- 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.
