Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 7th

• Alibaba Falters in Bid to Take Mobile Phone Control From Tencent: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s six-year-old excursion into mobile operating systems is faltering in China, casting doubt over software that bears billionaire-founder Jack Ma’s name and was once touted as key to countering Tencent Holdings Ltd. China’s largest e-commerce company debuted YunOS in 2011, a system that underpins search, shopping and browsing that its executives last year said could attain as much as 25 percent domestic market share by the end of 2016 -- surpassing Apple Inc.’s iOS. Six years on, YunOS’ slice of China software installations stands at just 2.2 percent while its share of 2016 shipments was 10 percent, researchers Canalys and Counterpoint estimate, respectively. Alibaba disputes those numbers. Alibaba managers have grown increasingly unhappy with its sluggish adoption and have begun an internal debate around the software’s future, a person familiar with the matter said. No conclusions have been reached, the person said, asking not to be named discussing a confidential matter. Yet the talks reflect the inability of a once-vaunted initiative to forestall Tencent’s dominance in the mobile arena, secured through the utility of WeChat -- a universal app that melds messaging, payments, media, shopping and on-demand services.

• Pinterest raised another $150 million and is now valued at more than $12 billion: Pinterest has raised $150 million in a new round of funding. The new deal values Pinterest at $12.3 billion, according to a company spokesperson, up from a valuation of $11 billion when it last raised funding two years ago. The round came from Pinterest’s existing investors, but the company is not saying which ones. Pinterest says it plans to use the money to help build its new visual search technology, which lets users employ images instead of keywords to find things on the service. The money will also be used to help grow its user base outside the United States. Around 40 percent of Pinterest’s users are in the U.S. Pinterest has raised well over $1 billion since it was founded seven years ago. The company’s business is finally starting to pick up; it expects to make more than $500 million in revenue this year, a 66 percent jump over last year, and more than Snapchat and Twitter made in the years before their respective IPOs.

• The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools: In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats. In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see. And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors. In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning. The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 31

• Uber Fires Former Google Engineer at Heart of Self-Driving Dispute: Uber said Tuesday that it had fired Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer brought in to lead the company’s self-driving automobile efforts who was accused of stealing trade secrets when he left a job at Google. What Mr. Levandowski did when he quit Google to start his own company, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for nearly $700 million last year, is the key question in a closely watched lawsuit that pits one of the world’s most powerful companies against Uber, a richly financed up-and-comer. The stakes are enormous for both businesses. Google was a pioneer in autonomous car technology and has spent nearly a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on its effort, which is now run through Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. And Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, has said the future of his ride-hailing company, privately valued at nearly $70 billion, hinges on work being done to create cars that can drive themselves. The dismissal of one of Uber’s most prized technical talents also points to the risks of the star engineering culture that has emerged in Silicon Valley in recent years, leading to giant paydays for a small group of employees.

• Amazon Shares Hit $1,000, Showing E-Commerce, Cloud Prowess: Amazon.com Inc.’s shares rose briefly just above $1,000 for the first time Tuesday, marking a new milestone for a company wooing investors by dominating online commerce and cloud computing. Amazon hit an intraday high of $1,001.20 in New York before ending the day little changed at $996.70. The stock is up almost 40 percent from a year ago and more than double the 15 percent gain of the S&P 500 Index in the same period. Investors are thinking about how much further Amazon can grow as it tries to replicate its U.S. success abroad. The Seattle company’s $478 billion market value is double that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. even though the world’s biggest retailer will have sales three times larger than Amazon’s this year. Investors put more value in Amazon’s web traffic and delivery network than they do in Wal-Mart’s vast store presence because online spending will grow more than four times faster than overall retail spending this year as shoppers continue to shift from stores to websites, according to EMarketer Inc. The world’s largest online retailer is dominating e-commerce with its $99-a-year Amazon Prime subscription, which includes delivery discounts, music and video streaming and photo storage that keep shoppers engaged with the website. Another Amazon advantage is its profitable and fast-growing cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, which maintains a global network of data centers and rents out storage space and computing functions to clients in a variety of industries, including Netflix Inc. and Airbnb Inc. as well as Capital One Financial Corp. and the federal government.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 30

• Why the Chinese Will Pay for Content That Americans Won't: Back in early 2016, Li Xiang was just another overworked magazine editor in Beijing. Then along came an opportunity to produce a business newsletter on a brand-new app called De Dao. In just a few months that app—which means “I Get”  in English—had attracted millions of users looking for daily advice and to learn everything from music to economics. And Li? Within months, he had close to 100,000 subscribers paying about $30 a year—which works out to almost $3 million in annual revenue. It's the kind of story that couldn't happen in the United States, where many people believe content should be free. In China, meanwhile, companies and individuals alike have managed to monetize smartphone apps, making money from news, entertainment and social media—by making people directly pay for it, instead of relying on advertisers. Chinese watch streams that others might find banal in part because they have fewer entertainment options, thanks to the government's strict regulation of media.There are cultural and demographic forces at work, too. In China, tens of millions of young people have migrated to the large industrial cities. They live far away from their families. So video livestreaming in particular has become a form of digital companionship. The upshot is that thousands—maybe millions—of people are able to earn a living this way.

