancelling them. This is the equivalent of a shopping site’s employee placing orders on a rival site and then returning the goods for no good reason. Uber calculated the total loss incurred by it because of such alleged practices by Ola and sought damages worthRs.496,164,780 from the latter. A total of “93,859 fake accounts” have been created by Ola, which have been used to make “4,05,649 false bookings” across various cities that were later cancelled, it said. Such cancellations roughly amounted to 8-10% of its total bookings, Uber added. Uber and Ola are fighting for dominance of India’s cab business that, according to Ola’s largest investor SoftBank Group, may be worth $7 billion by 2020. Justice Vipin Sanghi, who was hearing the matter, issued notices to both ANI Technologies Ltd (Ola) and Serendipity Infolabs (TaxiForSure, acquired by Ola) asking for replies to be filed before the next date. Ola’s statement denying all allegations was also recorded. A day after Alexander’s interview was published, a senior Ola official said the company’s newly launched low-cost offering, Micro, will soon do more daily cab rides than all of Uber India.According to US-based Uber, the company has wiped out Ola’s massive lead in a year. “In January last year, we were at 5% market share. Now we are right at the edge of 50%. I would say that within the next 30 days we would beat them (Ola). We will surpass them very, very shortly,” Alexander had said in an interview on 16 March.

• Chip-Card Payment System Delays Frustrate Retailers: Avi Kaner, a co-owner of the Morton Williams supermarket chain in New York, has spent about $700,000 to update the payment terminals at his stores. Trouble is, he cannot turn them on. The new terminals can accept credit and debit cards with embedded digital chips, a security feature intended to reduce the number of fraudulent purchases. But before the payment systems can work, they must be certified, a process that Mr. Kaner and many retailers around the country are waiting to happen. In the case of Morton Williams, the holdup has lasted several months. The cost of waiting, retailers say, is piling up. Until recently, banks covered much of the cost of fraudulent purchases. Since Oct. 1, though, merchants that cannot accept chip cards have had to shoulder the cost of fraud, and banks have not been shy about passing along the bill. “It’s been very frustrating,” Mr. Kaner said in an interview last week at his office in the Bronx, the home of his family-owned business. He bought most of the equipment he needed before Oct. 1, he said, and has been waiting months to get it certified. The delay, he said, pointing to a tall pile of paperwork, has cost him thousands of dollars in payments for fraudulent purchases. The long delays are just the latest black eye for the deployment of the new systems. Some consumers have not yet received new cards. Many merchants have not bought the updated equipment. And even when the cards and the terminals have been updated, they have generated confusion and slow lines. Many of the complications were widely predicted, but the certification system has added an unexpected wrinkle — and lots of finger-pointing. Banks say that retailers waited till the last minute to update their terminals. Retailers point to financial ties between the banks and the companies that provide certification, saying there is no motivation to move faster.

• Uber offers hackers 'treasure map' to find computer flaws: Uber, the high-flying transportation firm, is releasing a technical map of its computer and communications systems and inviting hackers to find weaknesses in exchange for cash bounties. While so-called "bug bounties" are not new, Uber's move shows how mainstream companies are increasingly relying on independent computer researchers to help them bolster their systems. It also indicates growing acceptance of the idea that making computer code public can make systems more secure, a philosophy that has long been advocated by the open-source software movement. Uber's “Treasure Map” details the ride-hailing company's software infrastructure, identifies what sorts of data might be exposed inadvertently and suggests what types of flaws are the most likely to be found. HackerOne, a San Francisco rival called Bugcrowd and other startups have helped accelerate efforts to tap the independent security community to identify serious programming mistakes before criminals or spies do. They can serve as intermediaries between researchers and companies, and sometimes vet their findings. A decade ago, hackers pointing out problems feared arrest but they can now earn modest sums from platforms like HackerOne. Firms such as Uber, looking to bolster their defenses, don’t pay as much as criminals and military contractors who are looking for tools to carry out offensive attacks, but they offer options to those who would prefer to act as "white hats." Bugcrowd Chief Executive Officer Casey Ellis said he has seen a surge in corporate clients asking for private bounty programs that are open to selected researchers. “That increases the amount of trust you are giving to the researchers,” Ellis said. “We run trusted programs where people get prerelease versions of Internet of Things devices or access to source code.

