Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 4

Google Dreams of a World After Apps but It’s a Nightmare for Rivals: With one search algorithm tweak this week, Google rekindled deep-seated fears that it is doing its damnedest to nuke apps. Maybe. Google earns more money when people are on the mobile Web, not in apps. Publicly, the company has voiced support for solving the nagging problems of apps, discovery and dormancy. Internally, however, chatter is less about crippling apps than imagining a world beyond them. Conversations with people inside and recently departed from Google reveal that the company is spending considerable attention on what comes after mobile apps, and how Google can usher that era in. A primary vehicle for doing so is app indexing and deep linking, methods to tie content within and between apps. Apple and a host of Silicon Valley startups are doing this as well. But Google’s effort is unique in that it is wrapped tightly with search and artificial intelligence — and, like Google’s approach to the Web, it is all-encompassing in its scope. There are some hints of how Google envisions mobile evolving beyond apps. Now on Tap, its feature launching soon in Android, inserts Google’s personal assistant tech and search intel into apps that allow it, essentially allowing a more seamless transition from app to app on a phone. A chat in email about a movie, for instance, would jump quickly to the app of IMDB. Voice control plays a role in the app-less future, too. Several rivals, along with app publishers and ad sellers, interpreted Google’s move this week as hostile. “It’s basically Google starting to meddle with people’s products,” said Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics, a deep-linking firm. Austin noted that with Google’s app indexing drive, it is pushing app creators to build mobile websites. “In an app world,” he said, “Google is nothing.”

Facebook Takes a Step Into Education Software: Facebook, which transformed communication with its social networking service, now wants to make a similar impact on education. The Silicon Valley company announced on Thursday that it was working with a local charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to develop software that schools can use to help children learn at their own pace. The project has been championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, and one of his top lieutenants, Chris Cox. The software allows students to work with teachers to create tailored lessons and projects. Teachers can also administer individualized quizzes that the software can grade and track. The platform, which is separate from the Facebook social network, is now being used by nine Summit schools and about 20 others. Ultimately, Ms. Tavenner said, “our motivation is to share it with everyone and anyone who wants it,” including other charters and public school districts. The software would be free for all users. Mike Sego, the Facebook engineering director running the Summit software project, said making money was not an immediate goal. “Whenever I ask Mark, ‘Do I need to think of this as business?’ he always pushes back and says, ‘That shouldn’t be a priority right now. We should just continue making this better.’ ”

Amazon Announces Purchase of Video-Software Company Elemental: Amazon is buying Elemental Technologies, a provider of technology for distributing videos to Web-connected devices, seeking to expand its portfolio of cloud-computing services. The online retailer paid about $500 million for Elemental, which helps media and entertainment providers reformat video made for cable, satellite and airwaves broadcast so that clips can be transmitted to desktop computers, smartphones and tablets. Amazon described the acquisition as a way to bring more video capabilities to Amazon Web Services, its Internet computing business. The Web retailer also offers movies and TV shows, which may also benefit from Elemental’s technology. Elemental has more than 700 media customers and supports over-the-top TV applications such as BBC’s iPlayer, CNNGo and ESPN ScoreCenter, and will continue to operate under its existing brand.

Extra screen time drags down teenagers' exam grades, study finds: Teenagers who spend an extra hour a day surfing the internet, watching TV or playing computer games risk performing two grades worse in exams than their peers who don't, according to research by British scientists. An extra hour in front of the TV or online at age 14-and-a-half was linked with 9.3 fewer exam points at age 16 -- equivalent to two grades, for example from a B to a D. Two extra hours was linked to 18 fewer points. Unsurprisingly, the results also showed that pupils doing an extra hour of daily homework and reading scored better - getting on average 23.1 more points than their peers. The scientists said further research was needed to confirm the effect conclusively, but advised parents worried about their children's grades to consider limiting screen time. In a breakdown analysis of different screen activities, the researchers found that TV came out as the most detrimental in terms of exam performance. In a study of more than 800 students aged 14 and 15, researchers from Cambridge University also found that physical activity had no effect on academic performance. Since this was a prospective study, in which the researchers followed the pupils over time to see how different behaviors affected performance, the scientists said it was reasonable to conclude that too much screen time reduced academic achievement.

