Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, July 26

• Amazon Expands Drone Testing in Britain:  Amazon has partnered with the British government to significantly expand drone testing, a move that could allow the devices to deliver packages to British homes far earlier than in the United States. Under the partnership, Britain’s aviation regulator will let Amazon test several aspects of drone technology — such as piloting the machines beyond the line of sight of its operators — that the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States has not permitted. The tests, which are an important sign of confidence in Britain after its historic vote last month to leave the European Union, are to begin immediately.The move puts pressure on the F.A.A., which had recently rebuffed requests by Amazon, Google and other drone makers to advance their delivery plans. The tech behemoths and other drone makers have aggressively lobbied the F.A.A. to authorize the devices to significantly reduce costs to transport goods by airplane, freight and trucks. Amazon said it hoped success with the drone trials in Britain would encourage more hesitant regulators in the United States and elsewhere to loosen restrictions. The trials will “help identify what operating rules and safety regulations will be needed to help move the drone industry forward,” the company said in a statement. Amazon will work with British regulators to test drones that fly beyond the line of sight of operators in rural and suburban areas. It will also test whether a single operator can safely command multiple drones at once, as well as technology that lets the machines automatically detect and avoid other planes, buildings and people.

• Analyst Downgrades Apple and Says It Has 'Peaked': With Apple Inc's earnings report just a day away, Wall Street analysts are more at oddsthan ever, and one of them in particular anticipates tough times for the tech giant. "Our opinion [is] that Apple has peaked under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook," Colin Gillis of BGC Financial L.P. said in a note this week. "Our view that that there is risk that the upgrade rate for the next iPhone may slow even more than the upgrade rate cycle of 6s, which has been materially lower than the upgrade rate of the iPhone 6 as per the company." However, others disagree and say that while things haven't been great as of late, things will get better next year. "Amid pervasive investor fear and negativity, we see results/guidance as not great but good enough to start swinging the tide from near-term fear to cautious optimism about the future," Timothy Arcuri of Cowen and Company LLC said in a note. "Given our installed base work, we see a "super-cycle" in '17 and iPhone 7 could even sell a little better than bearish expectations." Even Gillis acknowledges that shares could see a move higher after earnings due to the low expectations. After that bounce, though, his pessimism continues. "[W]hen we ask ourselves 'Do we see Apple gaining or losing its next $100 billion of value,' the answer is losing."

• Sprint says to be cash-flow positive next year, shares soar: Sprint Corp (S.N) reported better-than-expected first-quarter revenue as big discounts attracted more postpaid subscribers, and the No. 4 U.S. wireless carrier said it expected to be cash flow positive next fiscal year after breaking even this year. The company's shares surged more than 28 percent to $5.93 on Monday - their biggest intraday percentage gain ever - after it also said it had enough money to fund its business this year. Some analysts and investors had raised questions about Sprint's financial position after majority owner SoftBank Corp (9984.T) agreed earlier this month to buy UK chipmaker ARM Holdings for $32 billion. Sprint had negative cash flow of $3.17 billion in the financial year ended March 31. "We expect that we will have adequate sources to provide all the capital necessary to fund the business and repay the debt maturities due in FY 16," Chief Financial Officer Tarek Robbiati said on a conference call with analysts.Sprint, in which Japan's SoftBank holds a more than 80 percent stake, said its net operating revenue fell marginally to $8.01 billion. Up to Friday's close, Sprint's shares had risen 27.6 percent since the start of the year.

• Investors realize Nintendo didn’t develop Pokémon Go and shares plummet: Nintendo’s shares plunged after the company said late Friday that the worldwide success of Pokémon Go will not significantly impact its financial results. Nothing Nintendo disclosed about the ownership of the game was new information, but markets were shocked anyway. The stock sank 18 percent to 23,220 yen at the close in Tokyo, the maximum one-day move allowed by the exchange, noted Bloomberg. After the drop, Nintendo’s stock remained flat. In morning trading today, the Kyoto-based company’s shares were down $2.36, or 8.14 percent, at $26.64.On Friday, Nintendo put out a statement pointing out that it owns only 32 percent of the voting power of The Pokémon Company, an affiliated company that holds the ownership rights to Pokémon. Nintendo also owns 13 percent of Niantic, the San Francisco-based mobile developer spun out of Google last year who developed and distributed the game. “Because of this accounting scheme, the income reflected on the company’s consolidated business results is limited,” Nintendo wrote in a notice. Also, Nintendo said that “Pokémon Go Plus,” its peripheral device for use with the application, is scheduled for release and it’s already reflected in the financial forecast. Following Pokémon Go’s release in the U.S. at the beginning of July, Nintendo’s market valuation soared to more than $40 billion, passing Sony. 

