Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 23

• Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face: For years, there has been a limit to the success of American technology companies in China. Capture too much market share or wield too much influence, and Beijing will push back. Apple has largely been an exception to that trend. Yet the Silicon Valley company is now facing a regulatory push against its services in China that could signal its good relations in the country may be turning. Last week, Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies were shut down in China, just six months after they were started there. Initially, Apple apparently had the government’s approval to introduce the services. But then a regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, asserted its authority and demanded the closings, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.The about-face is startling, given Apple’s record in China. Unlike many other American tech companies, Apple has succeeded in introducing several new products — like its mobile payments system Apple Pay — in China recently. New resistance from the Chinese government to that expansion could potentially hurt the Cupertino, Calif., company. To a degree more than many tech companies, Apple relies on the smooth operation of its software — including its App Store and services like iTunes, which are tightly integrated with the iPhone and iPad — to keep customers coming back to its devices. Apple, which is facing a slowdown in sales of its iPhones, is also reliant on China for growth, so further moves by Beijing to curtail services could crimp sales. The company counts China as its second-largest market after the United States. Its China numbers will be dissected on Tuesday, when it reports quarterly earnings. China’s pushback against Apple shows that the company may finally be vulnerable to the heightened scrutiny that other American tech companies have faced in recent years. That scrutiny was spurred by revelations from the former United States National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden in 2013 of the use of American companies to conduct cyberespionage for Washington. China has sweeping goals in its move against Apple, said Daniel H. Rosen, founding partner of Rhodium Group, a New-York based advisory firm specializing in the Chinese economy. “They are interested in protecting the content that the Chinese people see, policing its national security and favoring indigenous giants such as Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent,” Mr. Rosen said. In this new era, he added, China “is strongly disinclined to accept the dominance of foreign players on the Internet, not least those from the United States.” Sales in China for those companies, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm, have slid as government oversight has increased. Some have grappled with raids, investigations and fines. Some have also been pressured to sell off holdings, hand over technology and work with local partners to expand their China businesses. Though Apple is one of the eight, it has had a much easier time - so far.

• Dell’s SecureWorks stumbles in first tech IPO of the year: It has been a dry year for tech IPOs. Up until today’s SecureWorks offering, there had been zero in the U.S. in 2016. Zero. This compares to seven in the same period last year and 24 in that timeframe the year before. So tech investors and late-stage private companies were watching SecureWorks closely, to see if the tech IPO window would reopen. It is one of the few indications we have right now to assess public investor appetite for tech IPOs. Unfortunately, SecureWorks faltered.The unicorn-sized security company split from Dell, although the computer manufacturer remains its majority owner. SecureWorks raised $112 million in the offering, after pricing its IPO at $14 per share. But the company was expecting the initial price to be between $15.50-$17.50. SecureWorks closed the day at $13.88, beneath the $14 IPO price. The offering certainly did not assuage concerns about the current environment for tech IPOs.

• Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired for $18 million: Hackbright Academy, the San Francisco-based coding school for women, has been acquired by Capella Education for $18 million as the publicly traded education company looks to expand its efforts to train more women in technical careers.Hackbright, which was started in 2012, has graduated 364 women from its 12-week full-time fellowship programs. Another 279 women have graduated from its part-time program. Capella, meanwhile, is based in Minneapolis and specializes in degree programs for working adults, three quarters of whom are women. The deal closed Friday, the companies said, with all of Hackbright’s 25 employees joining Capella. Hackbright CEO Sharon Wienbar will continue to lead the team, reporting to Gilligan. Hackbright will continue to focus its efforts on in-person trainings exclusively for women, Wienbar said.

• In Asia, Netflix trips on regulation, content, and competition: Months after its global rollout, Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) is facing problems in several major Asian markets as it struggles to provide enough strong content to attract consumers amid tough local competition, and also faces many regulatory hurdles, underlining concerns about disappointing subscriber numbers reported this week. From complaints that programming libraries offered in many countries are far smaller than in the United States to delays in offering its signature "House of Cards" series in some markets due to rights issues, the U.S. video streaming giant's January launch into 130 new markets worldwide, including a slew in Asia, has been bumpy. When it launched in Indonesia in January, for example, Netflix ran afoul of the film censorship board for carrying content deemed inappropriately violent or sexual. The communications ministry also demanded that Netflix set up a local office and pay Indonesian taxes.Netflix is still available in Indonesia via wifi connections and other carriers.In South Korea, where local content is popular and consumers have numerous streaming options, the Netflix site offers fewer than 20 local TV shows or movies."Korean Netflix's library in terms of content is pretty thin," said Jung Dong-yoon, a 29-year-old Seoul office worker and subscriber since January.Netflix had an explosive start in Australia, counting nearly 3 million Australians as viewers, OUT OF A population of 24 million, within nine months of its March 2015 launch. But growth has slowed just as dramatically, from a 55 percent leap between April and May to a rise of 4 percent between September and October, according to Roy Morgan research.