• Domo takes on Slack with $130 million at $2 billion+ valuation: Utah-based Domo has been a force in the enterprise space for a few years with its data management platforms, but the team is poised for growth with an additional $130 million in Series D funding from existing and new investors, including BlackRock, Credit Suisse and others. These $130 million are an addition to Domo’s previously announced $200 million Series D round. The company says it is now valued at $2 billion.  “We didn’t need the money,” Domo founder and CEO Josh James said of the funding round. He called it a “nice buffer,” but insists that the team didn’t need the cash and plans to go public within the year. Domo also today launched its app store, a mix of about 1,000 free and freemium apps, which can be customized for any company. The company is also introducing a free messaging service with threaded conversations, which James refers to as a Slack competitor. With more than 1,000 customers, including eBay and MasterCard, James said the team has achieved $100 million in bookings so far and that revenue is doubling. Domo has 800 employees and may hire another 500 in 2016. James previously founded web analytics platform Omniture, taking it public and eventually selling it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. The serial entrepreneur thinks he has what it takes to build something even bigger.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 22

• Apple’s Modest Product Upgrades Take Back Seat to Worries on iPhone Encryption: Apple held one of its regular product showcases on Monday, but this time the products did not take center stage. Before the Silicon Valley giant unveiled modest upgrades to its device lineup, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, defended the company’s stance in its fight with the federal government over the encryption on iPhones. The case had been expected to head to a court hearing on Tuesday, but the Justice Department abruptly moved on Monday to cancel the hearing, saying it might not need Apple’s help to break into the phone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting. In a news conference at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, Mr. Cook stressed that the company would stand fast. “We need to decide as a nation how much power the government should have over our data and over our privacy,” Mr. Cook said. “This is an issue that impacts all of us, and we will not shrink from this responsibility.”

• A Smaller iPhone, Cheaper iPad and Watch at Tepid Product Event By Apple:  Apple introduced a smaller iPhone, a smaller iPad Pro and new bands for the Apple Watch. The company introduced smaller versions of its flagship iPhone and iPaddevices, hoping to eke out more sales growth by filling gaps in its product lineup. The new devices, the iPhone SE and a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, represent a return to the form factors that prevailed before Apple supersized its smartphones in 2014 and added the large, business-oriented iPad Pro last year. So Apple upgraded the components of its new four-inch phone to largely match the speed and features of its flagship iPhone 6s, but at a lower price, starting at $399. The new 9.7-inch iPad Pro brings some of the features of last year’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro, including a stylus, a keyboard and four speakers, to a tablet the size of the consumer-oriented 9.7-inch iPad Air 2. The new Pro will start at $599, and Apple also cut the price of the Air 2 by $100 to start at $399. Apple also reduced the price of the Apple Watch by $100, to $299, and introduced new woven nylon wristbands for the device. More than one-third of Watch owners have more than one band, Mr. Cook said. Analysts say sales have been modest for the watch, which works as a companion to the iPhone. The price cut might encourage more people to give it a try. But Apple also acknowledges that the smartwatch category is in its infancy and it may take several more generations of the device before it really catches on.

• Apple's new iPhone faces challenge measuring up in China, India: Apple's new iPhone SE has first-rate features and a relatively low price tag, but its prospects in key markets like China and India may be limited by its diminutive size. At the product launch in Cupertino, California on Monday, Apple vice president of iPhone Product Marketing Greg Joswiak singled out China as a target market, saying four-inch displays like that on the iPhone SE were still popular with first-time smartphone buyers. Chinese buyers tend to start off with a phone with a 4-inch screen, just like the iPhone SE, he argued. China, Apple's second-biggest market, and India, one of the fastest-growing major markets in the world, are both seen as key for Apple, which expects overall iPhone sales to contract. The iPhone SE is seen as particularly important for India, where Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner, expects the smartphones market to double to 200 million units in the next two years. But in India and China, smartphones are often the main connection to the digital world, and a big screen is highly valued, analysts said. "(In India) the majority of the low-end, $100 phones have a five-inch display. The key reason being smartphone users are becoming more mature are preferring bigger screen size as many of them don't own a tablet or laptop," said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research based in Mumbai.Only 10 percent of smartphones sold in India at the end of December had a four-inch screen, according to Counterpoint, and Apple accounted for only two percent of overall smartphone shipments in India last year.