• Snapdeal receives Rs113 crore from Nexus, founders in surprise funding: Struggling online marketplace Snapdeal has received Rs113 crore in an emergency financing round from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners and the company’s founders. The funding will not affect Snapdeal’s proposed sale to Flipkart, three people familiar with the matter said, on condition of anonymity. Snapdeal (Jasper Infotech Ltd) has been in talks to sell itself to bigger rival Flipkart amid a boardroom battle involving its three most powerful investors and its co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. Japanese technology and telecoms conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp, Snapdeal’s largest investor, is trying to engineer the sale after giving up on the online marketplace, which has lost out to Flipkart and Amazon India in the e-commerce battle. At the other corner are Nexus, Kalaari Capital and the Snapdeal co-founders, all of whom were initially opposed to the sale.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 29

• Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.? Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established. Instead, he went to China. The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West invented the software and the chips powering today’s digital age, has become a major player in artificial intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future. Experts widely believe China is only a step behind the United States. China’s ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell. There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country’s ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor the internet. Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China’s A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan. China’s private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu — often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition — this year opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots. China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.

• BA cancels flights from London as global IT outage causes chaos: British Airways canceled all its flights from London's two biggest airports on Saturday after a global computer system failure caused confusion and chaos, with thousands of passengers queuing for hours and planes left stuck on runways. The failure, caused by a power supply problem, disrupted BA's flight operations worldwide and also hit its call centers and website, said Alex Cruz, the chairman and chief executive of BA. The problems, which passengers said had affected flights across Britain, came on a particularly busy weekend with a public holiday on Monday and many children starting their school half-term breaks.Terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick became jammed with angry passengers, with confused BA staff unable to help as they had no access to their computers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 26

• Target is investing $75 million in mattress startup Casper: Target has finalized an investment in Casper Sleep, pumping $75 million into the fast-growing mattress startup in a funding round that will total $100 million or more, according to a source familiar with the deal. Existing Casper investors like Lerer Hippeau Ventures, IVP and NEA are also participating in the round. New investors, in addition to Target, could send the round over $100 million. The investment comes after Target and Casper could not come to terms on an outright acquisition after Target offered to buy the startup for $1 billion. Casper, which is known for its foam mattresses that it ships to customers folded up in a box, last raised $55 million at a valuation of around $500 million in the summer of 2015. The startup received a higher valuation with this new investment, though the exact terms could not be learned. For Target, the investment signals a move to put its money where its mouth is in its attempt to reclaim some of the cool factor that made it a hit among discount retailers for so long through relationships with popular designers and brands.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 25

• The Rise of the Fat Start-Up: For much of the past decade, tech investors have been enamored of software companies that could grow very quickly for little money — like Instagram, which raised less than $60 million before it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. Even Uber, which has raised billions of dollars for expansion, has attracted investors on the promise of eventual low operational costs, as it neither owns nor actually employs its drivers. (They are considered independent contractors.) But modern capital markets have since unlocked far grander opportunities for tech entrepreneurs. They are blessed with essentially unlimited access to money, and ideas that once seemed too expensive, too risky or just too crazy are now getting off the ground. These start-ups are fat — with capital, with industry-altering ambition and, to their critics, often more than a little hubris. Consider how Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, is building electric cars, a gigantic automated factory, solar roofs, rockets and, as a hobby, a tunneling company. There are start-ups trying to create superspeedy Hyperloop transportation and others working on flying vehicles. 

• DJI’s new selfie drone is controlled with just a wave of your hand: DJI, the world’s biggest drone company, has a tiny new drone called the Spark. It’s the most affordable, accessible drone yet from the Chinese drone maker, costing $499. The Spark weighs only half a pound and is about the size of a can of soda. It’s designed to be carried for daily, spontaneous use, like in a backpack. And unlike DJI’s other drones, which are piloted via a smartphone or a separate controller, the Spark uses gesture recognition, meaning it moves in the direction you wave your hand, making it super easy to position in front of you. The Spark can even land using gesture control, as was demonstrated in an unveiling event today when the presenter landed the small drone on his palm. The Sparks flies at about 31 miles per hour. Like other consumer drones, the Spark has a short flight time. It only flies for 16 minutes before needing to swap batteries or be recharged (though its batteries can be recharged with a micro USB on the go). The larger Mavic can fly for 27 minutes and GoPro’s Karma clocks about 20 minutes of flight time. But short flying time hasn’t stopped people from buying new drones, and analysts predict the market will only continue to grow. The analyist firm Gartner estimates that this year the global personal drone market will be valued at $2.8 billion.