• Tipping Is Coming to Uber, and It’s Going to Be Awkward: Uber's mega settlement of as much as $100 million helps it solve a major legal liability around workforce classification, but another piece of the agreement could make for some uncomfortable situations in the near future. As part of the settlement with drivers in California and Massachusetts, Uber has agreed to notify customers more clearly that tips are not included in fares and give tacit approval for optional gratuity. Drivers can now solicit cash tips by asking passengers or posting signs in their vehicles. Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing the drivers, said riders should start seeing gratuities as a major part of an Uber driver's income. In other words, more like a cabbie. “I believe that, with this information, many riders will begin tipping their drivers, which will increase drivers’ pay substantially,” she said in a statement to the court. In the past, Uber tried to discourage tipping. During the company’s early days, its website said in 2011 that tips were included. Drivers complained that Uber was making its fares seem lower than they really were by rolling in a tip. In any case, they argued that Uber shouldn’t take a cut of the portion of the fare that was classified as a tip. The company eventually changed the way it described the cost of the ride. It currently says there’s no need to tip.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 12

• Apple Watch verdict a year later: Half of those surveyed think it’s a dud: More than half of those surveyed by the advertising technology company Fluent said they considered the Apple Watch a flop. That sentiment — expressed by the majority of the 2,578 adults in the U.S. who responded last week to an online survey — reflects how the device is perceived by the tech press and industry insiders, many of whom have been pessimistic about the Apple Watch from the start. Asked whether they considered the Watch a successful product for Apple, 53 percent responded “no.” But Fluent’s survey also offers a more nuanced picture of Apple’s first wearable device,which launched on April 24, 2015. A significant majority of Apple Watch owners — 77 percent — consider the smartwatch a success and about two-thirds said they plan to upgrade when the next version comes out. Those owners surveyed said they take advantage of a range of the smartwatch’s features, including monitoring their activity and receiving notifications (79 percent), listening to music (75 percent) and checking email or chat (66 percent). This survey supports the more comprehensive findings of Wristly’s “Pulse on Wristware,” released earlier this year. The research group, which surveys some 2,500 smartwatch and fitness band owners every week, says that despite some views of the Apple Watch as a “mediocre novelty,” it enjoys “astoundingly high customer satisfaction ratings.”

• Israel to Levy New Taxes on Google, Facebook in Policy Shift: Israel has expanded its definition of who must pay taxes on commerce, targeting digital multinationals such as Facebook Inc. and Google that critics say get a free ride. Because much of today’s trade is carried out on the Internet, a foreign firm may now be considered a “permanent establishment” and subject to tax even if most of its presence is virtual, the Israel Tax Authority said in an e-mailed statement. The authority said Internet multinationals will be required to pay value-added tax, which is 17 percent for Israelis. The new taxes, which take effect immediately, will eventually add hundreds of millions of shekels a year to state revenue, the authority said. A Google representative in Israel couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Facebook “pays taxes according to the law in every country it operates, including Israel,” a spokeswoman said via e-mail. Although Israel’s relatively small population of 8.5 million means the new taxes won’t clobber the international giants, they build on broader efforts worldwide to level the playing field between foreign Internet companies and local commerce. Russia is pushing to raise taxes on U.S. Internet companies to help its local industry and governments across Europe and beyond are trying to extract more revenue from Google, Apple Inc. and other multinationals with increasingly complex billing and ownership structures.