• Andy Grove, Valley Veteran Who Founded Intel, Dies at 79: Andy Grove, who escaped the ruins of postwar Europe to become one of the architects of Silicon Valley’s growth into the world’s center of technology creation, died Monday. He was 79. The Hungarian-born refugee was one of the founders of Santa Clara, California-based Intel, playing a key role in building the company from a startup in the 1960s to the world’s largest semiconductor maker, a title it still holds. Grove, who literally wrote the book on how to foresee and overcome a corporate crisis with “Only the Paranoid Survive,” also broke new ground by making the component maker a household name central to the worldwide adoption of the personal computer.  Arriving in the U.S. with less than $20 in his pocket, Grove was taken in by relatives in New York. He studied chemical engineering at City College and graduated at the top of his class, teaching himself English along the way.He moved to the West Coast to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1963. After graduating, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, home to a future group of semiconductor industry leaders who would give Silicon Valley its name. In 1968, he followed Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce out the door as Intel’s first hire. For the founders of Intel, Grove was the perfect fit. Moore and Noyce, both inventors in their own right, were opposite personalities: one studious and low-key, the other a born salesman. In the middle was Grove, a writer of scientific textbooks who brought a fear of failure to the laid-back culture of Silicon Valley in the early 1970s. As a detail-obsessed taskmaster, he forced Intel workers, including Moore, to sign in if they arrived at work after 8 a.m. Always seeking to pass along the benefits of his experiences, Grove acted as a mentor to many of Silicon Valley’s elite -- from Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 21

• A beginner’s guide to finally buying a virtual reality headset: if you are interested in being an early adopter,  here's a quick guide of the basics, plus a little input from my experiences with these products. Sony Playstation VR (PS VR) Buy if: You have a PlayStation already, or are looking to make a slightly smaller investment. Oculus Rift: After a long wait, Oculus opened preorders for the Rift headset, the first of which are expected to arrive at the end of March. The Rift is due to hit store shelves in April. Buy if: You want a stellar experience over everything else. Oculus was the first really big name to come out of the VR space and has probably done the most to minimize motion sickness. Samsung Gear VR: Powered by Oculus's technology and Samsung's smartphones, the Gear VR was first released in 2015 and is getting a renewed PR push with the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. Buy if: You're really watching your budget and are happy with some smaller-scale experiences. HTC Vive: The product of a partnership between Taiwanese tech giant HTC and the video game company Valve, the HTC Vive is due to ship its first orders in April. Buy if: You really want an early version of a Star Trek-style Holodeck and have the room to make one.

• Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source: Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet. Earlier on Friday, Germany's Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality. Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable...then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber. A key hurdle to driverless cars has been the question of liability in the event of an accident. Most countries are signatories to the 1968 United Nations Convention on Road Traffic which stipulates that a person, rather than a computer, must be in control of a vehicle. In February this year, U.S. vehicle safety regulators softened the rules to allow driverless cars, by saying an artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

• How real businesses are using machine learning: There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I’ve heard that old joke “Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it” about 20 times in the past week alone.But from where I sit, running a company that enables a huge number of real-world machine-learning projects, it’s clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. So where is it happening? Here are a few behind-the-scenes applications that make life better every day. Making user-generated content valuable: The average piece of user-generated content (UGC) is awful. It’s actually way worse than you think. It can be rife with misspellings, vulgarity or flat-out wrong information. But by identifying the best and worst UGC, machine-learning models can filter out the bad and bubble up the good without needing a real person to tag each piece of content. Pinterest uses machine learning to show you more interesting content. Yelp uses machine learning to sort through user-uploaded photos. NextDoor uses machine learning to sort through content on their message boards. Disqus uses machine learning to weed out spammy comments. Finding products faster: Successful e-commerce startups from Lyst to Trunk Archive employ machine learning to show high-quality content to their users. Other startups, like Rich Relevance and Edgecase, employ machine-learning strategies to give their commerce customers the benefits of machine learning when their users are browsing for products. Engaging with customers: You may have noticed “contact us” forms getting leaner in recent years. That’s another place where machine learning has helped streamline business processes. Instead of having users self-select an issue and fill out endless form fields, machine learning can look at the substance of a request and route it to the right place. Understanding customer behavior: Machine learning also excels at sentiment analysis. And while public opinion can sometimes seem squishy to non-marketing folks, it actually drives a lot of big decisions. For example, say a movie studio puts out a trailer for a summer blockbuster. They can monitor social chatter to see what’s resonating with their target audience, then tweak their ads immediately to surface what people are actually responding to - that puts people in theaters.
  
