Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 10

• Jessica Alba’s Honest Company has been in talks to sell to a big consumer product giant: Honest Company, the diaper and personal care product company co-founded by the actress Jessica Alba, has been in talks to sell the company, several sources close to the situation said. Sources indicated that the buyer is likely to be a big consumer product company like Procter & Gamble or Unilever. As in all acquisition talks, the discussions may not result in a deal, and a potential acquisition price is not known. But Honest Company was most recently valued at around $1.7 billion when it raised $100 million in financing last year. The five-year-old company has raised $222 million in investments overall and brought in revenue of around $300 million in 2015, according to one source. The talks come as consumer-packaged goods companies are grappling with the increasing importance of e-commerce to their future and the challenge of competing in this new world without relying too heavily on sales through Amazon. Traditional retailers are facing similar challenges, as displayed by Walmart’s planned $3.3 billion purchase of Jet.com, a shopping site that’s only one year old. Along the way, the consumer packaged goods giants have become intrigued by startup brands like Dollar Shave Club and Honest that have built large followings by selling consumer goods directly to customers through their own websites and not through Amazon. In a surprise purchase, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion earlier this summer.

• Facebook Becomes Emerging-Markets Play as User Base Shifts: With Facebook Inc.’s user growth in developing countries soaring, mutual funds focused on emerging economies are increasing investments in the Menlo Park, California-based company.Six years ago, 60 percent of the social platform’s 482 million monthly active users lived in the U.S., Canada and Europe and the rest were from elsewhere. Now two-thirds of its 1.7 billion users are from outside of the heart of the developing world. Researcher eMarketer estimates India will surpass the U.S. next year as the country with the most Facebook users. It also ranks India, Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines as the top four countries to see the fastest Facebook user growth until 2020. “From a monetization perspective it’s still dominantly the U.S. but from a long-term opportunity perspective it’s definitely emerging-markets,” Charlie Wilson, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based managing director at Thornburg Investment Management Inc., said in an interview in New York. He has steadily added Facebook shares to the Thornburg Developing World Fund, and they now account for 3 percent of the $1.2 billion portfolio.

• Apple will not give first-weekend sales of iPhone 7, the company said on Thursday, making it harder for analysts to get a read on the product's prospects amid questions over whether its popularity has peaked. The company decided to stop the practice because the number of phones sold during the period has become more a reflection of Apple’s supply than demand, a company spokeswoman said, when asked whether Apple will be releasing the figure.The stakes for the iPhone 7 are high after sales of the gadget dropped during two straight quarters this year, the first declines in its history. As they try to assess whether the iPhone has reached a plateau, investors will not be happy about losing a data point, said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. "Less data is never good, particularly given the question marks around this phone," he said. Apple shares fell 2.4 percent to $105.71 in mid-day trading.