• Cloud-based video production platform 90 Seconds lands $7.5M Series A led by Sequoia India: Despite the increasing ubiquity of online videos, making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. 90 Seconds wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of the video production process in one place. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Sequoia India. Other investors in this round include pay television provider SKY TV New Zealand, Airtree Ventures, Beenext and Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of stock image agency Fotolia.com. Now based in Singapore, 90 Seconds was launched in Auckland in 2010 by CEO Tim Norton after he struggled to find an online video production service for shoots in different places. 90 Seconds started with online production tools before launching its marketplace, which now lists 5,000 video professionals from 70 countries. The company plans to continue adding to the mobile version of its software until clients can manage every part of the production process — from commissioning a video to reviewing footage and uploading to YouTube and social media platforms — on their tablets or smartphones. Timeliness is important for 90 Seconds’ users, who have included Visa, Samsung and Microsoft, because they need to take advantage of trending topics and search terms. More companies are also using the platform to handle longer shoots, like TV spots. Hooking up companies with creators and giving them all the software tools they need to produce a video is how 90 Seconds differentiates from other video production sites (which include Visually, Userfarm and SmartShoot) and also what it hopes will future-proof its business model from new competitors as demand for online videos grows.

• Dell's SecureWorks valued at $1.42 billion in year's first tech IPO: Dell's cyber security unit, SecureWorks Corp, could be valued at up to $1.42 billion in its initial public offering, the first major U.S. listing of a technology company this year. Atlanta, Georgia-based SecureWorks said on Monday its offering was expected to be priced at $15.50-$17.50 per Class A share, raising as much as $157.5 million.  The share issue market worldwide plunged to a seven-year low in the first quarter, more than halving from a year earlier to $106.6 billion, as worries over slowing economic growth kept investors wary, according to Thomson Reuters data. In the past few years, several cyber security firms such as FireEye, Rapid7 and Mimecast have gone public to take advantage of growing investor interest in them after a spate of hacking attacks on companies including major banks and retailers. However, shares of Rapid7 and FireEye, which popped 70-80 percent in their debut, are now trading way below their IPO prices. Mimecast, which jumped 20 percent on its listing day, has also slipped below its offering price. Ritter warned against premium pricing for stocks of cyber security firms, saying that these companies were fighting for market share, which would keep their profit growth muted.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 3

• Snapchat’s new Terms of Service freaked people out because no one reads them: Snapchat updated its Terms of Service last week, and the Internet freaked out a little bit. Some users interpreted changes to mean the company could now hang on to users' private messages, broadcast them publicly and sell them to third parties. The pushback grew so loud that Snapchat took to its blog Sunday to explain itself, saying that private Snaps and Chats are still automatically deleted from its servers once viewed or expired. But, Snapchat said, its new Terms of Service granted the company "broad license" to user content. The company said those clauses are meant to apply to images and videos users share publicly for its "Live Stories" feature, which may be syndicated across other platforms. The new policy was also expanded to account for its Replay feature, which charges users who want to rewatch videos more than once, the blog post said.

• Instagram is jumping into the curation business, too: Over the weekend, Instagram took a page from the playbook of social media competitors and made a curated stream, based around Halloween videos, that pulled together clips submitted by its users. As Twitter and Snapchat have done before it, Instagram used the stream to highlight unique content on its network that users may not catch if they were just scrolling through their own apps. The trend toward curation makes quite a bit of sense. Sure, part of the fun of being on a real-time social network is being able to jump into the stream at any time and get plugged in to whatever's happening at that moment. But that can be overwhelming for new users, and even more experienced ones who want to zero in on a particular topic. On days such as Halloween — where everyone is posting similar videos for comparison — it seems like a smart thing to do to briefly bring the whole network together.

• Dell eyes $10 billion asset sales ahead of EMC merger: Dell Inc is preparing to sell around $10 billion in non-core assets, including software and services, to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy EMC Corp (EMC.N), according to people familiar with the matter. Dell, which will assume $49.5 billion of debt once the merger with EMC is completed, has communicated the plan to credit rating agencies in recent days, the people said on Monday. Assets Dell could sell include Quest Software, which helps with information technology (IT) management; SonicWall, an e-mail encryption and data security provider; back-up solutions unit AppAssure; as well as IT services provider Perot Systems, the people said. The divestitures will not include Dell's hardware assets such as servers, which are crucial in its quest to dominate the large enterprise market through its merger with EMC, as well as compete more effectively with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), the people added.

