Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 10

• Yelp swings to surprise profit, raises full-year revenue forecast: Consumer review website operator Yelp Inc swung to an unexpected second-quarter profit and raised its full-year revenue forecast as investments in sales and marketing led to more businesses and consumers signing up for its services. The company also gave a better-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter and said it partnered with and made a small investment in Nowait, a mobile platform that allows restaurants to manage their waiting lists. Shares of Yelp, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, jumped more than 13 percent to $35.90 in extended trading on Tuesday. They hit a 52-week high of $32.90 in regular trading. Yelp posted a net profit of $449,000, or 1 cent per share, for quarter ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $1.3 million a year earlier and $15.5 million in the prior quarter. Revenue rose 29.5 percent to $173.4 million.

• P&G, the biggest advertiser in the world, reminded us why Facebook wants to be TV: Facebook is a giant, mega-successful advertising business. It has 1.7 billion users, and it knows a ton about them, which is why it did $17 billion in ad revenue last year. But despite years of trying to convince advertisers otherwise, Facebook is still not TV — the place advertisers go when they want to spend huge sums on brand advertising, meant to create overall awareness of their products. Instead, Facebook is the place advertisers go for direct response ads: Ads that send you somewhere when you click on them, so you can buy or download something immediately. Facebook is better at DR ads than anyone — see that second sentence at the top — but DR ads are of limited use for some advertisers. We got a reminder of that today, when the Wall Street Journal reported that P&G, the world’s biggest advertiser, was going to pull back on the targeted ads it was running on Facebook, because targeted ads weren’t helping P&G sell Tide and Pampers. But P&G is increasing its TV budget. P&G isn’t cutting back on its overall Facebook spend, and this news isn’t going to be a long-term problem for Facebook.

• Virtual Reality Classrooms Another Way Chinese Kids Gain an Edge: Deep within a building shaped like the Starship Enterprise, a little-known Chinese company is working on the future of education. Vast banks of servers record children at work and play, tracking touchscreen swipes, shrugs and head swivels - amassing a database that will be used to build intimate profiles of millions of kids. This is the Fuzhou hive of NetDragon Websoft Holdings Ltd. a hack-and-slash videogame maker and unlikely candidate to transform learning via headset-mounted virtual reality teachers. It’s one of a growing number of companies from International Business Machines Corp. to Lenovo Group Ltd. studying how to use technology like VR to arrest a fickle child’s attention. (And perhaps someday to make a mint from that data by showing them ads.) China - where parents have been known to try anything to give their kids an edge and tend to be less obsessive about privacy - may be an ideal testing ground for the VR classroom of the future. As it’s envisioned, there’ll be no napping in the back row. Lessons change when software predicts a student’s mind is wandering by spotting an upward tilt of the head. Dull lectures can be immediately livened up with pop quizzes. Even the instructor’s gender can change to suit the audience, such as making the virtual educator male in cultures where teachers are typically men.The notion of adaptive, computer-based teaching has bounced around for more than a decade. Done right, it’s got the potential to fundamentally alter learning. Educators who’ve relied on their gut and visual cues could be replaced or augmented by digital avatars powered by algorithms, which can in turn be replicated across the planet. Advocates argue that the benefits of using machines to scrutinize children and learning to adapt to their foibles will outweigh questions of privacy because soon there won’t be enough human teachers.

• Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers, but It Strives to Make Ads More Relevant: Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up onFacebook’s desktop website, you will now be out of luck: The social network has found a way to block the ad blockers. On Tuesday, Facebook flipped a switch on its desktop website that essentially renders all ad blockers — the programs that prevent websites from displaying ads on the page when a user visits the site — useless. The change allows the Silicon Valley company to serve ads on its desktop site even to people who have ad-blocking software installed and running.Facebook’s move is set to add to a furious debate about the ethics of ad blocking. On one hand, many digital ads are a nuisance — they slow loading times of web pages and detract from the online experience. Yet the ads also serve as the business foundation for many digital publishers to provide content to readers. Ad blockers have become a threat to publishers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which are facing declining advertising revenue. About 200 million people worldwide use ad-blocking software on their desktop computers, according to estimates from PageFair, an anti-ad-blocking start-up. An additional 420 million use ad blockers on their smartphones, the company said. Several digital publishers, including Wired, Forbes and The Times, have begun experimenting with anti-ad-blocking techniques, including asking visitors who use ad blockers to “whitelist” their sites so that ads may still appear.