Daily Tech Snippet: 11 January 2015

• Zuckerberg Plea for Free Web in India Wins Support in Review: A majority of Indians who submitted comments to the nation’s telecommunications regulator said they support Facebook Inc.’s Free Basics plan that would allow free Web access. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that 1.35 million responses in support of the plan -- or 56 percent of all comments -- came from Facebook’s @supportfreebasics.in, according to a report on the agency’s review of different pricing for data services. It received another 544,000 responses from @facebookmail.com, with most backing Facebook’s plan, the regulator said, without providing a percentage. Comments either supporting or opposing differential pricing were “basically template responses" and "identical in nature," the regulator said Saturday on its website, without explaining how the views would be used in the review. The agency’s chief, R.S. Sharma, told The Hindu newspaper in an interview published Jan. 1 that such responses were "not helpful at all" and didn’t represent meaningful input. The regulator has appealed to respondents and Facebook to solicit more detailed opinions. Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers last month for the country to allow a free Internet service. Facebook’s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, health care and employment listings from their phones without a data plan. Industry groups say the program threatens the principles of net neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different websites.

• Aerodrome Is The First Commercial Airport For Drones: Aerodrome is working with the City of Boulder, Nevada, to launch the first commercial drone airport — the Eldorado Droneport. It’s one of only a handful of FAA-appointed UAS test sites in the United States. The plan is to offer training, maintenance and other support functions for the commercial drone industry, as well as for individual drone pilots. The company already operates teaching facilities in Detroit, Michigan and Henderson, Nevada.

• Israel’s Best-Performing Tech Stock Hasn’t Sold a Single Product: Occupying a small, second-floor space in the same office park as 3D printing giant Stratasys, a tiny Israeli upstart is trying to sell investors on a future in which physical objects materialize with the press of a button. Nano Dimension is nowhere near achieving that goal, yet somehow has become Israel’s best-performing technology stock in 2015. While Stratasys lost nearly three-quarters of its value last year, the much smaller Nano Dimension rallied 261 percent. Not bad for a company with no customers or revenue. This little 3D printing shop, with 44 employees and a market cap of 193 million shekels ($49 million), has become a source of hope for Israeli entrepreneurs struggling to secure venture capital. That’s because Nano Dimension took an unorthodox route to raise about $18 million and become a public company, while managing to avoid the long, costly process of an initial public offering.  Nano Dimension found its way onto the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange using what’s known as a reverse merger. This involves a private company taking over a public one, bypassing the formalities of an IPO. “We’re selling shares like any other public company,” said Amit Dror, the chief executive officer of Nano Dimension. “It’s just that it happens to be that our case is a public company that’s pre-revenue.”

• China Setting Up Fund for Its Electronics Industry:  A Chinese technology regulator said on Friday that it would cooperate with a bank to set up a $30 billion fund to support the country’s huge electronics supply chain. The creation of the new fund underscores China’s ambitions to expand its tech capabilities and also signals how those ambitions are being threatened by slowing growth and recent market turmoil. Official accounts of the fund did not make clear precisely how the money would be spent. But given the recent weakness in Chinese manufacturing and lower-end electronics manufacturers, it may be intended as a form of stimulus to the tech industry. The terminology used in media accounts signals China’s bold technology ambitions. Reports about the new fund said it would be used to build a “strong manufacturing country” and an “Internet power.” A report in state-run media said the fund was created to address problems faced by small and medium enterprises that have come under pressure or folded recently because of a lack of funding. The report made reference to recent factory closures, specifically pointing out the closing in October of Fu Chang Electronic Technology, a supplier to the telecom equipment makers Huawei and ZTE. The fund will be created through a partnership between an industry group controlled by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ping An Bank. Signaling the importance of the initiative, the signing ceremony was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, which is often used to host visiting dignitaries, and was attended by representatives of many of China’s largest technology companies, including Lenovo and Alibaba, according to an official release. The new fund seems to resemble a separate multibillion-dollar fund, announced in 2014, to provide financing and enable acquisitions to increase the size and sophistication of the country’s semiconductor industry.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 11

• Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience: Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers. Now the company plans to start making money from the vast number of people who are not signed in to the service but may click on a tweet they find through a web search or that is sent to them via email or text — an audience Twitter estimates at more than 500 million people worldwide. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said it has begun showing advertising to some of those casual viewers when they click on the link to a tweet or visit a Twitter user’s profile page. About 60 advertisers are participating initially, with the ads, known as promoted tweets, aimed at people in the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia. But the program, which has been in development for more than a year, is expected to ramp up quickly. These ads, which will be on the desktop web version of Twitter at first, won’t be quite as finely targeted as typical Twitter ads, relying on context, like other pages people have recently browsed, for targeting. Twitter estimates that each of these “logged out” users could be worth $2.50 a year to advertisers, compared with about $4 a year for active users. Wall Street, which has been focused mostly on Twitter’s lack of growth in active users, sees lots of potential in the program, and Twitter’s stock rose almost 7 percent on Thursday.

• GoPro's First Drone, Due Out in 2016, Will Be Called 'Karma': GoPro recently said it will debut its first drone in early 2016, and now the company has announced the brand name—Karma. On Wednesday, the company made the revelation by pushing a one-minute YouTube teaser. The video is a cut-up of the unbranded two-minute clip that GoPro uploaded to the video site on Oct. 28, when it originally disclosed its latest hardware. The longer spot has garnered nearly 4 million views since then. There's not much information about the drone—in terms of what it looks like or how much it will cost—in the video or on its dedicated website. But developing and marketing the product makes a lot of sense since so many GoPro enthusiasts have been attaching the high-def camcorders to drones made by other hardware companies. There are literally thousands of videos from such productions on YouTube.  

• Facebook to Publish Designs for `Big Sur' AI Computer Hardware: Facebook’s use of artificial intelligence, which ranges from tools for image recognition to the filtering of the news feeds for its social network, demands special computing infrastructure. The company recently began building custom servers for its artificial intelligence workload and Thursday announced it would release the designs for that powerful hardware to the world -- for free. The company said the plan to open-source the blueprints of the servers -- called “Big Sur” -- would help other companies and researchers benefit from the incessant tweaking of Facebook’s developers. This follows  Google’s release last month of a software tool for building AI systems named TensorFlow. The servers are built around graphical processing units from Nvidia Corp. GPUs are widely used in artificial intelligence because the chips have far more individual processing cores on them than traditional processors produced by Intel Corp., making them adept at the dumb-but-numerous calculations required by AI software.

• Wal-Mart adds to mobile wallet frenzy with 'Walmart Pay': Wal-Mart launched its own mobile payment service Walmart Pay on Thursday, potentially dealing a sharp blow to the ambitions of a mobile wallet the company had been co-developing with a consortium of retailers. The mobile payments space in the U.S. has seen a flurry of new launches and partnerships in the past year but has failed to gain traction as customer and merchant adoption have been sluggish. CurrentC - whose developers included Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy among others - was likely to prove strong competition to Apple's Apple Pay because it was developed as a single payment solution that could be used at many retailers and integrate their loyalty programs. But years of delay, a data breach and management changes hurt its prospects. An increasingly bigger worry for CurrentC is the end of its exclusive partnership with most of its members, which means they can now accept other mobile payment options at their stores. A survey released by data firm InfoScout found Apple Pay use to be at its lowest rate since the firm started tracking it. Shoppers used it this past Black Friday for only 2.7 percent of eligible transactions.

• Rovio’s CEO Steps Down After Just Over a Year: Last August Pekka Rantala took over the role of Rovio CEO from co-founder Mikael Hed, but just over a year later he’s already stepping down. He’s to be replaced by Kati Levoranta, former chief legal officer for the Angry Birds maker. Rantala says that “I feel now the time is right for me to step aside and move on to new challenges.” Despite being in the role for a relatively short period, Rantala presided over a tumultuous time for the game developer. Last October the company laid off 130 employees, and followed that up with 260 more job cuts in August, more than 30 percent of its workforce. The initial, unexpected success of Angry Birds caused the company to expand in many directions, yet it never managed to follow up Angry Birds with another big hit.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