  
• Why unicorns falter: In early February 2016, a study of financing deals reported by The Wall Street Journal found that investors are increasingly protecting themselves from IPOs that don’t perform as expected. This fallout is a continuation of the demise of the so-called “unicorn,” a tech startup with a pre-IPO valuation of over one billion dollars. As these companies secure late-stage funding before their public market exit, smart private investors are setting terms that ensure they don’t lose a dime if the IPO falls short of expectations. This comes at a great cost to the startup if the exit doesn’t deliver, as was the case for many of the IPOs of 2015. The unicorn investment cycle has been consuming the growth ramp of an IPO-bound company. Unlike previous eras when a public exit occurred earlier in the company’s growth, leaving the best days ahead of the company, the fastest growth for an IPO-bound startup now happens in the last funding rounds before an IPO. This leaves a 20-30 percent growth rate post-IPO, which is pretty good for a company at $100-$200 million/year revenue, but bad for anyone looking for greater than 2X ROI from an IPO investment. Addressing these issues requires a little course correction as companies work toward an IPO. To ensure ample room for future growth, a startup should be careful not to push its market cap too high by taking more funding rounds than needed during the growth-stage period before IPO. This can be a challenge because funding often generates media interest and credibility, which are certainly not things a young company wants to leave on the table. However, leaving a portion of its growth for the IPO will ensure that the company has enough runway to continue to grow and deliver for its public market investors, just as the company has done for its VCs. Otherwise, you create yet another unicorn where the late-stage investors garner all the potential gains, and even force guarantees on returns. This is bad for new investors in the open market, and worse for the employees of the company who only receive poor post-lockup stock performance as compensation for years of hard work and sacrifices.

• Facebook's Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive: Facebook's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met China's propaganda tsar Liu Yunshan in Beijing on Saturday as part of a charm offensive in one of the few markets where the social network cannot be accessed. The rare meeting, reported by China's state news agency Xinhua, suggests warming relations between Facebook and the Chinese government, even as Beijing steps up censorship of and control over the Internet. Liu, who sits on the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee which is the apex of power in China, praised Facebook's technology and management methods, Xinhua said. Zuckerberg was in Beijing for the China Development Forum, a government-sponsored conference bringing together top business executives and the country's ruling elite. China "hopes (Facebook) can strengthen exchanges, share experiences and improve mutual understanding with China's Internet companies", Xinhua quoted Liu as telling Zuckerberg. On Friday, Zuckerberg posted an image of himself running through smog in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, past the portrait of the late Chairman Mao Zedong hanging over the Forbidden City. The 31-year-old has achieved celebrity status in China, one of the few markets where Facebook and other foreign Internet platforms, including Alphabet Inc's Google services and Twitter Inc, are not available due to tight government controls. He has long sought to improve his company's relationship with the Chinese authorities, and now sits on the advisory board of the School of Economics and Management at China's elite Tsinghua University.

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Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 18, 2016

• Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. The deals were spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division, and brought about 300 robotics engineers into Google. Rubin left the company in October 2014. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. At the heart of Replicant’s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term. Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent e-mails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them. The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, who was temporarily in charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, “we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years."

• Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services: Alibaba has formally thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring after the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its own VR research lab, dubbed GnomeMagic Lab. The company invested in red hot augmented reality company Magic Leap earlier this year, in a deal that put Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai on the board, and it has tinkered with 360 degree panoramic video for Youku Tudou — the Chinese video site it invested in and is in the process of acquiring for $3.5 billion — but this is its official entry into the space. Alibaba, which claims 400 million users across its services, said that GnomeMagic Lab will work with its shopping businesses with a view to integrating VR into the shopping experience while exploring other applications, such as video with Youku Tudou and entertainment via Alibaba Pictures. In a press announcement, former Facebook engineer Zhao Haiping, who is on the Alibaba’s GnomeMagic Lab team, said VR could enable customers to shop virtually on New York’s Fifth Avenue from the comfort of their own home. On a more practical level, Alibaba wants to help merchants use VR to sell on its sites, it said it has already created VR visuals for hundreds of products. That’s the plan for where Alibaba believes that VR is going, or could go, in the longer term. For now, the company is setting up a store dedicated to VR hardware to help companies tap into its vast audience.VR is the hot topic of the moment, and it’s more a case of which tech companies aren’t getting into it. Samsung has already shipped a headset. Facebook bought Occulus, which is about to launch its Rift VR and an initial 30 games. HTC’s is arriving imminently and Sony’s effort is also on its way. On the content side, Facebook, YouTube and — today — even British broadcaster Sky are opening themselves up to the virtual future.

• Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won’t give them a college degree: One of the biggest booms in the job market right now: an influx of coders graduating from three- to six-month coding crunch programs in lieu of traditional four-year Computer Science degree programs. These for-profit programs, non-accredited and operating without much regulation, have been cropping up in response to a swelling market demand for STEM workers. They vary in quality, but most bootcamps promise steady, high-paying work upon graduation, prompting aspiring coders to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 of personal money to enroll. Now, colleges and universities are teaming up with these private schools, or rolling out their own bootcamp-style programs to offer accelerated coding workshops to their students. Northeastern, UPenn, and Rutgers have announced in-house bootcamps in the couple of months, while Lynn University and Concordia University have paired with programs like General Assembly and The Software Craftsmanship Guild. It’s a response to thetremendous growth in bootcamp enrollment, which increased by 138 percent from 2014 to 2015, compared to more modest growth in traditional Computer Science degrees (14 percent from 2013 to 2014). The demand is clear. But should universities be borrowing bootcamp tactics? O’Neill, who is Principal Architect at Monetate, agrees. He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said. A typical four-year CS degree will require students to study theoretical principles of programming on top of straight coding skills. Bootcamps, on the other hand, focus on programming alone, with an emphasis on in-demand languages in popular sectors like app development, functioning more like vocational school. But Anupam Joshi sees the immediate benefits of these programs. He’s Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which doesn’t currently have plans to incorporate bootcamp style programs into its CS department (though the university does have a “training center” that offers vocational services, including coding). But he appreciates the bootcamps' quick adaptability to industry fads and the wider scope of needs they fill amidst the student body. “Bootcamps are good for someone who wants to get an entry level job,” he said of the promotion of coding over theory. “It’s like every other trade.”

• Blackstone nears $940 million deal to buy HP Enterprise stake in India's MphasiS: sources Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is nearing a deal to acquire Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) (HPE.N) controlling stake worth about $940 million in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS Ltd (MBFL.NS), according to three sources directly involved in the deal. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and the U.S.-based parent had been looking to exit from the Indian venture to shore up its capital. Bids for buying the MphasiS stake were submitted earlier this month and the U.S. private equity firm has emerged as the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter, the sources said. Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS' stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company's total market value is about $1.6 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 17 2016

• Flipkart and Amazon may have explored sale talks, say sources: Flipkart reportedly considered selling itself to Amazon, upending the notion that India’s largest online retailer would go full distance as an independent Internet giant. half-a-dozen sources told ET of the discussions between Flipkart and Amazon, and emphasised there is no reason to believe that a deal will be struck or that talks are still ongoing between the two. The talks were held until as recently as the last quarter of 2015, one of the sources said. ET was not able to determine the exact timeline of these talks or if they were initiated by one of Flipkart's investors. Flipkart itself denied that it is up for sale, or that it is in the market for capital. Three of the sources, who are top-level executives in venture capital and private equity firms, said Amazon made a preliminary offer of up to $8 billion to acquire Flipkart, nearly half of its previous stated valuation of $15.2 billion. A mutual fund managed by Morgan Stanley slashed the value of its Flipkart shares by 27% last month to about $11 billion, increasing speculation that new investors will back the company at a lower valuation. Flipkart-Amazon talks went cold after the offer was perceived to be too low, but the sources said the situation can change given Alibaba's interest in Flipkart.