• Fitbit Crushes Expectations In Q3, But A Follow-On Equity Offering Drags Its Shares Down: Following the bell, Fitbit announced its third-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $409.3 million, and earnings per share using normal accounting methods of $0.19. The company’s adjusted profit totaled $0.24 per share. The results are notably strong. Investors had expected the company to report a far-slimmer $0.10 adjusted per-share profit off of revenue of just $350.97. Shares in the company, however, are sharply lower in after-hours trading, off nearly 9 percent as of the time of writing. What is going on? Despite a smashing quarter, Fitbit’s equity is getting whacked by what, so far as TechCrunch can tell at current tip, is planned liquidity for current shareholders, a newly announced follow-on offering, and legal friction. Starting with the legal point, Jawbone and Fitbit have a legal back and forth going, with the latest news being a counterclaim filed by the former. Fitbit has a pending patent infringement case on the books, but Jawbone has denied all allegations…using the fun word “frivolous.”

• Google Says Chromebooks and Chrome Operating Systems Aren’t Going Away: Rumors of the demise of the Chrome operating system have not just been exaggerated but are simply untrue, Google said on Monday in a rare public response to an earlier report. A report on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal claimed Google is preparing to merge its Chrome OS, which powers the Web-centric Chromebook laptops, with its mobile OS Android. After the story landed, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s SVP who runs both Android and Chrome, pushed back on it, tweeting that the company is “very committed” to the desktop operating system.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 13

• Facebook adds dedicated shopping section in continued move into e-commerce: Facebook Inc (FB.O) wants its users to shop for clothes and other products from their mobile phones without ever leaving its app. In an effort to move further into e-commerce and compete with Amazon Inc’s (AMZN.O) retail offerings, Facebook announced Monday it is testing several ad features that allow users to shop directly through its app. Few users make purchases on mobile phones because it is slow and cumbersome, but Facebook hopes to win over more ad dollars by smoothing the process. Mobile purchases make up less than 2 percent of all retail sales, according to research firm eMarketer. Among the new features are ads that take a user through a specific brand's products without redirecting them to another site. For example, a user who clicks on an ad from a boutique could see an expanded page that displays numerous clothing items. Businesses on Facebook will also be able to display products for purchase directly on their own pages. And users will be able to purchase products directly on Facebook through a “buy now” button that will be more widely available. The 1.5-billion-member social network has also added a new section on its app that takes users directly to a shopping page where they can browse among numerous brands from a select group of small businesses that will gradually expand. “From Facebook’s perspective, they’re addressing a pain point for retailers,” said Catherine Boyle, an analyst at eMarketer. “They will attract serious ad dollars with this offering.”

• Dell buys EMC for $67 billion in largest deal in tech history: Dell announced Monday it had reached a deal to acquire cloud computing giant EMC for $67 billion -- the largest acquisition in the history of the technology industry. The deal signals that Dell believes it is best to go big at a time when many older technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard are paring down and becoming smaller, nimbler companies. Traditionally known as a personal PC-maker, Dell has more recently set its ambitions on the high-tech business world and portrayed itself as an all-in-one provider of equipment and services. Dell and equity firm Silver Lake Partners said in a press release Monday that buying EMC, a major data storage company, broadens its appeal to those lucrative corporate customers. In 2007, Dell returned to run the company he founded and took the company private again in 2013 with backing from Silver Lake Partners. The EMC transaction is expected to close in the “middle of next year,” executives said on a call with analysts Monday morning. It will take time for Dell and EMC to integrate their businesses if the deal closes, Hewitt said. For one, he noted that EMC has carved its niche by offering comprehensive — and not inexpensive — software solutions to businesses, which is where Dell wants to go. But, he noted, Dell's philosophy is deeply rooted in providing cost-efficiency. As Dell has struggled to adapt its PC business for the modern age, EMC has also been under pressure from activist investors to spin off its cloud and virtualization business called VMWare for more than year as its faced heavy competition from flash storage and cloud storage firms. It has also faced pointed questions about its "federated" business structure, which strung together three firms -- its traditional business, VMWare and its software development firm Pivotal. Analysts had formerly counted Dell, as well as HP, Cisco and Oracle, as potential buyers for the firm. 

