Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 15

• Line Rises in Initial Public Offering, Cheering Skittish Tech Industry: The Line Corporation, the owner of a Japanese instant messaging app with a colorful cast of cartoon characters, cheered the technology industry on Thursday when its shares jumped 30 percent in their American trading debut. The strong showing offers hope for tech firms and their financial backers that Wall Street investors are warming up to closely held technology start-ups. But experts say Line is an unusual case of an established company with operating heft and a proven way to gin up sales — something that many new tech companies lack. Line itself still faces considerable hurdles, such as slowing user growth and an untested plan to use advertising to help make it profitable. Line’s American depositary shares, priced at $32.84 each on Monday, jumped to $42.70 in early trading in New York on Thursday. The stock is expected to begin trading in Japan on Friday. Line’s debut coincided with another new high for the equity markets in the United States. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has surged 8 percent since June 27, after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union roiled stocks worldwide, as investors anticipated additional stimulus from central banks.

• Snapchat Geofilter Campaigns May Get a Boost From Yext: Snapchat Inc. may start to see more brands paying up for location-based advertising campaigns on its photo-sharing mobile app, thanks to the efforts of another startup, Yext Inc. Advertisers can already pay the social-media service to have branded geofilters -- a type of graphical overlay people can use to decorate photos or videos they’re sharing -- to show up in the app in specific locations. To run these campaigns, companies have had to manually provide Snapchat with the exact geographical details of where they want the filters to appear and the dimensions of each space. Yext, whose software helps businesses manage digital location data, has been working with Snapchat to make that process easier. The New York-based startup on Thursday is unveiling a new feature that lets clients give Snapchat all that information with a few taps.Last year, Snapchat started offering geofilters to brands as an advertising platform. In the U.S., a national geofilter campaign reaches 40 percent to 60 percent of daily users, according to Snapchat’s website. The company also unveiled a cheaper option for smaller businesses and individuals this year: on-demand geofilters. The starting price for one of these geofilters is $5 for up to 20,000 square feet of coverage. Companies including McDonald’s Corp., Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yum! Brands subsidiary KFC have already launched location-based ad campaigns on Snapchat. The fried chicken seller offered special KFC-themed geofilters at more than 900 locations in the U.K., resulting in a more than 23 percent lift in visitation within a week of a user seeing the filter in a friend’s Snap, according to a June presentation by KPCB partner Mary Meeker.