Indian Shopkeepers Help You Tap ‘Buy’: Since 2013, at least $8.6 billion has poured into Indian e-commerce companies. The slice of the population that’s ever shopped online: 4 percent. As the country’s leading Internet bazaars—Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon India—hawk wares to the urban, English-speaking middle class, they’re all but ignoring the 510 million working-age adults living in rural areas. “These people don’t trust an app or a website” even if they have a phone, says Krishna Lakamsani, founder of e-commerce startup IPay. “They will only buy from someone they know and trust.” That’s why IPay and rival StoreKing are recruiting local shopkeepers to sell online goods in their stores in exchange for commissions. By relying on merchants to persuade people to buy online, IPay says it moves about $1.6 million worth of merchandise each month through 6,000 shopkeepers’ tablets in India’s southern states; StoreKing sells $4.2 million through 10,000. The early returns are promising, even if they’re a sliver of Flipkart and Snapdeal, each of which says it sold $300 million worth of goods in June. Amazon wouldn’t disclose sales. For the shopkeepers, commissions range from 4 percent to 10 percent, and the tablets—$134 from IPay, $226 from StoreKing—quickly pay for themselves. During the eight months Panjala has had the IPay unit, he says, each day he’s done about $30 worth of business on it, one-seventh of his sales. Using shopkeepers to push the tablets means IPay and StoreKing don’t have to worry about training most customers to order through their apps. Because shipments get delivered to the shops, there’s less risk of losing goods on remote roads. And the buyers pay cash, so the companies don’t have to invest in electronic payment systems. “We’ve been generating operating profits from Day One,” says StoreKing Chief Executive Officer Sridhar Gundaiah. “That’s something none of the big e-commerce companies can boast of.” Amazon and Snapdeal say they’re experimenting with kiosks that also help customers buy online. StoreKing and IPay are creating a rural e-commerce market in India by selling via tablets in thousands of local stores.

Facebook Makes It Easier To Optimize Ad Campaigns Based On Conversions: Facebook is unveiling an improved version of its Conversion Lift measurement tool, which first launched in January. Previously, Facebook allowed you to measure whether your ad campaign was actually improving online and offline sales. Now, you can also test different ads to find the best approach. Conversion Lift previously looked at two groups — a group of users who saw the ad and a group who didn’t. It then compared each group’s conversion data (the data can be pulled from Facebook’s Custom Audiences pixel, an in-store point-of-sale system and elsewhere), which should reflect whether an ad actually succeeded in driving sales. With the improved Conversion Lift tool, advertisers can compare multiple test and control groups. That means they can see which ad units are delivering the best results, compare brand and direct response ads, see how mobile ads are performing compared to the rest of the campaign or compare ads featuring product versus lifestyle-format photos. For example, website builder Wix compared a group that saw only direct response ads with another group that saw direct response and video ads. It turned out that the combined of formats did a better job of improving premium subscription signups — that group saw uplift of 7.4 percent, compared to the DR-only group, which saw uplift of 6.8 percent. Also part of the update: Conversion Lift can now look at how ads improve in-app sales, as well, so that app developers aren’t just optimizing campaigns to deliver the most downloads, but instead focus on improving revenue.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 27

• Archived snippets are here, and MP3 versions are here

• Yelp Cries Foul at Google’s Mobile App Ad Declaration: Those ads that splash on your phone, nudging you to install an app? You know the ones. Earlier this week, Google released an internal study showing that these app download “interstitials” were not merely obnoxious but ineffective, hindering the intended goal of encouraging app installation. Google said it was retiring them and asked the mobile Internet to do the same. Some were pleased. Some were not. Firmly in the latter camp is Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO and frequent Google sparring partner. On Friday, he pointed to the study and cried hypocrite. Here’s the background: Google’s test paired the full-page ads against subtler banner promotions on mobile websites. Nine percent of mobile users tapped through to the app from the first ads, while 69 percent ran away from the site. With the second version, Google reported an uptick of 17 percent in traffic to the app. Innocuous enough. But Stoppelman is not just accusing Google of a double standard (running its own app ads while nixing others). Behind his beef is the suspicion, percolating in the mobile industry now, that Google is trying to replicate its Web search position with apps. In the past year, Google has pushed aggressively to index the entirety of the app world, while positioning itself, through deep-linking features like the upcoming Now on Tap, as the facilitator. And with Google as facilitator, that leaves less room for other app go-betweens, a la Yelp. It doesn’t help Google’s case here that the interstitial study relied on its own Google+ social app, a Google application that, to be kind, is not terribly in demand.