• SAP third-quarter operating profit beats estimates on mature markets: SAP said third-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose to 1.62 billion euros ($1.84 billion), beating the most optimistic estimate among 14 analysts, with individual estimates ranging from 1.45 billion to 1.59 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters data. Third-quarter total revenue of 4.98 billion euros was slightly ahead of the average expectation of 4.93 billion. Europe's largest software maker said it was sticking to its outlook for the full year for non-IFRS operating profit of 5.6 billion euros to 5.9 billion euros at constant currencies, which represents flat growth to a rise of as much as 5 percent from 5.6 billion euros last year.

• Financing in the Dell-EMC Deal: Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, EMC has negotiated a "go-shop" provision in the preliminary deal that gives it the opportunity to seek out other buyers. Yet analysts say that while the Dell deal may slightly undervalue EMC shares, it's still a good deal. Shares of EMC rose about 1.5 percent during regular trading Monday. While the company will be a private concern after the deal is closed, a portion of its shares will continue to trade publicly. EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC’s prize holding, software maker VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share. EMC’s stock climbed 1.8 percent Monday to $28.35. Dell will add almost $50 billion to its debt load to complete the purchase, people familiar with the matter said, on top of the $11 billion it already is carrying. The combined company will be run by Michael Dell, the chief executive officer of the company he founded and took private for about $25 billion two years ago. He is financing the takeover with his MSD Partners investment vehicle, Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings. He also is using debt, the VMware tracking stock and cash on hand. The deal will combine EMC’s dominance in devices that store data with closely held Dell’s No. 2 position in servers, the powerful machines that help companies handle big computing challenges.

• Implications for the Data Center Business: The deal will help Dell raise its profile in data centers, the modern factories of the digital age that house servers, networking gear and storage systems. EMC had 21 percent of the storage market last year, about twice what Dell had, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While Dell has been outperforming some of its rivals, the company is grappling with sagging demand for personal computers. During the third quarter, overall shipments declined 7.7 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Still, Dell was able to post a small gain of 0.5 percent while larger rivals declined.

• Implications for VMWare: EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. VMware declined 8 percent to $72.27 on Monday amid concern that the creation of a tracking stock will weigh on the company’s valuation. Analysts at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. lowered their target price for VMware to $75 from $95. EMC rival Pure Storage Inc. rose 8.8 percent to $18.06, exceeding its public offering price of $17 for the first time since shares began trading Wednesday.

• Silver Lake Had Explored Sale of Dell’s PC Business Ahead of EMC Deal: Private equity firm Silver Lake, co-owners of Dell, last week approached Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Huawei to explore the possibility of selling off Dell’s personal computing business, sources familiar with the matter told Re/code. But by Monday, Dell proposed to pay a combined $67 billion to acquire the data storage company EMC and its subsidiary VMware in what is the largest proposed technology M&A deal in history. It was not immediately clear if Silver Lake acted alone or if Dell was consulted. It is also unclear if Silver Lake or Dell would continue to explore a sale at this point. The approach comes as the once thriving PC industry grapples with declining sales. That’s partially why none of the parties that were approached engaged further. Nearly half of Dell’s annual revenue come from the PC business, or about $27 billion, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday March 11

• Facebook to give away designs of servers and networking at its Data Centers, Cisco and Dell are feeling the heat: Facebook’s plan to change big computing is moving fast and is attracting more companies to its plans. The company announced on Tuesday that it would give away designs of two crucial elements of its enormous computing centers, both computer servers and networking. These designs and others like them will be offered as products from several other manufacturers, along with a significant amount of supporting software from other companies. Facebook also noted that its designs had saved the company $2 billion in the last three years, compared with using conventional computing equipment. If the new designs become popular, it could mean new pain for the large incumbent computer-hardware makers, like Cisco and Dell, which for several years have faced inroads from open-source software. The Facebook products involve both hardware and software. A Facebook executive said much of the difference in the way Facebook designs computing systems comes from its huge data flows, both internally and from users on desktop computers and mobile phones. While few companies now handle Facebook-heft computation, expectations are for huge loads to become commonplace at many companies. “It’s hardware that better fits the workloads and software,” said Jason Taylor, vice president of computer infrastructure at Facebook. “There are thousands of companies with these needs.” He said the new designs could be interesting to any company spending more than $10 million a year on computing — a not exceptional amount for a large company. The two designs are being open-sourced through the Open Compute Project, which Mark Zuckerberg helped start to lower his costs and catch up with giants like Google and Amazon Web Services in building global computing infrastructures. Open-source projects can help a company like Facebook in a couple of ways. In the design phase of a project, having outsiders examine work can mean unexpected improvements and bug fixes. If the product becomes successful, Facebook gets the benefits of lower prices from higher production. “Supply chains get healthier if there is more demand,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s an advantage” for Facebook. One of the products Facebook is donating to the Open Compute Project is a recently developed networking switch with a modular design that enables smaller switches to create larger ones. Switches are the way data moves between computer servers in a rack, and between the racks inside a data center. Accton, a Taiwanese maker of networking gear, is expected to sell a version of the switch later this year. In addition, two other companies making switching software, Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks, are donating software to the project. Facebook is donating switch management software that it has developed. The other Facebook donation is a new version of a low-power server that uses a special semiconductor from Intel. Up to 192 of the chips can be fit into a single rack of servers at relatively low power consumption but high performance.

