Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 22

• Apple drives further into Facebook, Snap territory with video app Clips: With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple Inc is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world, where its huge base of iPhone users could help it compete with Snap Inc's Snapchat and Facebook Inc's Messenger. Clips, which will hit Apple's App Store in April, lets customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colorful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters. The functions closely resemble those that drive Snap's wildly popular Stories feature. With Stories, Snap users string together photos and videos, embellish them and then post them to their feeds. Ttech giants obsess over messaging because it is where users are headed, according to analyst firm Gartner. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of U.S. and UK smartphone owners who used social media apps dropped from 85 percent to 83 percent while messaging apps jumped from 68 percent to 71 percent, a trend Gartner expects will continue.

• Pinterest expects to make more than $500 million in revenue this year: Pinterest may finally be growing into its $11 billion valuation. Pinterest, which makes all of its money from advertising, is targeting more than $500 million in revenue in 2017, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Some believe the company could generate as much as $600 million this year. Even on the low end of that range, that would be a jump of at least 67 percent over the $300 million in revenue Pinterest brought in last year, when it had internal goals to bring in $1 million per day. The company generated $100 million in revenue in 2015. Pinterest’s business is still relatively new. The company is in its third full year selling advertising and has just one ad product, Promoted Pins, which let advertisers push their posts to users who may not follow them on the service. But those close to the company believe Pinterest is on the path to an IPO. Sources say Pinterest won’t IPO “soon” but that it’s currently putting the pieces in place. The company hired its first CFO, Todd Morgenfeld, from Twitter back in October, and has Facebook’s former monetization director, Tim Kendall, overseeing all of Pinterest's revenue efforts, among other things. Those close to Pinterest believe that if Snap, which generated roughly $400 million in revenue the year before its IPO and shares tens of millions in revenue with media partners, can fetch a valuation north of $20 billion on the public markets, Pinterest is in good shape to do something similar.

• What happened to tablet sales? In the past month, both Apple and Samsung have refreshed their flagship tablets for the first time since 2014. A lot has changed in the space in the intervening years — mostly for the worse, as overall sales have continued to slip. In Q4 of last year, IDC reported that shipments had dropped 20 percent, year over year, while Strategic Analytics has the number at half that. There’s room for debate as far as precisely how down the overall market is (not to mention what precisely qualifies a device as a tablet), but there seems to at least be a consensus that early predictions of the tablet space eclipsing PCs missed the mark. The space has suffered for a variety of reasons. Among them, the fact that users simply aren’t refreshing tablets at a rate many manufacturers no doubt predicted. “The iPad 2 is still in use today,” IDC Senior Analyst Jitesh Ubrani tells TechCrunch. “The [original] iPad Minis and Air are all still in use today. They were being supported by Apple until very recently. People have been hanging onto these devices and they’re finding that they work just as well as they did when they were released.” There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, users haven’t been conditioned to upgrade slates on the same cycle as smartphone — something that’s been hammered into consumers in almost Pavlovian fashion through carrier upgrade cycles. There’s also the simple fact that we tend not to put the devices through the same sort of day to day wear and tear of smartphones, or even laptops, with many users simply leaving their devices at home and breaking them out when it’s time to watch some Netflix. The growing size of smartphone displays has gone a ways toward cannibalizing tablet sales, as well, limiting the need for a much larger device when so many handsets are now within the six-inch range. 

• Tiger Global may be part-exiting Flipkart with 3x return: Tiger Global, the biggest investor in Flipkart, may have struck a deal with Microsoft and other new investors to sell a part of its stake in the e-commerce company in the latest fund-raising round that valued it at $9.3 billion pre-money, a person familiar with the conversations told VCCircle. While US online retailer eBay, Chinese tech major Tencent and Microsoft are investing $500 million each in the round, the part-sale of Tiger’s shares would mean Flipkart is still short of the $1.5 billion it was targeting to raise in this round. That means either one of the three would put in additional money, or a fourth investor—potentially Google Capital—would help Flipkart close the round within a few weeks, added the person cited above. The part-sale of its Flipkart stake aligns with Tiger Global’s strategy to book some gains before actively investing in the country again, VCCircle had reported earlier. It is part of its broader plans to monetise stakes in its major bets, such as Flipkart, Ola and Quikr, in the near term. The secondary transaction of Flipkart shares between Tiger Global and Microsoft would result in the former’s stake in the company decreasing to around 25%, from the current 33-35%, depending on the deal size. This would also mean Tiger getting some of its money back—the firm is believed to have invested around $1 billion in Flipkart. This part-exit would mean three-fold return for Tiger Global’s biggest investment in India, better than some of its poor exits such as Caratlane last year, where it practically made no gains at all. Except MakeMyTrip and JustDial, Tiger has seen no impressive exits in India yet.