• Using Algorithms to Determine Character: A company in Palo Alto, Calif., called Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements. Those are among the things that normally earn a good or bad credit score, but these people haven’t been in the working world that long. So Upstart looks at their SAT scores, what colleges they attended, their majors and their grade-point averages. As much as job prospects, the company is assessing personality. “If you take two people with the same job and circumstances, like whether they have kids, five years later the one who had the higher G.P.A. is more likely to pay a debt,” said Paul Gu, Upstart’s co-founder and head of product. “It’s not whether you can pay. It’s a question of how important you see your obligation.” The idea, validated by data, is that people who did things like double-checking the homework or studying extra in case there was a pop quiz are thorough and likely to honor their debts. Analytics, meet judgment of people. “I guess you could call it character, though we haven’t used that label,” said Mr. Gu, who is 24. The same personality dynamic holds for people go to great schools or have top grades. Douglas Merrill, the founder and chief executive of ZestFinance, is a former Google executive whose company writes loans to subprime borrowers through nonstandard data signals. One signal is whether someone has ever given up a prepaid wireless phone number. Where housing is often uncertain, those numbers are a more reliable way to find you than addresses; giving one up may indicate you are willing (or have been forced) to disappear from family or potential employers. That is a bad sign. Zest recently branched into “near prime” borrowers, who have either fallen from the prime category or risen from subprime. The question is why these people have changed categories, and Zest tries to figure out if a potentially reliable borrower has had some temporary bad luck, like a one-time medical expense. “‘Character’ is a loaded term, but there is an important difference between ability to pay and willingness to pay,” said Mr. Merrill. “If all you look at is financial transactions, it’s hard to say much about willingness.”


• Facebook and Other Tech Giants Expand Internet Access in Africa: Africa has become a hotbed of experimentation by big American technology companies as well as local start-ups. In addition to Facebook’s efforts, which included developing a Swahili language version of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM have all been promoting tech projects on the continent. Google, for example, has built a high-speed, fiber-optic Internet network in Kampala, Uganda. But unlike the similar Google Fiber project in major American cities, Google doesn’t offer the service, called Project Link, directly to Ugandans but instead sells access cheap on a wholesale basis to local Internet providers. The result was a sharp drop in the price of Internet access in Kampala as new entrants competed with the traditional carriers to offer services. Microsoft has been supporting various projects to transmit Internet signals via “white spaces,” which are basically unused portions of the television broadcast spectrum. On Friday, the company announced that it was working with the United States government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation to provide financing to Mawingu Networks to build solar-powered Internet access stations across rural Kenya using white spaces technology. And IBM said on Saturday that it would begin a formal program to assist entrepreneurs in Nairobi’s iHub innovation and collaboration space. And Africa seems to have brought a bit of kumbaya to the traditional tech rivals. “It’s the one place where I have seen Microsoft and Google and Facebook as allies,”


• Facebook partnership a boon for video technology firm Bidalgo: Facebook marketing partner Bidalgo targets a tripling in sales in 2015 as its new technology to automate the process of making personalized online video advertising benefits from Facebook's growing share of the video market. Facebook is becoming a leader in the video market as users prefer to watch video ads over static images, said Peleg Israeli, general manager of Bidalgo's Israeli operations. Videos are expensive to make and an advertiser usually makes only one or two versions. The Bidalgo executive said his company's technology, called ADaptation, can automatically turn one video into as many versions as needed, so that targeted audiences will see images they respond to most. For example, a German audience might see a German flag in one video while users in France will see their flag. Automated videos will give Facebook an advantage over Google's YouTube, as Facebook's core technology can identify users "in the most accurate way". U.S.-Israeli Bidalgo's technology targets mobile app and game developers, who have been quick to adopt mobile advertising. Clients include online gaming firm 888 Holdings and Zynga. Bidalgo, which has 40 employees, has been profitable for about a year, with a target of $100 million in sales this year, Israeli said. It competes with San Francisco-based Ampush and Boston-based Nanigans. Companies wishing to advertise on Facebook must bid for users that they wish to see their advertising. Bidalgo's algorithms test an ad against multiple audiences to understand which segments are relevant and what is the right price the advertiser should offer.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 17

