Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 19

• Building a Community, and an Empire, With a Gay Dating App in China: MA BAOLI was accustomed to secrets. By day, he was a police officer in northern China with a wife and a knack for street chases. By night, he led a life as a gay man, furtively running a website for gay people across China at a time when many were viewed as criminals and deviants. For 16 years, Mr. Ma kept his secret, worried that coming out would mean expulsion from the police force and estrangement from his family. Then in 2012, his superiors at a police department in Qinhuangdao, a coastal city in Hebei Province, uncovered his website and he resigned. His job lost, his family struggling to accept his sexuality, Mr. Ma set out to turn his passion for connecting gay people into an empire. He created Blued, now China’s most popular gay dating app with an estimated value of $600 million and more than three million active daily users, about as many as Grindr, a popular gay dating app in the United States. Mr. Ma said he was optimistic that long-entrenched stereotypes were fading in China and that within two decades, the country would embrace ideas like same-sex marriage. He quoted his idol, the Alibaba.com founder Jack Ma, in describing both the challenge of building a successful start-up in China and the struggles of the gay-rights movement. “When I’m at my most painful moments,” he said, “I remember what Jack Ma said: ‘Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.’ ”

• Airbnb seeks to raise an additional $153 million: Airbnb on Friday authorized the sale of up to $153 million in equity to investors, according to venture capital database CB Insights, which obtained the company's financial filing. The funding is an extension of a round in September, when Airbnb raised more than $555 million, according to financial filings. Investors have valued the company at $30 billion. The price per-share for the sale is $105, up from the $93.09 share price the company commanded in its 2015 financing round, according to CB Insights.

• Nintendo Tumbles as Super Mario Run Game Debuts to Tepid Reviews: Nintendo Co. dropped in Tokyo as the debut of Super Mario run was met by lukewarm reviews. The stock tumbled 4.4 percent as of 10:36 a.m. on Monday, bringing its losses since the game’s debut last week to 8.4 percent. Nintendo’s partner DeNA Co., which helped with the game’s development, has dropped 12.4 percent in the same period. The title, which for now is only available for Apple Inc. devices, had nearly 50,000 reviews in the U.S. App Store, with an average rating of two and a half stars out of five. That’s among the lowest for apps at the top of download rankings and below other popular smartphone games like Clash Royale or Candy Crush Saga. Nintendo has been criticized for the cost of the game, which is free to download and play the first three levels but costs $10 for the full version. “Investor expectations were very strong,” said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute. “There are a lot of people writing on the App Store that Super Mario Run isn’t very fun. Perhaps expectations were too high.”