Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 21

• Foursquare is launching an analytics platform to help retailers understand foot traffic: While Foursquare started as a social check-in app, the company has always said there is a bigger picture — mainly related to unique ways of leveraging its database of check-ins at nearly 100 million public places. There’s no better example than when Foursquare predicted that Chipotle same-store sales would fall 29 percent after the Mexican chain was hit with E. coli outbreaks. The actual decline announced by Chipotle ended up being a spot-on 30 percent. As you can imagine, these analytics can be very valuable to retailers, allowing them to better understand customers’ habits as well as predict store traffic. So today the company is announcing Foursquare Analytics, a foot-traffic dashboard for brands and retailers. The platform is available for retailers with any number of stores, no matter how small. Previously the only way for companies to access this data was through one-off deals with Foursquare. Retailers will be able to use the dashboard to see foot-traffic data across metrics like gender, age and new versus returning customers — on a national or citywide scale. They also can compare their foot traffic against a set of competitors and their category as a whole. The data is collected via Foursquare’s existing database of locations (which powers more than 100,000 apps, including Snapchat), as well as anonymized in-store-visit data collected from users of Swarm and Foursquare who have opted in to always-on location sharing. Foursquare then normalizes this data to make sure it accurately represents the U.S. population as a whole.

• Ant Financial Said Considering Higher Offer for MoneyGram: Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Financial is considering whether to make a higher offer for MoneyGram International Inc., according to a person familiar with the negotiations, after the U.S. company said a smaller rival’s bid could be a better deal. In January, China-based Ant Financial announced its plan to acquire MoneyGram for $13.25 a share in cash, pending regulatory approval. Last week, Euronet Worldwide Inc. swooped in with a $15.20-a-share offer, a proposition that “could reasonably be expected” to result in a superior proposal, Dallas-based MoneyGram said Monday in a statement. Douglas Feagin, Ant’s head of international operations, said he’s “confident” that the deal will go through. It’s likely that Ant Financial will either counter the bid with a higher offer, or say that it will wait until Euronet finishes carrying out its due diligence before delivering a rival bid, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. If MoneyGram declares Euronet’s bid superior, Ant will have four days to respond. MoneyGram’s shares rose 0.9 percent to $16.43 at the close in New York. They have more than doubled in the past year.

• Vodafone-Idea merger: Birth of a telecom giant: Facing intense competition from cash-rich Reliance Jio, the Aditya Birla Group and British telecom giant Vodafone Plc on Monday announced the merger of their Indian wireless telephony businesses, creating the largest telecom operator in the country. In a news conference in Mumbai, Vodafone Group Plc Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Vittorio Colao and Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla said the merger would create a new champion of digital India. It would launch new services soon. As the first step of the merger, Birla-owned Idea Cellular and Vodafone India would merge their operations at a swap ratio of 1:1. Then, Birla’s holding companies would buy a 4.9 per cent stake from Vodafone at Rs 110 per share, investing close to Rs 3,900 crore. This will increase Idea’s stake to 26 per cent and bring down Vodafone Plc’s stake to 45.1 per cent. The Birlas would have the right to acquire another 9.5 per cent stake from Vodafone in the next four years, so that both partners eventually hold an equal stake in the company (about 35.5 per cent each). “India was earlier the jewel in our crown. Now with this merger, we have got a bigger jewel,” Colao said, adding: “This is our Make in India initiative.” At present, Vodafone and Idea together have a customer base of 400 million. Their joint revenue share is likely be 41 per cent, after the merger is complete at the end of 2018. Bharti Airtel, which used to be the biggest market player till now, will be a distant second, with 268 million customers in India. Revenue-wise, too, Airtel would be on the second spot with a market share of 35.6 per cent, along with Telenor. Airtel and Telenor are planning to merge their operations. nvestors of Idea Cellular, however, were not happy with the transaction; its shares closed with a 9.55 per cent fall at Rs 97.6 a share after the deal was announced. Birla said the investors’ reaction was a “knee-jerk” one. He was confident that like other Birla group mergers and acquisitions, investors would gain in the long run. Analysts said the consolidation in the telecom sector, triggered by Jio’s $25-billion (about Rs 1.7 lakh crore) investment, was likely to continue.