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Google Shares Rise 11% as CFO Porat Signals She’ll Rein In Spending: In the first earnings report for Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer Google lured from Morgan Stanley, Ms. Porat said the company was keeping a closer eye on costs. “People are realizing it’s a new era,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial LP. “She’s coming in and she’s expressing what investors wanted -- that’s there’s going to be cost rationalization, a degree of discipline.” The numbers backed her up, with revenue and profits outpacing the expectations of Wall Street. The company reported that revenue rose 11 percent to $17.7 billion from a year earlier, with net revenue — a figure that excludes payments to advertising partners — increasing to $14.35 billion. That was above the $14.28 billion projected by analysts, according to Bloomberg. Google said that absent currency fluctuations, overall revenue would have risen 18 percent from a year ago. Google’s cash pile swelled to $70 billion in the second quarter. In the recent quarter, the number of clicks on ads rose 18 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase in the first quarter, while the average cost per click fell 11 percent after dropping 7 percent in the prior period. Google’s mobile cost-per-click is climbing, helping to close the gap with desktop ads, Porat said on the call. Watch time on YouTube, the company’s video-sharing site, was up 60 percent, with mobile watch time more than doubling, she said. The slower growth in costs, along with suggestions from Ms. Porat that Google will try to be more forthcoming with investors — and may be open to redistributing some of the company’s cash pile down the line — suggested a new era of cooperation from a company that has historically had an antagonistic relationship with Wall Street. She confirmed that they are more open to focusing on expense controls, more open to providing new disclosures and more open to potentially returning cash,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities. “Those are the three things people wanted, and she came through.” Analysts like Mr. Schachter were impressed by her investor-friendly tone, and Google shares jumped nearly 11 percent in after-hours trading.


• The surprising way smartphones are changing the way we shop: Smartphones and tablets now account for up to 68 percent of the traffic to the videogame chain’s Web site, where customers are frequently browsing products and looking up trade-in values for their old games. One thing they’re not doing much of on mobile devices? Buying stuff. In fact, “purchasing through that phone probably wouldn’t even make the top ten list of engagement activities that they do,” said Jason Allen, the retailer’s vice president of multichannel. “We’re not overly focused on conversion on mobile, we really see it as a tool to drive traffic in our stores” This reflects a trend seen throughout the industry: While there has been a surge in traffic to retailers' Web sites from smartphones, a proportionately big boom in sales on these gadgets have yet to appear. In other words, for all the time we spend swiping and tapping on our phones, we still aren’t especially willing to make purchases on them. At Kohl’s, executives say they have spent the last year and a half updating their app, in part to accommodate an in-store shopper who is more frequently searching for product reviews, watching video content about merchandise and sharing their finds on social media. When customers are in Kohl’s stores and on the retailer’s Wifi network, customers spend more time on the app than when they’re not in the store, company officials said. These behaviors have led Kohl’s to develop a new “in-store mode” for its app, in which users who walk into a Kohl’s store will be asked if they want to use a special version that is tailored for wandering the store. Kohl’s declined to say how the in-store mode will be different from its regular app experience, but said it would be available in September. Big-box behemoth Target is also catering to shoppers who are using their phone to guide them through stores with a relaunched app that has a stronger emphasis on a tool that helps them building their weekly shopping list and an interactive map of each store in its fleet. It’s easy to see why the company has moved in this direction: Since it installed free WiFi in its stores a few years ago, Target has found that the most-visited site, by far, is the retailer’s own Web site. This enthusiastic embrace of in-store phone use might have seemed unthinkable in corners of the retail industry only a few years ago, when many brick-and-mortar chains were panicking about showrooming, the industry term for when shoppers would go to a store to check out merchandise, only to ultimately buy it online for a better price. But that fear has largely dissipated as study after study has shown showrooming is not a huge threat. In fact, several studies have found that the opposite behavior -- browsing online before buying in a physical store -- is more common.