• Why does a company with hundreds of billions in cash raise debt? Because it can - Apple has timed the bond market superbly, calling market tops, but at the expense of its bond buyers: Apple Inc., as it turns out, knows the bond market too. The company has an uncanny ability to raise money in debt markets right before interest rates go up. That means buyers are often left with losses. Take the iPhone maker’s $6.5 billion debt sale on Feb. 2. Those notes have already lost more than $230 million of value through Monday. And remember the company’s record-breaking $17 billion bond sale in April 2013, sold just three days before Treasury yields began the biggest two-month surge in a decade? “When they decide to go to market, they’re watching for whenever there’s a potential inflection point forming,” said Jody Lurie, a corporate credit analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia. “They have a feeling that something’s going to happen.” The reason for the decline in Apple’s bonds isn’t a repudiation of the Apple Watch’s success or the company’s ability to come up with new products. Instead, it underscores the risks investors are taking in a market that’s become about the most sensitive ever to moves in U.S. government debt yields. U.S. Treasuries have declined 2.7 percent since the end of January, with notes maturing in more than 15 years falling 8.8 percent, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data. The $2 billion of 30-year notes that Apple sold last month have fallen to 92.2 cents on the dollar from 99.1 cents at issuance. More generally, Apple’s dollar-denominated bonds have lost more than 3 percent since the end of January, compared with 1.8 percent of losses on Bank of America’s index of U.S. investment-grade corporates. With plenty of cash on its balance sheet, Apple certainly doesn’t need to borrow extra money to support its business. Instead, it has the luxury of waiting until yields get so low that the top-rated company would practically be financially irresponsible not to borrow money The company doesn’t even have to use the proceeds to invest in new products or pay back existing debt; Apple can simply funnel the cash raised from bond buyers to boost returns for its stock holders, namely by repurchasing shares. Indeed, as bondholders suffered losses since January, the company’s stock soared more than 8 percent. As yields go lower on all corporate debt, investors are taking a bigger gamble that benchmark rates will stay low for a longer period of time. “Rates are so low that ultimately, what are investors going to get out of it at the end of the day?” Lurie said. On $6 billion of new Apple bonds, nothing but losses so far.

• Google's CFO retires to spend time with family: Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, is retiring to spend more time with his family. Seriously. On Tuesday Mr. Pichette announced the news of his retirement on Google’s social network, Google Plus. Then, in what Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, described as “a most unconventional leaving notice” he tried to convince the cynics that he is, indeed, retiring to spend more time with his family. “We give a lot to our jobs,” he wrote, adding: “And while I am not looking for sympathy, I want to share my thought process because so many people struggle to strike the right balance between work and personal life.” For the last seven years, Mr. Pichette, 52, has been the primary liaison between Google and Wall Street, serving as the search giant’s chief defender against analysts who have been needling the company to do things like spend less money on “moonshots” or give shareholders some of their cash back. In the company’s latest conference call, for instance, he repeatedly defended Google’s speculative investment spending – which range from biotech to self-driving cars – as “disciplined.” He said the company did not have any immediate plans to issue a dividend to shareholders, but also didn’t rule it out. And, for analysts who needed the reassurance, he noted that Google’s stock price “does matter” to its managers. Mr. Pichette’s goodbye letter was touching, adventurous and completely outside the experience of 99 percent of the world’s population. On Google Plus, he wrote that the process that led to his decision to retire began in September. He was watching the sunrise from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro when his wife suggested they continue traveling the world. He replied that it wasn’t time yet – he had too much to accomplish at Google and elsewhere, he wrote. She asked when it would be time. Apparently that time is in a few months, during which Google will search for Mr. Pichette’s replacement, according to a spokesman. “The questions just hung there in the cold morning African air,” Mr. Pichette wrote of his thoughts about retirement from atop Kilimanjaro. There ensued a long mediation on life, children and work (Mr. Pichette said he belonged to the “Fraternity of Worldwide Insecure Overachievers”). “Allow me to spare you the rest of the truths,” he wrote. “But the short answer is simply that I could not find a good argument to tell Tamar we should wait any longer for us to grab our backpacks and hit the road — celebrate our last 25 years together by turning the page and enjoy a perfectly fine midlife crisis full of bliss and beauty, and leave the door open to serendipity for our next leadership opportunities, once our long list of travels and adventures is exhausted.”

