Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 15

• Wall Street Tours the Tesla Factory—and Loves What It Sees: Wall Street analysts have been touring Tesla’s massive factory in Fremont, Calif., and they're returning with the same conclusion: Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company is getting ready for something big. In a sign of this enthusiasm, Robert W. Baird & Co. upgraded its Tesla rating on Monday morning following a factory tour. Last week, Stifel analysts returned from their fourth visit in four years to Tesla’s flagship factory in Fremont. “In roughly one year since our last visit,” wrote analyst James Albertine, “the progress witnessed is truly stunning."  Tesla shares have jumped 45 percent in the past month as Musk, the chief executive, sought to reassure investors that the company is still on track after the challenging and much-delayed launch of the Model X luxury SUV.  Stifel and Credit Suisse both noted Tesla's new aluminum stamping press, which Credit Suisse's Galves says has 10 to 20 times the output of  Tesla's older machine. The bodies of the Model S and Model X are both made of aluminum, which costs twice as much as steel but weighs less. Tesla hasn't yet disclosed the composition of the Model 3. Keeping the weight down on electric vehicles helps achieve the maximum range on the battery, but maintaining a balance between cost and performance is crucial for a mass-market plug-in car. Tesla has built a new state-of-the-art paint shop that's capable of scaling up to 500,000 cars a year. That happens to be Tesla's production forecast for 2020, a 10-fold increase from last year's sales. If Tesla is to achieve that lofty goal, paint jobs won't be a holdup.

• What New Delhi’s free clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system: Rupandeep Kaur, 20 weeks pregnant, arrived at a medical clinic looking fatigued and ready to collapse. After being asked her name and address, she was taken to see a physician who reviewed her medical history, asked several questions, and ordered a series of tests including blood and urine. These tests revealed that her fetus was healthy but Kaur had dangerously low hemoglobin and blood pressure levels. The physician, Alka Choudhry, ordered an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital. All of this, including the medical tests, happened in 15 minutes at the Peeragarhi Relief Camp in New Delhi, India. The entire process was automated — from check-in, to retrieval of medical records, to testing and analysis and ambulance dispatch. The hospital also received Kaur’s medical records electronically. There was no paperwork filled out, no bills sent to the patient or insurance company, no delay of any kind. Yes, it was all free. The hospital treated Kaur for mineral and protein deficiencies and released her the same day. Had she not received timely treatment, she may have had a miscarriage or lost her life. The technology that made the instant diagnosis possible at Peeragarhi was medical device called the Swasthya Slate. This $600 device, the size of a cake tin, performs 33 common medical tests including blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, urine protein and glucose. And it tests for diseases such as malaria, dengue, hepatitis, HIV, and typhoid. Each test only takes a minute or two and the device uploads its data to a cloud-based medical-record management system that can be accessed by the patient. The Swasthya Slate was developed by Kanav Kahol, who was a biomedical engineer and researcher at Arizona State University’s department of biomedical informatics until he became frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the cost of diagnostic testing. He worried that billions of people were getting no medical care or substandard care because of the medical industry’s motivation in keeping prices high. In 2011, he returned home to New Delhi to develop a solution. By Jan. 2013, Kahol had built the Swasthya Slate and persuaded the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Northern India, to allow its use in six underserved districts with a population of 2.1 million people. The device is now in use at 498 clinics there. Focusing on reproductive maternal and child health, the system has been used to provide antenatal care to more than 22,000 mothers. Of these, 277 mothers were diagnosed as high risk and provided timely care. Mothers are getting care in their villages now instead of having to travel to clinics in cities. A newer version of the Slate, called HealthCube, was tested last month by nine teams of physicians and technology, operations, and marketing experts at Peru’s leading hospital, Clinica Internacional. They tested its accuracy against the western equipment that they use, its durability in emergency room and clinical settings, the ability of minimally trained clinicians to use it in rural settings, and its acceptability to patients. Clinica’s general manager, Alvaro Chavez Tori, told me in an email that the tests were highly successful and “acceptance of the technology was amazingly high.” He sees this technology as a way of helping the millions of people in Peru and Latin America who lack access to quality diagnostics.

• Google Will Let Mobile Games Stream in Search So That Mobile Game Makers Will Buy Search Ads: Google will let you try out a mobile game right inside the search results page, before downloading it. And Google will let game developers pay for the privilege. It’s part of Google’s ongoing effort to squeeze more ad revenue from mobile and its business cornerstone, search. For developers, the trick offers a new avenue — paid search — for recruiting new users. Most money for gamers is made inside the app, so some developers may be reluctant to move away from direct downloads. But, in theory, the streaming method lets them grab devoted game players who have tried out the game, like it, and will stick around and buy stuff therein. For Google, it’s another way to nab the ample flow of app promotional dollars — a flow that Facebook has largely cornered. Over the past year, Google has rolled out a stream of mobile app advertising tools as the company has prioritized ways to fortify its central business. It added ads to the Play store so developers could pay to get noticed there. In November, Google started testing app streaming in organic search results with a handful of apps; it brought the feature to ads within apps a month later. Now, developers can promote their apps with streaming inside search, too. Google’s share of app advertising is rising steadily, although Facebook is still out in front, according to industry sources.

• Infibeam turns profitable; to open first IPO by an Indian e-com venture on March 21: The parent of horizontal e-commerce platform Infibeam and e-commerce enabler BuildaBazaar, is to hit the market with its initial public offer (IPO) on March 21. This would make it the first among peers, including those several times bigger, to go public. Infibeam had received a green signal from securities market regulator SEBI for its initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to Rs 450 crore last October.  Founded in 2010 by a former Amazon executive, Vishal Mehta, Infibeam would also become one of the youngest firms to list on a national bourse. Having restricted itself from raising private capital, unlike its peers, it did not get too aggressive in customer acquisition to drive the B2C business and has been especially pushing the B2B e-commerce enabler platform BuildaBazaar. Infibeam would be the first pure-play e-commerce firm in the country to float an IPO in India and would test the general investors’ appetite for the sector. E-commerce in India has absorbed billions of dollars over the past four years, much of it from foreign private equity and venture capital firms. Infibeam happens to be an exception as it has not approached any major private investor for funds till now. It is promoted by a Gujarat-based affluent family whose business interest straddles a dealership for Toyota cars. Interestingly, Infibeam made profit in the first six months of the current financial year. It reported net revenues of Rs 171.27 crore for the April-September 2015 period with EBITDA of close to Rs 15 crore and net profit (adjusted for prior period items) of Rs 6.5 crore. It had clocked net loss of just under Rs 10 crore for 2014-15. As of December 31, 2015, it had 48,724 registered merchants on the BuildaBazaar platform. In Infibeam.com e-retail site, in addition to direct sales procured from suppliers, it had more than 5,000 registered merchants, and claimed to have more than 7.8 million active users (based on last login in the immediately preceding 12 months). To its credit, it is one of the rare horizontal e-commerce platforms to have survived without large external funding. Others like IndiaPlaza shut down as they failed to get follow-on funding, and as a consequence, investors funding got concentrated to the troika of Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues. Global e-commerce behemoth Amazon itself has built a big presence in India and is among the top three ventures in the country. Infibeam’s only external equity funding has come from media house Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, which bet around Rs 33.3 crore through the ad-for-equity investment platform Brand Equity Treaties Ltd (BETL). BETL owns a 1.8 per cent stake in the firm. BETL also pitched in with Rs 2 crore of non-convertible debentures, which are outstanding.