• As Google and Microsoft push app developers to reveal their content, coders balk at making apps searchable: The giants of the Web have been pressing developers of mobile apps to index their content so it can be parsed by search engines or linked to from other sites. That’s already possible with most Web pages, thanks to pieces of embedded code known as deep links. Imagine a future in which a Google search for a “tulle mini” would call up results from Wish, a fashion app, along with links to e-commerce sites. A Facebook user who wanted to share a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies from the Yummly app would be able to post a link that would take viewers to the relevant page instead of forcing them to download the app first. So far, the effort has been a bit like herding cats: Only a few thousand apps—a tiny fraction of the millions out there—have adopted the competing tech protocols that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are pushing. Google’s pitch to developers is that deep links benefit them by driving more traffic to their apps. The company says traffic on the Yellow Pages and Etsy apps increased by 8 percent and 12 percent, respectively, after they began using Google’s indexing. Rajan Patel, a principal engineer at Google, says more than 1,000 apps—mainly those designed for its Android mobile operating system but also some for Apple’s iOS—use its deep linking. “To us, the main advantage that we see coming from this is removing friction—not having to find the app on your phone and fire it up,” says Atul Kakkar, principal product manager at Eventbrite, a website that helps people publicize and sell tickets to yoga classes, tech conferences, and other happenings. The company plans to start indexing its app to enable Google searches. Some developers have resisted using deep links because it’s costly and laborious to create separate code for each mobile platform. (Android and iOS are the predominant ones.) Inserting the links eats up as much as 5 percent of the time it takes developers to build an app, says Alex Matjanec, managing partner at AD:60, a New York-based ad agency that creates apps for clients.


• YouTube's Top Advertisers Increased Their Spending by 60% in Q2: Google's second quarter earnings report today, the tech giant revealed that YouTube viewership is growing faster than it has in two years, and advertiser money is following. YouTube's mobile users averaged 40 minutes per session during Q2, which represents a 50 percent increase year over year while ultimately helping the Mountain View, Calif.-based player beat Wall Street expectations. The number of advertisers rose 40 percent year over year on the video platform, while the average spend of YouTube's top 100 advertisers rose 60 percent. Google does not break out how much revenue YouTube generates, but executives were clearly satisfied with the performance. There are more 18- to-49-year-olds on YouTube than there are consumers who watch cable TV, Porat said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday January 23

• Amazon buys an Israeli chip startup for $350-370M; Annapurna Labs makes chips optimized for the cloud business: (More coverage here and here) Amazon agreed to acquire Israeli semiconductor company Annapurna Labs, seeking to improve performance within its Amazon Web Services cloud unit. A deal has been reached but hasn’t yet closed, said Mary Camarata, a spokeswoman at Amazon Web Services. She declined to comment on the terms. Acquisition talks were reported earlier by Israeli newspaper Calcalist, which said the purchase price could be as much as $370 million. Annapurna Labs develops microprocessors that allow fast data traffic for power-efficient computing and storage servers, according to the newspaper. Seattle-based Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is constantly seeking to improve the cost and performance of the equipment in its data centers and has been hiring more semiconductor engineers to add to its capabilities, James Hamilton, a vice president of Amazon Web Services, said in a November interview. The unit rents out computing power on its servers to businesses for access through the Web.

• Google is gearing up to sell wireless service directly to customers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), by acquiring excess network capacity from Sprint and T-Mobile and reselling it to customers under its own brand. This is the same approach used by Cricket Wireless, MetroPCS, Pure Talk, Republic Wireless and many others in the U.S., but Google’s arrangement apparently required special consideration, according to The Wall Street Journal, given the potential threat network providers perceived in giving the search giant and Android maker too much control. Sprint built a volume clause into their agreement with Google, per WSJ, which triggers if the Google wireless service acquires a large number of users and lets Sprint renegotiate the terms of the deal. There’s no word on how T-Mobile’s arrangement works, but given comments about the U.S. carrier by its parent company Deutsche Telekom, the provider is probably looking for ways to shore up the sustainability of its prolonged “Uncarrier” campaign. More analysis here: What is Google planning? The company hasn't confirmed anything, but reports suggest that Google wants to offer its own brand of cellular service by partnering with Sprint and T-Mobile, the nation's third- and fourth-largest carriers, respectively. This means you'd buy minutes and data from Google, but it would all ride over the other two companies' pipes. Is this like Google Fiber for cellphones? Not quite. With Google Fiber, Google is connecting homes to high-speed fiber-optic infrastructure that, in many places, the search giant laid down itself. But in this case, it doesn't appear that Google is building its own cell towers; it would simply resell Sprint and T-Mobile under the Google banner. Would this shake up the wireless industry? Google probably hopes so, but unlike the wired broadband industry that Google Fiber has been so successful at disrupting, the wireless industry is actually fairly competitive already. You have four major national carriers that are engaged in a major battle over pricing and customers right now. You also have dozens if not hundreds of smaller carriers who operate on the same basis as Google's rumored plan — paying the national carriers a wholesale rate and then repackaging the service into a different product. These piggyback carriers are called MVNOs, short for mobile virtual network operators. Why would Google want to become a wireless provider? If there's one thing driving Google, it's a thirst for your commercial data. Think about all the data generated by your Google searches that gets scooped up and used for advertising. Now think about all the data you generate when you place a phone call: whom you're calling, for how long, what time of day and so on. This information is incredibly personal and can be used to help build a profile of you — which, if you'll recall, is partly why everyone was so outraged when they found out about the National Security Agency's snooping into phone records. Then there's the business information Google can collect about which data plans people find most attractive and how they use those plans. And naturally, all of Google's handsets would likely run on Android, so there's that software integration.