• Bitcoin soars above $2,400 to all-time high: Digital currency bitcoin hit a fresh record high on Wednesday, surging above $2,400, as demand for crypto-assets soared with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain technology. Blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin, is a financial ledger maintained by a network of computers that can track the movement of any asset without the need for a central regulator. Bitcoin hit a record of $2,409 BTC=BTSP on the BitStamp platform and was last up 4.3 percent at $2,363. So far this year, the price of bitcoin has more than doubled. A key reason for bitcoin's dominance in the nefarious online underworld, say technologists and cybercrime experts, is its size - the total value of all bitcoins in circulation is more than twice that of the nearest of hundreds of rivals. Also, a big part of bitcoin's recent surge is the increase in demand for other digital currencies being sold in so-called "initial coin offerings", or ICOs. Under ICOs, blockchain start-ups sell their tokens directly to the public to raise capital without any regulatory oversight. "Bitcoin up 100 percent in under 2 months. Shanghai down almost 10 percent same timeframe, compared to most global stocks up. Probably not a coincidence!", Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive at DoubleLine Capital tweeted on Tuesday.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 24

• Uber to Repay Millions to Drivers, Who Could Be Owed Far More: Uber said Tuesday that it had made a mistake in the way it calculated its commissions, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to its New York drivers, and the company vowed to correct the practice and make the drivers whole for the lost earnings. The ride-hailing service said it had been taking its cut from a figure including state taxes, rather than a pretax fare. If a passenger handed over $20, and $2 of that represented taxes, Uber’s commission was a percentage of the full $20, not of $18, as it should have been. Even at pocket change per ride, the cumulative difference was vast. But Uber’s handling of passenger payments raises questions about a larger legal issue, potentially far more substantial: not the pocket-change difference in the commission but whether that entire $2 in taxes is improperly coming out of the drivers’ wallets. Uber’s contract with drivers appears to allow the company to deduct only its 25 percent commission, not taxes, from their fares. But a lawsuit filed by a drivers’ advocacy group in New York last year said the company was making its drivers swallow the tax burden — a practice the group said amounted to wage theft. The questions arise as Uber is facing mounting pressure over what drivers say is declining take-home pay, epitomized this year by a viral video of an argument between a driver and the company’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick.

• Southeast Asia's Biggest Startup Files for $1 Billion IPO, Sources Say: Sea Ltd., Southeast Asia’s most valuable startup, has filed confidentially for a potential U.S. initial public offering that could raise about $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The Singapore-based company, formerly known as Garena, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the past few weeks, and is considering listing in early 2018, though no final decisions have been made, one of the people said. Sea is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley on the share sale, the people said. Under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue can file for an IPO with the SEC privately and work out the details outside the public eye. The company, founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Forrest Li, began as an online gaming portal and has since branched out to add mobile shopping and payment services. A $1 billion deal would be the largest technology IPO out of Southeast Asia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and be a boon for backers such as Tencent Holdings Ltd.  Any overseas listing of Sea would be a blow for Singapore, which has been trying to woo local startups to sell shares at home as it seeks to build a regional hub for fast-growing, innovative companies.

• India's electric vehicles push likely to benefit Chinese car makers: India's ambitious plan to push electric vehicles at the expense of other technologies could benefit Chinese car makers seeking to enter the market, but is worrying established automakers in the country who have so far focused on making hybrid models. India's most influential government think-tank unveiled a policy blueprint this month aimed at electrifying all vehicles in the country by 2032, in a move that is catching the attention of car makers that are already investing in electric technology in China such as BYD and SAIC. The May 12 report by Niti Aayog, the planning body headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recommends lower taxes and loan interest rates on electric vehicles while capping sales of petrol and diesel cars, seen as a radical shift in policy. India also plans to impose higher taxes on hybrid vehicles compared with electric, under a new unified tax regime set to come into effect from July 1, upsetting car makers like Maruti Suzuki and Toyota Motor. Earlier this year SAIC set up a local unit called MG Motor which is finalising plans to buy a car manufacturing plant in western India. A spokesman at SAIC did not comment specifically on the company's India plans. Warren Buffett-backed BYD already builds electric buses in the country, while rival Chongqing Changan has said it may enter India by 2020.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, Monday May 26

• SoftBank's $100 Billion Tech Fund Rankles VCs as Valuations Soar: In the months since Softbank Group Corp. unveiled plans for a $100 billion technology fund, the Japanese company has been making its presence deeply felt across the industry. The Vision Fund closed a few days ago with $93 billion in initial commitments, and already venture firms from London to Silicon Valley are fretting about a behemoth with the resources, clout and name recognition to snatch away the most promising deals. Just last week, SoftBank swooped in and pumped $1.4 billion into Paytm, India’s largest digital-payments startup. The deal boosted Paytm's valuation by about 40 percent to $7 billion. That's not outlandish given Paytm's dominant market position, but the valuations of other SoftBank deals have prompted head-scratching and ignited alarm that a funding atmosphere that only recently cooled off will heat up again. there's the concern that SoftBank will ladle out more money than startups need or can absorb. Already founders approached by SoftBank are caught between the desire to take the money and concern about handing over too much control of their company, according to an investor. One startup targeted by SoftBank has tried to negotiate for less money, this person says. SoftBank won't budge; it's a big check or nothing. SoFi originally asked for less money, too, according to another investor. Pushing startups to take more cash than they ask for has been Son's strategy since the beginning. SoftBank invested more money in Yahoo, Alibaba and Didi than what the entrepreneurs had initially wanted. 