• Holiday Shopping Is Chilly for ‘Buy’ Buttons at Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest: More than a year after Twitter and Facebook began placing Buy buttons on their social networks, their e-commerce initiatives still appear to be relegated to experimental side projects. And at Pinterest, the tech platform that many believe is most conducive to e-commerce, one of its mainstream launch partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day via so-called Buyable Pins. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Facebook and Twitter, and tepid early results at Pinterest, highlight the myriad challenges all three platforms face in transforming their immense user bases into shoppers. The sluggishness of the combined efforts also serves as a warning to other industry players betting big on the idea of social commerce that it’s still unclear if consumers will make purchases in big numbers on platforms that aren’t mainly retail destinations. Spokespeople for the three companies declined to disclose sales numbers for these initiatives. While each platform had its own reasons for pursuing e-commerce initiatives, the central idea was that they thought there was an opportunity to make it easier for their users to buy a product when they discover it on the platform. In theory, the usefulnesses of such a feature would be the biggest on mobile phones, where clicking through to make a purchase on another site can make purchases less likely because of uneven mobile webpage experiences. Facebook was the first to take a crack. Sixteen months after Facebook first began testing Buy buttons on ads and regular posts to let people purchase products they discover on Facebook without leaving Facebook, the initiative is still being dubbed a beta test, restricted solely to online merchants who work with e-commerce software provider Shopify. The company has also recently added purchase capabilities to some Facebook business pages and to a dedicated shopping section of Facebook, but these features, too, are being characterized as “tests” that aren’t available to all Facebook users in the U.S. At Twitter, it’s still unclear how big of a priority e-commerce will be going forward under the leadership of new CEO Jack Dorsey. The company began placing Buy buttons in tweets in September of 2014, and struck partnerships in October of this year with software partners such as Bigcommerce and Stripe to get more merchants on board. Best Buy, for example, will soon join the program — just not in time for the just-passed Black Friday weekend. But regular Twitter users can still go weeks without seeing any tweets enabled with e-commerce; most Re/code colleagues I polled, who are absolute Twitter power users, said they never come across them at all. Then there’s Pinterest, the massive tech platform that retailers were most excited about for its e-commerce potential. The company began inserting Buyable Pins into its iPhone app in late June, and just added the feature to its Android app in early November. The company says more than 10,000 merchants have joined the program, including big retailers and brands like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Tory Burch, but at least one of these big partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day on Pinterest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the sales figures. This source and another also said that Pinterest insiders have privately admitted to being disappointed with early sales numbers.

• AppDynamics Raises $158M; Now Valued At $1.9 Billion: Last month, based on an SEC filing, we told you that seven-year-old, San Francisco-based AppDynamics had raised a fresh $83.4 million in funding as part of a round that was targeting up to $150 million. Turns out the company met that target and then some. CEO David Wadhwani — who joined the firm in September after spending more than a decade as an executive at Adobe, including as its digital chief — says the company has just closed on $158 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital. Other participants in the round include Adage Capital, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Cross Creek Advisors, as well as earlier backers Institutional Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. AppDynamics makes software to monitor the performance of business applications, competing with some traditional firms like IBM, as well as younger outfits like New Relic, which went public last December and has seen relatively steady stock performance since. (New Relic, which raised $214 million in venture funding, has a current market cap of $1.8 billion.) AppDynamics had previously raised roughly $206 million in debt and equity, including a $120 million round — $70 million equity and $50 million of debt — that closed in July of last year. At the time of the funding announcement, the company told VentureBeat that the money represented “pre-IPO growth financing.” Asked today what this new round means, Wadhwani said he “won’t speculate on the exact timing” of an IPO but added, “I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do.” The new funding, he said, “represents freedom. We can [execute on our plans for the company] on this money and effectively choose when we want to go public.” Wadhwani declined to discuss the company’s post-money valuation, but a source close to the company pegs it at $1.9 billion.

