Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 15

• Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth: In January, Lyft said it raised $1 billion, which is helping fuel the spending spree and steal market share from Uber Technologies Inc. To keep costs in check, Lyft has promised investors to cap its losses at no more than $50 million a month, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.Meanwhile, Uber has been working to fulfill its own promise to shareholders and employees that it would achieve profitability in North America by the second quarter of 2016, a milestone it says it has now reached in the U.S. and Canada. In February, Uber earned an average of 19¢ per ride in the U.S., according to previously undisclosed financial documents. Uber takes about a 25 percent cut of a typical fare, most of which goes to antifraud efforts, credit-card processing, customer support, marketing, and software development, the documents show. Not included in Uber’s profitability calculations are interest, taxes, or equity-based compensation for employees. Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick’s commitment to profitability has left an opening for Lyft, and the smaller upstart’s free-spending strategy is starting to pay off.  Lyft says it has captured 45 percent of trips in Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles and 43 percent in San Francisco, where both companies are based. Uber says it had 55 percent of ride-hailing sales in Austin, 75 percent in Los Angeles, and 66 percent in San Francisco, citing third-party credit card data from the first two weeks of March. Uber says Lyft has shaken loose only a few percentage points. “From everything I’m looking at, we’re gaining share in all top 20 markets, which is where 80 percent to 90 percent of rides happen,” says Lyft President John Zimmer. “This continues to prove what we said all along, which is once you hit a certain level of scale, it’s a natural duopoly.” Outside of big cities, though, it’s still Uber country. Of 169 million trips booked through Uber worldwide in March, the company says 50 million of those were in the U.S. Lyft says it did 11 million U.S. rides that month, up from 7 million in October. Lyft continues to devise new—and often expensive—ways to expand in the U.S., the only country in which it operates. When a Lyft driver refers someone to sign up as a new driver, both get a $750 bonus in some cities. And Lyft has the capacity to keep spending. Zimmer says the company still has “by far the majority” of the $2 billion it’s raised from investors. “This allows us to control our own destiny. We do not need to raise any additional capital, and it’s just a fantastic position to be in.” Whether Lyft’s gains will stick remains to be seen. Uber says customers lured away by subsidies are the most likely to return if Lyft’s prices go up. “It’s easy enough to buy trips with heavy subsidies for drivers and discounts for riders,” Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Uber, wrote in an e-mail. “But to build a successful, long-term business, you need a path to profitability—which Uber has always had.”

• Rocket Internet Drops in Frankfurt Amid $222 Million Loss: Rocket Internet SE, Europe’s biggest startup factory, fell the most in more than two months in Frankfurt trading after reporting a loss of 197.8 million euros ($222 million) for last year. While Rocket-backed companies continued to increase sales, operating losses widened at several of them, including at food delivery startup HelloFresh and e-commerce site Lazada, which drew an investment from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. this week. Rocket had net income of about 429 million euros the previous year, according to the Berlin-based company’s statement Thursday. The shares fell 10 percent to 26.09 euros at 11:42 a.m. local time after dropping as much as 12 percent, the biggest intraday decline since Jan. 15.

• Whatever Happened to Facebook’s Slack Competitor Facebook at Work? Do you remember Facebook at Work? The version of Facebook specifically built for your office? The one that would send Slack and Yammer and email running for the hills? We almost forgot, too. But hidden among the Internet-beaming drones and 360-degree video cameras Facebook showed off this week at its annual developer conference in San Francisco was a Facebook at Work booth, a small, unheralded reminder that the future of workplace communications is also on Facebook’s radar. Add it to the list. When we last spoke to Facebook about Work, the company was gearing up to launch a freemium version of the software to the masses before the end of 2015. It’s now mid-April 2016, and Facebook at Work is still in a closed beta. So what happened? Is Facebook at Work still part of the game plan? So things are still moving. Just slowly. And that matters because Facebook’s top competition, tech startup Slack, is growing quickly in the interim. Facebook said it has 450 companies using the pilot, up from 100 in August, including some big companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has more than 100,000 employees. More importantly, though, Facebook says it has 60,000 businesses that have signed up for its waiting list. That’s a lot of interested customers, but it’s unclear how many of them would actually pay for Work or use the free model. Slack, for comparison, has more than two million users and more than 675,000 users who pay (or have employers who pay for them). That’s more than 100,000 new paid users since December, the same time we thought Facebook would be out on the open market. Facebook has a tendency to turn small numbers into big numbers very quickly, so it’s not as though a few months’ delay means Facebook at Work can’t ultimately be a hit. But at a conference dedicated to Facebook’s future, Facebook at Work was a side note. And side notes can be hard to remember.

• GoPro’s developer program aims to connect its cameras to cars, toys and apps: GoPro on Thursday very quietly took the wraps off its new developer program, by which it hopes to get its action cameras hooked into as many third-party devices, vehicles and services as possible. The program was announced at a private event in San Francisco, where it showed off the fruits of various partnerships. The Periscope integration announced earlier this year is an example of what the company is hoping to achieve. There was also a snap-on time-code system that you can use to sync your footage (announced last week, but still new), a mount for kids’ toys from Fisher-Price and add-ons for tracking your route and vital statistics when parasailing, skiing and other extreme activities — you get the general idea. Partnerships with BMW and Toyota also suggest more automotive applications in the future. Perhaps the coolest item, shown off at the end of this highlight video, was a gesture-based camera control system for when your motorcycle gloves or [insert extreme garment here] prevent you from operating the app.