• Box prices IPO - implied valuation of $1.6B, 33% discount to last funding as Box struggles to rise from storage play to platform play: (More here) Box Inc. is set to price its initial public offering at a discount to its latest financing round, as stiff competition overshadows the cloud-storage company’s plans to expand into new areas. The IPO comes almost a year after Box, which lets businesses manage, store and have access to data over the Web instead of through onsite computers, first filed to go public. The company’s financials in its March prospectus underwhelmed some investors just as deep-pocketed competitors including Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) were entering the fray, and the IPO was delayed. Ten months later, Box’s losses have narrowed as revenue surged 70 percent in the most recent quarter, and the company is offering new services that could help it retain and increase its customer base. The company, led by 29-year-old Aaron Levie, is still valuing itself below the level it fetched in a July private-financing round, betting the combination of its turnaround plan and cheaper price will lure buyers. “Investors are either going to have to buy into that story that they can diversify their business, or that this is coming cheap and that there will be consolidation,” said James Gellert, the president and chief executive officer of Rapid Ratings International Inc., which uses quantitative models to grade securities. Box, based in Los Altos, California, is seeking as much as $163 million from the IPO, scheduled to price Jan. 22. It is offering 12.5 million shares for $11 to $13 apiece, according to a Jan. 9 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Those terms indicate a valuation as high as $1.6 billion, reflecting a 33 percent discount to the $2.4 billion Box was valued at during a private round by investors including TPG Capital and Coatue Management LLC. The market for file sharing and synchronization software is forecast to grow 23 percent a year on average to $2.3 billion in 2018, market researcher IDC said in a report looking at 2013. The enterprise side of the market, where Box fits, is growing slightly faster at 27 percent a year. Box had 14 percent share in the overall market, behind Dropbox Inc. with 27 percent and Microsoft with 17 percent. The challenge for Box, said IDC’s Maureen Fleming, is that Microsoft has been dropping prices for its OneDrive and including it free for customers who are signing up to use its Office apps online. That means many corporate customers decide to at least try OneDrive, curbing Box’s growth rates. Fleming regards Box as superior to OneDrive for companies looking for cloud-based systems but said product quality doesn’t always matter to chief information officers in the market for software. In response to those price wars, Box has created ancillary services on top of storage to differentiate its offerings. They include programs to help companies to build custom applications as well as security features that can be customized. The company also has a consulting arm, which helps customers navigate its services. Said Eli Lilly CIO Mike Meadows: “They are doing the right things and saying the right things,But we haven’t come across the use case that would drive us using them in more of platform mode rather than just a storage mode.”

• Reddit's Pick for New Ad Leader Shows the Site Is Getting Serious About Mobile Hires Zubair Jandali away from Google. The company hired Zubair Jandali from Google, who started this month as Reddit's first vp of sales. Jandali had been with Google since 2009 when the company bought ad network AdMob, where he also worked. His hiring is yet another sign Reddit is serious about developing a mobile advertising presence. Reddit recently bought Alien Blue, the app that lets readers access Reddit on mobile, to hone a more sophisticated approach to smartphones and tablets. Alien Blue is Reddit's first in-house app. Now, it has a vp of sales with experience in mobile advertising to go along with the product. "Mobile is definitely one big area of investment for the company, so my background certainly plays into that," Jandali said in a phone interview this week. Reddit offers brands two ways to advertise on its site, which reaches 150 million people a month: banners and sponsored headlines. Headlines are the items that users and brands post to Reddit, and users can vote up or down on whether they like them. The user-submitted headlines that accumulate the most positive votes rise to a higher position on the page, but brands pay for top placement. There are over 8,000 "active" user-generated groups on the site called subreddits dedicated to different categories; they can attract fans of brands, movies, science fiction or just about any interest you can imagine. Advertisers can target a subreddit or buy ads on the front page of the site, which gets 50 million views a day, Jandali said. For instance, on Wednesday TBS promoted a headline on reddit.com at the top of the page for the show King of the Nerds. Jandali said visitors who click on sponsored headlines can spend up to five minutes in the posts. Jandali reports to CEO Ellen Pao, who took the role after a shake-up late last year that saw the exit of the former CEO and the return of co-founder Alexis Ohanian to board chairman. The ad sales teams are based in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