• Quora tests video answers to steal Q&A from YouTube: Newly-minted unicorn Quora has even bigger ambitions than text questions-and-answers. And it’s not going to let video giants or startups disrupt its future. This week Quora began testing video answers, because sometimes it’s a lot easier to show someone how something works, the best way to complete a task, or why one thing is better than another than try to write it out for them. Users in the beta group will be able to record videos on iOS or Android as supplements or complete answers that everyone on Quora can watch. It’s considering allowing video uploads, which might offer more polished content but increase spam concerns. Previously, Quora only let users answer with text, natively hosted photos, links, and embedded videos from platforms like YouTube. Now it’s actively hosting and soliciting video uploads. Quora’s entry into the space could box out younger competitors like Justin Kan’s mobile video Q&A app Whale, and video Ask Me Anything app Yam. These apps are focused entirely on simplifying the process of recording video answers to questions with features like filters to make you look better, and both give creators ways to earn money. But Quora’s 190 million users, $226 million in funding, and 8-year head start give it a big edge. It’s been cautiously curating a network of experts and content, while building a brand name known for quality in contrast to its predecessor Yahoo Answers. Its network effect may be tough to break.

• Pittsburgh Welcomed Uber’s Driverless Car Experiment. Not Anymore. When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. “You can either put up red tape or roll out the red carpet,” Bill Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, said in September. “If you want to be a 21st-century laboratory for technology, you put out the carpet.” Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. Among Uber’s perceived transgressions: The company began charging for driverless rides that were initially pitched as free. It also withdrew support from Pittsburgh’s application for a $50 million federal grant to revamp transportation. And it has not created the jobs it proposed in a struggling neighborhood that houses its autonomous car testing track. The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and others.

• LeEco employees are being called to a Tuesday meeting, and massive layoffs are expected: LeEco, a Chinese company that made a big splash in the U.S. last fall, is preparing for a round of layoffs that may happen as soon as Tuesday, according to sources. Two people told CNBC the company is planning massive layoffs in the U.S., with one source saying that only 60 employees will be left after the cut. The company's current headcount in the U.S. is over 500, according to this person. LeEco started out in China as a streaming media provider — it has been referred to as the "Netflix of China" — and looked to expand into the US by selling affordable hardware that linked consumers to media content from LeEco's partners. Its first batch of products included two smartphones and several TVs, all of which offered flagship-level specs at affordable prices. The idea, it seemed, was that LeEco would make its money back when consumers tuned in to partner programming. When it made its debut in the US in October 2016, it also promised more, including VR headsets and an electric bicycle.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 22

• Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1 Billion for a Talking Cat? Even by the opaque standards of Chinese mergers and acquisitions, the deal was a head-scratcher. It’s hard to see the synergies between a maker of chemical solvents and a digital cat perched over a toilet. And curiously, the buyer, which had recently been renamed Zhejiang Jinke Entertainment Culture Co., had revenue of only $133 million in 2016, according to Bloomberg data pulled from regulatory filings, and its gross profit was $55 million. Jinke won’t say where the money to buy Outfit7 came from. Talking Tom is not alone. There’s been a recent flurry of oddball pairings between Chinese industrial interests and Western entertainment companies. A real estate magnate in Beijing bought Legendary Entertainment, the movie studio that made the Dark Knight trilogy, for $3.5 billion. A maker of construction materials bought Framestore, the company behind the special effects in the Harry Potter films. Zhejiang Dragon Pipe Manufacturing Co. acquired app developer Entertainment Game Labs. And perhaps strangest of all, Digital Extremes Ltd., which created an alien battle game, and the studio Splash Damage Ltd., which made an offshoot of the Xbox hit Gears of War, were bought by an enormous Chinese poultry processor. According to CODE Advisors LLC, an investment bank that specializes in media and technology deals, 70 percent of all acquisitions of game companies since 2015 have been by Chinese buyers. Samo, for one, isn’t stopping to ask questions. A vegan, he’s using his windfall to start a food-sustainability foundation. “It’s not easy,” he says, “to find buyers for a $1 billion company.” The deal activity can best be understood as a consequence of quirks in the Chinese stock market. In China, industrial companies trade at valuations they’d never receive elsewhere in the world. Affan Butt, an investment banker who helped facilitate the sale of Jagex, says some may trade at as much as 100 times their annual earnings—more than four times the multiple of General Electric Co. This means they can acquire companies at what is effectively a discount. A target like Jagex is worth more once it’s part of a Chinese-listed company, allowing the acquirer to pay prices that appear bafflingly high to the rest of the world. 