• What AlphaGo’s sly move says about machine creativity: AlphaGo, the computer system Google engineers trained to master the ancient game of Go, needed only one move to make it abundantly clear that it has left humans in its dust. The move came Thursday, in the second game of AlphaGo’s 4-1 landmark victory over South Korean Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best Go players. About an hour into the match, AlphaGo placed one of its stones in a nontraditional spot on the board that surprised those watching. “I don’t really know if it’s a good or bad move,” said Michael Redmond, a commentator on a live English broadcast. “It’s a very strange move.” Redmond, one of the Western world’s best Go players, could only crack a smile. “I thought it was a mistake,” his broadcast partner, Chris Garlock, said with a laugh. Sedol, however, was more serious. He stared at the board, then got up from the table and left the room. As Sedol returned after a few minutes and pondered his next move, it became clear that AlphaGo’s move was no mistake. It might be strange, but it definitely wasn’t bad. It was brilliant.  Sedol would take almost 16 minutes to make his next move. He would never recover, losing the match. “Almost no human pro would’ve thought of it, I think,” Redmond said after the match. Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and author of “The Master Algorithm,” saw a parallel between AlphaGo’s style and how chess prodigy Bobby Fischer was feared because his early moves were considered too foolish to even be made. But as Fischer’s matches wore on, the ill-advised moves suddenly looked genius. “If that’s not creative, then what is?” Domingos asked. He sees machines delivering creative results, and they’re just getting started. Domingos believes a computer eventually will write a best-selling book. And he thinks there’s a 50-50 chance that a computer writes a hit pop song in the next decade, given advances in artificial intelligence techniques and computing power.Domingos said such advances shouldn’t come as a surprise, as machines increasingly demonstrate that creativity isn’t magical and distinctly human.

• Apple looks to Google’s Cloud Platform as it diversifies its infrastructure: Rumors are flying today that Apple is moving part of its cloud business from AWS to Google’s Cloud Platform. We did some asking around and yes, it does appear that Apple has made some moves to diversify its iCloud storage, tapping Google for some of that business. This is another huge win for Google and a — at the very least perceived — loss of ground for AWS, which has watched as Dropbox moved large parts of its US storage business in-house and Spotify moved at least part of its business to Google, too. If you’re keeping score, it’s been a good month for Google and especially the new head of its cloud business Diane Greene. High profile clients like Spotify and Apple would certainly make it more attractive to other enterprise customers. Google’s Cloud Platform may have the power of Google’s data center technology behind it, but that hasn’t yet helped the company in competing against AWS and Microsoft’s Azure platform. AWS has the advantage of an early start and Azure profits from Microsoft’s existing sales channels and it’s focus on hybrid cloud technologies. And even with the power of Microsoft behind it, though, Azure remains a distant second in the cloud business. One industry insider who chose not to be identified, however, told TechCrunch that Apple was definitely exploring its options around public cloud vendors, looking at Microsoft Azure and Google, but it had not made any firm decisions yet. It’s worth noting that Apple already uses  Azure (and AWS) for iCloud services and media serving. Whether Apple will continue moving off of AWS and onto other platforms is anyone’s guess. But at the moment it appears that this is a matter of diversifying its portfolio of cloud suppliers. Another wrinkle here is that Apple is currently expanding its data center in Prineville, Oregon, and is also expected to invest heavily in new data centers in both the U.S. and Europe. If that’s the case, moving from AWS to Google, then Google to Prineville wouldn’t seem to make sense. Why not just wait until the data center construction is complete?If Apple is indeed simply looking to diversify its infrastructure, though, then adding Google (on top of Azure, AWS and its own data centers) would be a fairly logical move. It’s also possible that Apple is only looking at some very specific services on the Google cloud, with theBigQuery data analytics platform being the prime suspect here.