• Twitter pleads with power users not to use Instagram: Twitter appears to be sending out a message to a group of very high-profile users suggesting that these users post photos directly to Twitter instead of sharing through Instagram. Mashable secured a screenshot of the prompt, which shows the aesthetic differences between sharing an Instagram link and posting a photo directly through Twitter. In 2012, Instagram shut off Twitter Cards integration, meaning that the images would no longer appear in-line on the Twitter feed. Instead, Instagram photos shared out to Twitter would simply show as an Instagram.com link and push the user to the website for viewing. At the time, many people were upset that Instagram would interfere with the user experience for Twitter. It’s also worth noting that parent company Facebook has always displayed and still proudly shows Instagram images right in the feed. The original backlash over Instagram shutting down Twitter integration has long been forgotten, and in many ways, Instagram has won. In December, Instagram announced that it had surpassed 300 million active users, surging past Twitter’s 284 million active users. Twitter, which is older than Instagram, has struggled to keep up with the young gun in the media department. Twitter has released countless updates to the web product and the mobile apps to try to bring more attention to images and videos. It added a tab under user profiles to view media only, and put more focus on images that are used on profiles, like the addition of the Facebook-style header image and the now-larger profile photos. The company also added photo filters and editing tools long ago to deal with Instagram’s exodus from the feed in 2012. This latest message from Twitter to its mega-users, asking them to post photos from the app itself, only shows the severity of that struggle as consumers hungrily consume more and more multimedia content.

• Button, a mobile start-up, looks to deep link apps with commerce: It took years for the web to become what it is today: a sprawling, interconnected network of sites endlessly linking back and forth to one another. It will likely take years for the same thing to happen to smartphone applications, which are mostly stuck in silos, disconnected from one another. One New York-based start-up believes it can help speed that process. “The mobile app world is so very fragmented that for users, it makes interactions between apps much more difficult than they should be,” said Michael Jaconi, chief executive of Button, which announced a $12 million round of venture financing on Thursday morning. “Our thesis is, can we connect the mobile economy in a smarter way?” Button’s value proposition is largely technical: The company wants to create the plumbing behind what’s known as deep-linking between apps that make sense to be connected. So for example, if a customer books a table at a restaurant using Resy, a restaurant reservation app, Button could suggest you book a ride to the restaurant using Uber, the ride-hailing service, and link the customer directly to the Uber app to request a ride. That connection may come with a commerce-based incentive — say, a $30 credit toward an Uber ride. Button makes its money based solely on the amount of traffic it drives to its app partners. The idea, Mr. Jaconi said, is similar to what Google did for search more than a decade ago. When a user wants to find something specific, they type in a search query and Google serves up a list of suggestions, along with a series of advertisements. Google has made billions capitalizing on what technologists call the moment of intent — that is, the exact time when a person wants to see a paid advertisement. Button believes it can pinpoint that moment of intent inside apps, a problem that Google has yet to crack. “The future, we think, is one where we’re no longer living in a world of typing, but rather in a world of taps,” Mr. Jaconi said. “Using your phone, we’ll be able to infer what you want to do next based on your location, the time of day, the context of the other apps you’re using.” “It’s increasingly difficult for app developers to rise above the noise and acquire users, and then re-engage these users over time,” said Chris Moore, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm that led Button’s recent funding round. “Button enables a new channel for user acquisition and engagement.” Button is not the only company taking on deep app links. Facebook wants its deep-linking solution, announced last year, to become the standard for developers. And start-ups like Branch Metrics, URX and Quixey offer different approaches to the same problem as well.