• ‘Thanks!’ or ‘Thanks.’? Google will tailor suggested email replies to your preferences. If you use Google's Gmail app, you may have seen something new pop up on your screen this week: suggested responses for your emails. The move illustrates one way that Google is using its increased focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. If you're wondering why and how Google can make these suggestions, here are some answers about the feature and how it works. Google calls the feature Smart Reply, and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Google algorithms are scanning your messages and using the information it gleans to suggest ways that you could reply to any given message. Smart Reply relies on machine learning to scan the subject line and body of an email and make suggestions based on what it sees. The company said it has built up a huge bank of anonymized customer messages and response decisions to help accomplish this. It is also designed to remember your individual preferences for things, such as punctuation. So it will be able to adjust its suggestions depending on whether you're a “Thanks!” or “Thanks.” type of person. Smart Replies won't appear on every email though, Google said. You're most likely to see response suggestions on emails that can be easily answered with a simple sentence or two.

• Softbank-Saudi tech fund becomes world's biggest with $93 billion of capital: The world's largest private equity fund, backed by Japan's Softbank Group and Saudi Arabia's main sovereign wealth fund, said on Saturday it had raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics. Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank, a telecommunications and tech investment group, revealed plans for the fund last October and since then it has obtained commitments from some of the world's most deep-pocketed investors.  In addition to Softbank and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), the new fund's investors include Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment, which has committed $15 billion, Apple Inc, Qualcomm, Taiwan's Foxconn Technology and Japan's Sharp Corp. The new fund made its announcement during the visit of President Donald Trump to Riyadh and the signing of tens of billions of dollars worth of business deals between U.S. and Saudi companies. Son was also in Riyadh on Saturday. After meeting with Trump last December, Son pledged $50 billion of investment in the United States that would create 50,000 jobs, a promise Trump claimed was a direct result of his election win. The fund may also serve the interests of Saudi Arabia by helping Riyadh obtain access to foreign technology. The Saudi economy has been severely damaged by low oil prices, and policymakers are trying to diversify into new industries.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 19

• Alibaba Profit Lags Estimates on Tax as Sales Defy Slowdown: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s earnings lagged estimates after it swallowed a higher tax bill and splurged on the entertainment and cloud computing businesses that are fueling revenue growth. The shares dropped the most in almost a year. China’s biggest e-commerce company posted adjusted earnings-per-share of 4.35 yuan, missing the 4.51 yuan average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That came even as revenue rose at a faster-than-expected 60 percent to 38.6 billion yuan ($5.6 billion). Core commerce revenue surged 47 percent to 31.57 billion yuan with the business delivering operating income of 16.5 billion yuan, the company said. While cloud unit revenue doubled in the March quarter to 2.2 billion yuan, the business had an operating loss of 505 million yuan as it slashes prices to snatch market share from Amazon.com Inc. and Tencent. Revenue from digital entertainment more than tripled to 3.9 billion yuan with an operating loss of 2.6 billion yuan as it spends on content for video site Youku Tudou and other platforms. Income tax expenses soared 149 percent to 4.6 billion yuan in the March quarter. Its effective tax rate climbed to 29 percent from 23 percent a year earlier.

• Paytm raises $1.4 billion from SoftBank, valuation soars to $7 billion: Paytm has raised $1.4 billion from SoftBank Group Corp. in the largest funding round by a single investor in India, making the digital payments firm the Japanese company’s biggest bet in India’s start-up ecosystem. The deal includes $400 million worth of shares that SoftBank will buy largely from Paytm’s early investor SAIF Partners in a secondary transaction, and a minor stake from founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, according to two persons close to the development. The deal values the company at about $7 billion post-money (including the investment) and will take SoftBank’s stake to about 20%, the two people said, requesting anonymity. Paytm, India’s second-most valuable internet firm, will use the money to acquire 500 million new customers and launch a slew of financial services products such as wealth management, insurance and deposits and loans. “This business will require a lot of capital before it can start generating cash and hence we need long-term investors like SoftBank and Alibaba,” founder Sharma said in a telephone interview.

• Walmart Reports 63% Rise in Online Sales: On Thursday, the company said e-commerce sales had grown 63 percent in the United States in the latest quarter. The unexpected leap offered the strongest evidence yet that Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, is making headway in its effort to be as prominent online as it is across the American landscape. Walmart’s latest strategy, put in place by its current chief executive, Doug McMillon, has several parts: expand the number of products available online, better leverage its huge physical warehouses and distribution centers to reach customers quickly across the country, and aggressively pursue deals for online stores. The biggest of those deals, in which Walmart paid $3.3 billion for the bulk e-commerce retailer Jet.com last year, was part of the plan to offer customers more products through the web. The earnings results on Thursday gave only hints of about how much the acquisitions gave the company a one-time bump in sales, rather than long-lasting fruit from other changes the company has made. Comparable-store sales, one measure of growth that looks at stores that have been open for at least a year, rose 1.4 percent. That number includes Walmart’s core online business, but not items sold through Jet.com. Walmart completed its purchase of Jet in September. Smaller digital acquisitions followed, including ModCloth, a women’s clothing retailer, and the outdoor apparel site Moosejaw. The deal for Jet was also widely seen as a play for its founder, Marc Lore, a serial digital entrepreneur who could help fix Walmart’s online strategy. Mr. Lore was put in charge of running Walmart.com after the acquisition, spearheading the face-off between the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer and its biggest online competitor.