• In a Global Market for Hacking Talent, Argentines Stand Out: Want to learn how to break into the computerized heart of a medical device or an electronic voting machine? Maybe a smartphone or even a car? Thanks to the legacy of military rule and a culture of breaking rules of all sorts, Argentina has become one of the best places on earth to find people who could show you how. As Silicon Valley’s talent war has gone global, particularly for those skilled at breaking into things, this Latin American nation has become a rich recruiting ground for corporations and foreign governments. Companies need hackers to help defend against online criminals and state-sponsored spies. And as the world’s critical infrastructure moves online and the threat of war moves into cyberspace, governments are desperate to acquire hackers’ tools. Within Latin America, Brazil has become known in recent years as the world leader in Internet banking fraud. But Argentina’s hackers have a reputation for creativity. In particular, they are known for their ability to find so-called zero-day flaws, which are unpatched holes in widely used technology that can be used to spy on or even destroy adversaries’ computer networks. Technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have encrypted their products and services so that in many cases the only way to monitor a target’s communications is to hack directly into its device. As a result, there is a new urgency among governments in acquiring zero-day exploits. A mix of executives from around the world, government officials, contractors and — or so it was rumored — spies gathered here in October in an industrial building converted into a cultural center to watch hacking done the Argentine way at the 11th annual EkoParty, the largest hacking conference in Latin America. Long before foreign companies came calling, hacking things was a life skill in Argentina, a way to get by through decades of repressive military rule and a volatile economy. Argentines have a saying, “atado con alambre,” which translates roughly as “held together with wire,” to describe the inventive nature of so many here who learned to do much with little. The country still has one foot in the tech industry’s past because of stringent import rules. Amazon will not ship to your door here. BlackBerry has more market share here than Apple. A new iPhone costs $2,000 or more on MercadoLibre, an online auction site, but many iPhone owners said they had been able to persuade a friend traveling from abroad to sneak one through customs. To get their hands on the latest, greatest devices, Argentines often have to think like a hacker — or even become one. “You make do without resources, without high-end technology, with poor Wi-Fi connections,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentine political analyst. “We improvise creative solutions, for lack of other options, and many have applied these same procedures to the technical industry.”

• FAA Permit for Drone Flight School May Help Amazon, Google Speed Up Delivery Plans: The Federal Aviation Administration is plotting how to regulate drones. Tech companies with plans for drones — Amazon, Google, DJI, GoPro and a bevy of others looking to tap a potential multi-billion dollar market — are itching for the FAA to get on with it already. Last week, the agency made a small legal maneuver that advocates hope indicates more leniency to come on the commercial applications of drones. The FAA authorized the Kansas State University Polytechnic campus to train students and outside companies on flying unmanned aircraft. This type of authorization, called a Section 333 exemption, is common; construction sites, news outlets and disaster relief groups have received them. Amazon scored one in April. The notable difference here is in how close the FAA lets drones get to people. Even with flight authorization, drones must stay 500 feet from people, unless the craft meet some stringent safety and logistics requirements. The only exception had been on closed film and TV sets, which deploy drones for movie magic. But the FAA lifted the 500-foot restriction for the Kansas school, even though it didn’t ask for the specific closed-set exemption.

• Target and PayPal Sites Report Problems on Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, is not immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to gain access to the site of Target, the discount chain,and PayPal, the online payments processing service. Both are now back online after an onslaught that reflects the shifting trends in the way consumers are looking for shopping bargains. Foot Locker, Groupon and Victoria’s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns Monday afternoon, according to Catchpoint Systems, a web monitoring firm. In a statement on Monday, Target said it was experiencing its biggest online volumes ever in response to a 15 percent online discount that it had announced previously. Visitors to the site early Monday got a message saying: “Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic’s causing delays. If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP.” According to a statement from Target, the company said it placed online shoppers in a queue in order to manage the volume of users, but it then allowed them to keep trying to gain access by refreshing their browser. A heat map on downdetector.com showed most of the problems with PayPal were reported in North America and Europe. Problems started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. PayPal said in an emailed statement that the “brief, intermittent interruption” in service was resolved. It did not provide a reason. The holiday buying frenzy has evolved over the years as more stores offer sales before and sometimes on Thanksgiving Day. It has also shifted away from physical stores as Americans have increasingly turned to online shopping. For many people, Monday was their first day back at work after the long Thanksgiving weekend, so some shopping was presumably being done surreptitiously while at work.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 30 2015

• Thanksgiving Final Results – OmniChannel Strikes Back: This morning we are releasing the final results from Thanksgiving 2015. What stands out is the Omnichannel players with stores and online marketplaces (Best Buy, Sears, etc.) did extremely well.  This indicates that these ‘Brick and Clicks’ retailers were really able to tie their store and online promotions together with great success. This data is date-shifted to compare Thanksgiving this year  (Nov 26) vs. last year (Nov 27).  In summary, Thanksgiving 2015 blew the doors off, coming in at 43.4% y/y growth compared to 20.1% last year – more than twice the rate of growth.  The trick is while we know that Thanksgiving 2015 was very strong, we don’t know if this will continue through the entire Cyber Five and through all of Holiday 15, or if consumers are shopping much earlier than last year and will taper off as we get past Thanksgiving.  Omnichannel marketplaces led the pack with Google Shopping and Amazon also outperforming. From a device perspective, Smartphones were 58% of traffic compared to last year’s Thanksgiving 35% and a new high water mark for this device type in our data.  From an order perspective, smartphone came in at 37% which was also more than double last year, although conversion rates continue to lag desktop and tablet considerably. Conclusion: consumers not only increased their Thanksgiving sales, but they utilized their smartphones heavily and favored omnichannel retailers.