• Facebook Finally Lets Its Firehose Be Tapped For Marketing Insights: Twitter’s firehose of tweets has long been offered as a goldmine for businesses trying to understand how to improve or market their products, and now Facebook will allow privacy-safe peeks at its treasure trove, too. Today Facebook launched a new insights product called “Topic Data” in the U.S. and U.K. with the help of brand analytics leader DataSift. Facebook explains that “Topic data shows marketers what audiences are saying on Facebook about events, brands, subjects and activities.” For example, “A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity’s effects on their hair.” On days when everyone’s posting status updates about how frizzy their hair is, a brand could step up its ad spend knowing it’s the perfect time to reach potential customers. Sentiment, location, volume of mentions and words often mentioned alongside a brand can be pulled, too. Because much of Facebook’s data is private, unlike Twitter, offering Topic Data in a privacy-safe way is a top concern and might explain why Facebook waited so long to offer this functionality that brands have been begging for. To ensure personal info isn’t divulged, Topic Data is aggregated and anonymized, so brands can’t know or piece together exactly who said what. Queries that might pull up personally identifiable data like home addresses will be banned. At least 100 different users have to match a query for it to be allowed. Still, the idea that their private status messages to friends will fuel better ad targeting may irk some Facebook users. There’s no opt-out, and the only way to keep data totally private is to either set posts to be visible to “only me” or not post at all. To be clear, this isn’t a brand monitoring tool. It’s not designed to let companies see every mention of their business and try to respond. That wouldn’t work since data is anonymized any way. Brands issue the forward-looking queries through a third-party analytics provider that submits them to DataSift, which can run them against Facebook’s data. DataSift hands the analytics tool back anonymized statistical data about posts that match the query since it was issued that can be formed into charts and insights, or bundled with social analytics from other networks. More examples Facebook gives for how to use Topic Data include: “A fashion retailer could see the clothing items its target audience is talking about to decide which products to stock.” “A brand can see how people are talking about their brand or industry to measure brand sentiment.” When Twitter opened its firehose to this kind of analysis a few years back, it spawned an entire ecosystem of data interpreters, including Adobe Social, Brandwatch, Crimson Hexagon, Socialmetrix and DataSift itself, which was one of only a few companies allowed to sell the full Twitter firehose at one point. Facebook will authorize a limited, undisclosed list of tools it’s already working with to access its firehose through DataSift.

• Alibaba investee Weibo 2014 revenue: $334M, +77%; loss widens to $63.4M; 176 MAU in Dec, +36% Y/Y Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social network, continues to grow – albeit slowly. Weibo ended 2014 with 175.7 million monthly active users (MAUs), which is up 36 percent year-on-year, and up 5.2 percent from Q3 to Q4. Although many have talked about WeChat making Weibo irrelevant, it seems that Weibo is standing its ground against the hugely popular messaging app (WeChat is close to 500 million MAUs) despite a number of areas of overlap between the two social networks. Weibo’s newest data, released overnight as part of the company’s Q4 2014 earnings report, also shows that daily active users (DAUs) are moving upwards slowly. Weibo now has 80.6 million DAUs. As always with Weibo, there are concerns about how many of those users are humans or spambots. So is Weibo, which started in 2009 and received US$586 million in investment from Alibaba in 2013, making any money after five years of operations? Nope. Throughout the whole of 2014, Weibo made $334.2 million in revenue (up 77 percent from 2013’s tally), but that translated into a net loss of US$63.4 million, which is greater than its losses in 2013.