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Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 18

• Cisco revenue forecast disappoints; says to cut 1,100 more jobs: Cisco forecast current-quarter revenue that widely missed analysts' estimates and said it would cut 1,100 more jobs, as the world's largest networking gear maker steps up efforts to transform into a software-focused company. Shares of the Dow component fell 8.2 percent to $31.05 in after-market trading on Wednesday. The stock had closed down 1.4 percent in regular trading, compared with the 1.78 percent slump in the index. Revenue in its closely-watched security business, which offers firewall protection and breach detection systems, rose 9 percent to $527 million, but missed analysts' estimate of $545.5 million, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet Street Account. Cisco, like other legacy technology players, is shifting its focus to high-growth areas such as security, the Internet of Things and cloud computing, amid intense competition from companies such as Huawei and Juniper. The company's net income rose to $2.52 billion, or 50 cents per share, in the third quarter ended April 29 from $2.35 billion, or 46 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue fell 0.5 percent to $11.94 billion.

• Square Will Replace Meters in Washington Taxis: Washington, D.C., is enlisting Square Inc.’s help as its taxi commission tries to help the city’s cabbies compete with Uber drivers. By the end of August, all of the taxis in Washington have to tear out their traditional meters and start using smartphones or tablets, in what the city government has been describing as a complete reimagining of how the cab system works. For Square, the deal reflects an increasing focus on becoming the payment platform for a range of other company's mobile applications, websites and point-of-sale devices. No money is changing hands between the company and the city. Square agreed to satisfy the department’s requirement that drivers give up no more than 2.65 percent of their fares in transaction fees, according to the department. That’s lower than the standard 2.75 commission it usually takes and significantly less than the 3.5 percent to 5 percent commission that drivers currently pay to use the mechanical meters, according to Ernest Chrappah, the director of the city's taxi regulator.  Chrappah said the lower fees will help make it easier for cabbies to sustain themselves. But the bigger changes come in the increased flexibility that taxi drivers will have once they’re untethered from mechanical meters. There won’t be a single taxi app. Instead, the department is asking developers to build apps, which it will then certify for use by licensed taxi drivers. It is currently working with seven developers, who will make their apps public between now the deadline to replace the meters. It will continue to consider adding new apps as developers pitch them. All of the certified apps must be able to operate as meters for street hails. They’ll also be able to provide digital receipts showing the route they took and give riders the option to rate drivers. Developers can also build services like carpooling or delivery systems that will connect drivers to local merchants looking for people to drop off food, groceries or other products. A developer could build an Uber clone, creating a way to connect drivers to passengers requesting rides through an app. The exact contours of these services will become clear as the individual developers release their software. Taxis will also be able to offer dynamic pricing, where drivers can give discounts during periods when they have trouble securing fares. This resembles Uber’s practice of charging more when demand rises as a way to coax drivers onto the road, only in reverse. Drivers won’t have the option to increase their fares.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 17

• As self-driving cars hit the road, real estate development may take new direction: The much-hyped transition to autonomous cars, while still years, or even decades, away, according to experts, is an opportunity and challenge that has wide potential to reshape our transportation systems. But many believe that as city planners, transportation officials, and, eventually, developers start grappling with the changes to come, autonomous vehicles’ potential to reshape real estate, development, and city planning will rival that of the introduction of the automobile. At the American Planning Association’s annual conference earlier this month in New York City, the issue of autonomous vehicles and driverless cars, one admittedly far in the future, was the subject of numerous present-day panels, discussions, and debates. [An expert] sees two small but significant changes affecting urban real estate development in the age of driverless cars. A reduced need for parking may be the most significant. High-value property in urban areas needs to account for mandatory parking allowances, forcing developers to factor the cost of parking spaces into construction costs and rent. Local government will need to act decisively to regulate drop-off lanes, speeds, and new parking rules before market forces, and other governments, begin making decisions for them. Technology firms shouldn’t reap the rewards after cities make the investments necessary to adapt to a new transportation reality.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 16

• Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says: Uber, the ride-hailing company, sidestepped a full shutdown of its self-driving car efforts on Monday when a federal judge stopped short of issuing a temporary injunction against the program. But the court mandated that Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer leading the program, be prohibited from working on a critical component of autonomous vehicle technology for the duration of the litigation, a setback that could hamper Uber’s development efforts. The decision was in a case that has underlined the increasingly bitter fight between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google’s parent company. The companies have been competing in the development of autonomous vehicles, which many consider the future of transportation. The outcome of the case may affect who wins or loses in the technology, which has also drawn other tech companies, automakers and start-ups. In the ruling on Monday, Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said, “Waymo L.L.C. has shown compelling evidence that its former star engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 confidential files from Waymo immediately before leaving his employment there.” He added, “Significantly, the evidence indicates that, during the acquisition, Uber likely knew or at least should have known that Levandowski had taken and retained possession of Waymo’s confidential files.” Judge Alsup also ruled that Waymo significantly “overreached” when it asked for protection on more than 120 patents it called trade secrets. “General approaches dictated by well-known principles of physics, however, are not ‘secret,’ since they consist essentially of general engineering principles that are simply part of the intellectual equipment of technical employees,” Judge Alsup wrote. He directed Uber to produce a timeline of the events leading to Mr. Levandowski’s hiring, including all oral and written discussions between the parties about an important self-driving technology called lidar, short for light detection and ranging, which Mr. Levandowski has been accused of stealing. The judge also ordered Uber to do what it could to ensure the return of the files to Waymo, including the possibility of terminating Mr. Levandowski’s employment at Uber.Despite the judge’s ruling on Mr. Levandowski, Uber also had cause for celebration because its self-driving research program was not shut down, which would have been a more serious blow.

• Hardly Anyone Paying the Hackers? Because Using Bitcoin Is Hard: An unprecedented cyberattack swept across the globe over the weekend, but so far the majority of victims haven’t paid hackers a ransom. After the ransomware began infecting users on Friday, they were given 72 hours to pay $300 in bitcoin -- chosen by the hackers because the crypto currency is harder to track than conventional payments -- or pay twice as much. If they refused to pay after seven days, their computer would be permanently locked -- a serious problem for those who haven’t backed up their data. As of early Monday, only about $50,000 had been paid in ransoms, according to Elliptic Enterprises Ltd., a London-based company that tracks illicit use of bitcoin. The company calculated the total based on payments tracked to bitcoin addresses specified in the ransom demands, adding that it expects the total to rise.  Paying a ransom isn’t like buying something from Amazon by entering their credit or debit card information. Even though the hackers provided a helpful link for those new to paying in bitcoin, the crypto currency is a black box for most people. "If you’re presented with something that says pay this amount in bitcoin, most people don’t know where to start with that," said James Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Elliptic. There are several steps. First, a person or business has to obtain the bitcoins by registering with one of the various online exchanges and going through its verification process. After that, money can be deposited into the exchange. For those living in countries that don’t have an exchange, including the U.K., money must be converted into another currency. Once the money is deposited on the exchange, the bitcoins can be sent to the address provided by the extortionist. "It looks like a long garbled string of text," Smith said. After the fee is paid, the hackers supposedly free the affected computer. "A large amount of bitcoin is actually somewhat difficult to source quickly," said Alex Sunnarborg, an analyst at bitcoin research company CoinDesk, adding it might take a few days to create an account at a bitcoin brokerage or exchange, connect a bank account, and then receive the bitcoin. One notable difference with this attack is that the perpetrators demanded a relatively small amount of money but from a large number of people, said James Chappell, chief technology officer and co-founder of U.K. security company Digital Shadows. More typically, he said, hackers demand one large ransom to unlock all the infected machines. "Quite often they’re in the thousands rather than the hundreds of dollars," he said. "It is unusual to see this piecemeal approach, computer by computer."

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 15

• Extortionists Mount Global Hacking Attack Seeking Ransom: Extortionist hackers who may be using leaked computer exploits from the U.S. National Security Agency infiltrated computers in dozens of countries in a fast-spreading attack that forced British hospitals to turn away patients and breached systems at Spain’s Telefonica SA and organizations from Russia to Taiwan. The ransomware used in Friday’s cyber-attacks encrypts files and demands that victims pay $300 in bitcoin for them to be decrypted, the latest in a vexing style of security breaches that, at the very least, forces organizations to revert to backup systems to keep critical systems running. The malicious software has infected more than 75,000 computers in 99 countries worldwide on Friday, most of them concentrated in Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan, according to Dutch cybersecurity company Avast Software BV. While the victim tally is likely to grow, the ransomware, called WanaCrypt0r, only affects computers that haven’t applied Microsoft’s two-month-old fix, a reminder that individuals and organizations that don’t routinely update their machines are vulnerable. Hospitals are notoriously slow in applying security fixes, in part because of how disruptive it is to take patient-facing equipment and databases offline. That has made them a reliable target of ransomware and identity-theft attacks, and why they routinely fall victim even to random mass attacks.