• Morgan Stanley Downgrades LinkedIn, Slashes Price Target by 34 Percent: Why we were wrong" isn't a phrase one might want to include when sending out a note to clients, but it's what Morgan Stanley analysts were forced to deploy on Wednesday morning as they downgraded LinkedIn Corp. The shift from "overweight' to "equalweight," is the latest in a series of cuts for LinkedIn after it reported lackluster earnings last month that sent shares tumbling by more than 40 percent the following day.  "With its current product offering, LinkedIn isn't likely to be as big of a platform as we previously thought," the team, led by Brian Nowak, said. "We are reducing our price target to $125 [per] share (from $190) as well, driven by our lower long-term cash flow forecasts and increased execution uncertainty." Two key factors that had kept Morgan Stanley bullish are now abating. The first was growth in LinkedIn's Talent Solutions segment, which includes such things as subscription revenue. Nowak and his team now believe that growth has slowed both domestically and internationally for this segment and that the increased focus on small- and medium-sized businesses betokens that LinkedIn is hitting a peak when it comes to larger companies. The second was the monetization potential in new segments, known as Lynda and Sales Navigator. Recent events have caused the team to grow skeptical.

• Oracle Increases Buyback Program by $10 Billion:  Oracle reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit and increased its stock buyback program by $10 billion. Oracle, like other established tech companies, is moving its business to the cloud by providing services remotely through data centers versus selling installed software. Total cloud revenue rose 39.5 percent to $735 million, accounting for about 8 percent of Oracle’s total revenue. Net income fell to $2.14 billion, or 50 cents a share, in the third quarter, from $2.50 billion, or 56 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company reported a profit of 64 cents a share. Revenue fell 3.4 percent to $9.01 billion. Shares rose more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.

• Beyond Swipe Right: The Pickup Line Gets a Makeover: Thanks to the popular dating app Tinder, a one-size-fits-all gesture of approval, swipe right, has in theory replaced awkward fumbles at an opening conversational gambit. But in fact, the migration of courtship online has resulted in a refinement of pickup lines far beyond ’70s singles-bar relics like “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” and “Are those space pants? Because your butt is out of this world.” The simple “Hi” and its variations are the surest ways to end a conversation; they’re too generic and, lately, indistinguishable from the way bots initiate contact. Only those with the most flattering profile pictures can get away with generic questions like “How was your weekend?” A more common approach in Tinder-land is to quickly skim the other person’s profile and find something to comment on — a detail from a photo, or a line of profile text. Statements tend to work better than questions as conversation starters; they’re less personal and invite reactions and commentary rather than disclosure. With the help of a friend, Brent Bailey, 24, a programmer in New York, came up with a successful opener to someone who mentioned her life being “a bit messy” in her profile. “I could make your life a whole lot messier,” he responded. Mr. Bailey said he was more successful with crowd-sourced pickup lines. “As a rule, my friends are way less concerned about my dignity, so they usually come up with something way more interesting than I would,” he said. On the dating service Bumble, where women must initiate all conversations, Ms. Smothers decided to try what she called a “dumb troll-y” gimmick — asking every match if he was a feminist. Men loved it, and she got a high response rate she has yet to match.

• LivingSocial is laying off more than half of its workers: LivingSocial will cut more than half of its workforce, according to anannouncement from the company saying it has completed its "initial phase of turnaround." The move is the latest sign of the decline of "daily deal" sites once thought of as the next big thing for online shopping. The sites typically offered users heavily discounted vouchers at local businesses in exchange for a cut of deal sales. But some business complained that the model wasn't actually a good deal for them -- and consumers seemed to tire of the flood of emails sent by the services. The latest job cuts are part of a series of layoffs. The local company cut 400 jobs in 2014 and another 200 in October of last year. Competitor Groupon has also struggled: In September it announced it would lay off 1,100 people -- roughly 10 percent of its workforce -- and close operations in six countries. LivingSocial plans to move away from the voucher business, but hopes to expand "card-linked" discounts, according to the press release. The company is trying out a program called Restaurant Plus in handful of cities that works by letting customers reserve a deal with payment card information on file, but not charging them for it until it's actually used.