Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 3

• China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech: Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video. All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China. WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols — called QR codes — to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home. Silicon Valley has long been the world’s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley’s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter. But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.China’s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America’s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America.Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat. Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.

• Instagram's Snapchat-like feature allows 24-hour-limit posts: Users of Instagram, a photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc , can now post picture and video slideshows that last 24 hours, a feature similar to the signature function of social media rival Snapchat. Snapchat, which launched in 2011, got its initial boost from millennials, especially teenagers, who value the privacy that the app offers. Text messages disappear right after they are read, and posts expire after 24 hours. As with Snapchat, the new Instagram Stories feature allows its 500 million members to annotate their posts with emojis, doodles and texts, Instagram said in a blog post on Tuesday. The feature is the latest salvo between Facebook, which bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and Snapchat, which rejected Facebook's $3 billion buyout offer just three years ago, as they try to attract more users. Snapchat is popular with younger people who want to shield their posts from the eyes of their parents, who are more likely to be on Facebook, whose 1.7 billion monthly users tend to be older. Snapchat recently surpassed Twitter Inc in daily users and is valued at around $18 billion.

• Lyft hit a record of 14 million rides last month with run-rate revenue of as much as $500 million: July was a record month for Lyft, which performed 13.9 million rides, according to a letter the company sends its investors on a monthly basis that Recode obtained.That’s 1.5 million more rides, or 12 percent more, than the company performed in June 2016 and amounts to 167 million rides on an annual run-rate basis, according to the document. The company also hit more than $2 billion in what it calls net ride value for the first time in its history, on a run-rate basis. Net ride value — not to be confused with Lyft’s revenue — is the amount passengers pay without accounting for tips and tolls. Lyft takes anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of the fare, which means the company’s run-rate revenue for the year is between $400 million and $500 million. The leaked document comes at a time when the company is under pressure to sell right after Uber sold its China operations to homegrown competitor Didi. The two companies have essentially agreed to operate a monopoly in China after years of battling for customers and riders through price enticements that made it hard to turn profit. Market dominance is more important than ever as ride-hailing startups look to turn a profit. Uber is likely to seek an IPO next year, and Lyft will have to find a buyer to help it better compete.

• Tableau Software’s Q2 earnings fall short of estimates: Data analytics provider Tableau Software reported second quarter earnings after the bell today. The Seattle-based company posted a loss due to higher than expected expenses for the quarter, while still beating analyst’s expectations in terms of revenue. For the three months ended June 30, Tableau posted total revenue of $198.5 million Tableau Software went public in May 2013 at an initial public offering price of $31 per share. At the New York Stock Exchange trading Tuesday, the company’s shares closed down 4 cents, or less than one percent, at $56.40.