• Alphabet’s self-driving unit Waymo is teaming up with Lyft: Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent company Alphabet, is teaming up with Lyft to work on bringing autonomous vehicle efforts to market, the New York Times reports. Details on what this partnership entails remain a little fuzzy, but sources told Times reporter Mike Isaac the two companies would be working together on pilot projects and product development efforts. That's another way of saying Lyft users in some markets will likely be able to hail a Waymo self-driving car in a limited test sometime down the road. This is not Lyft’s only partnership aimed at bringing self-driving technology into the mainstream. Lyft has a partnership with GM, which last year acquired self-driving startup Cruise. Alphabet was also experimenting with its own ride-hailing app — which the company has been using in its first pilot program in Arizona. But it's not likely the company would solely depend on either that app or the ride-matching service Waze, another Alphabet subsidiary, has been experimenting with to give consumers access to self-driving cars. That’s largely due to the difficulty of gaining market share in the already crowded ride-hail industry — an issue Lyft, the perennial runner up to Uber, knows all too well. The relationship between Uber and Alphabet has gone from tense to combative in the past year. It was long-rumored that the two players would work together on an network of autonomous cars but Uber decided to navigate that road on its own making a competitor of Alphabet as both companies vyed for automaker partnerships. This is just the latest in a series of blows to Uber’s and Waymo’s once potentially fruitful relationship.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 12

• Netmarble Soars as Korea’s Biggest IPO in Seven Years Takes Wing: Netmarble Games Corp. jumped as investors pursuing a high-growth alternative to traditional industry piled into South Korea’s biggest coming-out party in seven years. Shares in the mobile game developer and publisher climbed as high as 171,500 won in early Seoul trade, 9.2 percent above their initial public offering price, to give the company a market value of more than 14 trillion won ($12.5 billion), surpassing LG Electronics Inc. Founded in 2000 by high-school dropout Bang Jun-hyuk, Netmarble is a rare entrepreneurial success in a nation dominated by politically connected manufacturing conglomerates. Betting smartphones would drive gaming, Bang built the company into one of Asia’s largest publishers of mobile titles such as Lineage 2 Revolution, and won backing from China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. A successful debut could inspire a generation of talent in a country whose conglomerates have been accused of stifling innovation.  Investors bought in despite the stock trading at valuations well above its rivals: Netmarble was priced at more than 70 times 2016 earnings, surpassing NCSoft Corp.’s roughly 29 times and Nexon Co.’s 45 times as of Thursday’s close. It also faces stiffening competition, with NCSoft releasing a role-playing series this year to directly challenge Lineage 2 Revolution.

• How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout: Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya.“Australia was the first country where a totally national plan to cover every house or business was considered,” said Rod Tucker, a University of Melbourne professor and a member of the expert panel that advised on the effort. “The fact it was a government plan didn’t necessarily make it doomed. In Australia, we have changes of governments every three years, which really works against the ability to undertake long-term planning, and the long-term rollouts of networks like this.” Australia poses natural connectivity challenges. It lies oceans away from other countries, and any network would have to connect far-flung cities separated by its sparsely populated interior.Still, Australia had high hopes for its ambitious internet project. Started in 2009, the initiative, known as the National Broadband Network, was intended to bring advanced fiber-optic technology to the doorstep of just about every home and business. It was initially estimated to cost 43 billion Australian dollars, shared by the government and the private sector. But the government share of those costs quickly climbed until taxpayers were responsible for all of it. The technology was slow to roll out, in part because of negotiations with Telstra, Australia’s big telecommunications provider, over installing the fiber. (A Telstra spokesman said the company did not believe the talks added to delays.) The government-funded effort drew fire from the Liberal Party, the opposition at the time, which said the job should have been left to the private sector. After a Liberal-led coalition was elected in 2013, that party looked for ways to contain costs and speed up the rollout. They focused on what in the telecommunications industry is called “the last mile” — the wires that connect a home or business with the broader network. While the National Broadband Network initially envisioned high-speed fiber connecting homes and businesses directly to the network, the Liberal-led effort compromised by connecting them with existing copper wire — basically, the same technology used in the earliest days of the telephone. The result, critics say, was slow speeds that still did not stop rising costs.

• The Risk in Using a Public Phone Charger: Can a phone really get hacked by plugging it into a public USB charging station? A. If you have ever backed up your phone’s contents by plugging into the computer, you have seen how the USB port can transfer data as well as charge the device’s battery. The concept of “juice-jacking” has been proved at hacker conventions and seen in the wild, and it is definitely possible to transfer malicious software with a phone through a USB connection — perhaps from a computer or device concealed within a public charging station, like those found in airports or malls. If you are traveling and are concerned about keeping your phone’s battery charged, bring your own USB cable and AC adapter so you can plug right into a regular power outlet. The Wirecutter, a product-recommendation site owned by The Times, has suggestions for USB battery packs to bring along when you expect to be away from an outlet for long periods of time. Other solutions for protecting your phone include taking (or making) a power-only USB cable that lacks the internal wiring needed to transfer data. If you do not have one of those cables, power off the device before you plug it into a public charging port (although this is not a foolproof solution for every phone model out there). Last year, the Federal Trade Commission warned consumers against connecting a personal smartphone to the entertainment system through a USB port or Bluetooth wireless link in a rental car. This is because the dashboard software can import and store data from your phone, like your call logs, messages, contacts and locations you requested from the GPS software.

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