Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 11

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX nails landing at sea: After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football field-sized floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled off the dramatic feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year. The landing, the first ever of a rocket’s first stage at sea, was heralded as a breakthrough for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry, and its leader, SpaceX. The companies’ efforts to recover their rockets is part of what Bezos calls the “Holy Grail” quest of lowering the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments. Typically, the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a second stage, or a capsule, to space. But if the commercial sector can build innovative rockets that can be reused, many think that would dramatically reduce the costs, a key step toward making space travel more routine. SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform. The first stage was hurtling toward space when it started a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning itself around and heading back toward Earth. As it approached the platform, the booster was tilted into the wind but was able to right itself just before touching down, about nine minutes after liftoff. Crews were expected to board the ship and secure the rocket to the platform.

• Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing’s Giants Take In Billions: Imagine building an enormous beach resort, maybe the best in the world. Instead of renting the rooms, you charge guests based on the grains of sand they touch. You charge very little per grain, but if they lie on enough of them, it adds up. That is one way to think about what is going on at the world’s biggest cloud-computing companies. Instead of grains of sand, think about computing cycles, the activity that goes on in a computer server that is running software. For a price, think about one line of software code for two one-millionths of a penny. When tolls that tiny are paid often enough, they can make a billion-dollar business. At Amazon Web Services, which pioneered this method late last year, there is no charge for the first million times a customer runs code. Thereafter, A.W.S. charges by the million times, or for the hundreds of milliseconds the computer is used. “The scale at which we operate allows us to do innovative things,” said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy at A.W.S. “When we get better economies of scale, we’ll use that to our advantage.” This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often. In other words, you have to be really big to worry about making money off things that are really tiny.

• China's $6 Billion Tech Funding Boom Signals Flight to Quality: If the startup funding party is finally breaking up, somebody forgot to tell China. The second-largest economy is avoiding the pitfalls affecting venture capital elsewhere, as investors around the world rein things in after an unprecedented technology financing boom. Ride-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate and online property service Homelink are close to raising at least $6 billion, people familiar with the separate deals say. The operator of Alipay, Alibaba’s affiliate, is targeting more than $3.5 billion alone, which would mark the technology industry’s largest single round of financing. All those numbers emerged over the space of just three days last week. In China, larger startups like them are attracting major backers and garnering the lion’s share of the money even as smaller operators are left to struggle. The frenetic pace is remarkable at a time venture investment globally is plateauing: there were fewer U.S. deals in the first three months than at any time in the past four years, according to research firm PitchBook Data. “China’s VC market is becoming very polarized," said Jarod Ji, an analyst at Beijing-based research firm Zero2IPO. “There’s not a lack of money in the market, but investors do feel that there’s a lack of good projects and that’s why companies like Didi are getting so much money.” The top 20 percent of Chinese startups could get 80 percent of the funding, he added.

• SAP quarterly results fall short as U.S. market slows: Europe's largest software company, SAP (SAPG.DE), warned late on Friday that first-quarter results would be weaker than expected due to slower sales of software licenses to corporate customers, particularly in Brazil and the United States. Software license revenues fell 13 percent while the company's newer, but lower-margin cloud software business grew 33 percent. Business customers are shifting to cloud-based software delivered over the Internet instead of relying on older software packages they install and run on in-house computers. "America was a little more lumpy in terms of the signing of contracts," Chief Executive Bill McDermott told reporters on a conference call, noting that U.S. revenue from its classic on-premise software business grew more slowly than expected. First-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose 5 percent to 1.10 billion euros ($1.25 billion). Analysts, on average, had been looking for a first-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, of 1.15 billion euros, with 12 estimates ranging from 1.09 billion to 1.25 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. The company also reported revenue of 4.73 billion euros, shy of the I/B/E/S average forecast of 4.83 billion euros.