• Kobe Bryant Takes NBA Retirement News to Twitter, Not TV. Chris Sacca Is Pumped: On Sunday, outgoing NBA star Kobe Bryant opted not to make his expected retirement announcement on broadcast TV. Instead, he went for social media, posting his retirement poem on Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. It links to Players Tribune, a site for athletes from fellow superstar Derek Jeter, which subsequently crashed after the Kobe post. It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook’s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over “lack of sex.”)It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook’s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over “lack of sex.”)

• Amazon releases video showcasing unmanned delivery drones:  Amazon has unveiled what its unmanned drones for package delivery would look like with a video launched on Sunday on the prototype of technology it announced two years ago. The promotional clip, narrated by television show host Jeremy Clarkson, shows a family receiving in about 30 minutes replacement soccer shoes for the one chewed up by its dog. "In time, there will be a whole family of Amazon drones. Different designs for different environments," Clarkson says. The video shows the box containing the shoes ordered by the family fitting seamlessly into the body of the drone. It then rises vertically, in helicopter style, for nearly 400 feet, according to Clarkson, after which it assumes a horizontal orientation, flying like an airplane. Clarkson said the drone in the clip could fly for 15 miles. It was equipped with what he called "sense-and-avoid technology" to sense, then avoid, obstacles in its path. The video shows the drone approaching its targeted landing spot, dropping the package, then taking off again, presumably to return where it came from. The launch of the video appeared to be timed ahead of "Cyber Monday", one of the biggest shopping events for electronics retailers. Amazon did not say when it hoped to have the drones in service.

• Judge Dismisses Yelp Suit Brought by Shareholders: Yelp won the dismissal of a lawsuit by shareholders who claimed they had been fraudulently misled about the authenticity and quality of its reviews, and who accused Yelp of manipulating those reviews to favor paying advertisers. In a Nov. 24 decision, United States District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar in San Francisco said reasonable investors would understand that not all Yelp reviews are real, particularly given the company’s admission that its technology to screen user-generated content is not foolproof. In April, Judge Tigar dismissed an earlier version of the complaint, which sought class-action status. He said the plaintiffs could not sue again because any amendment would be “futile.” Yelp lets users rate restaurants and other businesses on a five-star scale. Positive reviews can bolster sales and negative reviews can harm sales, especially if viewers perceive the reviews as unbiased. Shareholders led by Joseph Curry accused Yelp of inflating its share price by falsely promoting the reliability of its reviews, as part of a calculated strategy to extort businesses into buying ads or making payments in exchange for removing bad or fake reviews. But the judge said only 11 of the complaints accused Yelp of offering to manipulate reviews in exchange for fees, a small number.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 24

• The U.S releases draft regulations for drones: Proposed Regulations for Drones Are Released in the US: On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. The government already has rules that limit the use of drones for commercial purposes, like delivering packages. But attention has turned to recreational use more recently, as drones, many of them the size of a laptop computer, have emerged as a must-have item for thousands of people. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, has estimated that 400,000 drones will be sold this holiday season in the United States.

• Deliveroo, an On-Demand Food Delivery Service, Raises $100 Million: On Monday, Deliveroo, an on-demand food delivery service based in London, announced that it had raised $100 million from investors, including DST Global, an early backer of Facebook, to help push the service into new markets, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. In total, the start-up has now raised roughly $200 million since its creation in 2012. Just about four months ago, Deliveroo raised $70 million to expand beyond its British roots. The company provides a one-size-fits-all offering for nontech savvy restaurants that includes food packaging, delivery drivers and other support so individuals can order the restaurants’ food through smartphones. As part of the new fund raising, Deliveroo expects to branch out into highly populated cities across Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore. Mr. Shu said there were no plans in the short term to offer the service in the United States, though the start-up now operates in 50 cities in 12 countries, primarily in Europe. While online food delivery companies like GrubHub and Just Eat, its European counterpart, have allowed people to order food through smartphones for years, a new generation of start-ups like Deliveroo are trying to extend that offering to restaurants that do not have their own delivery logistics. That group includes Delivery Hero, based in Berlin, which also offers a fleet of drivers and other logistical support to restaurants looking to expand into online orders. Delivery Hero is valued at $3.1 billion and operates across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Other tech companies, including Uber, the ride-booking service, now offer similar products. Yet for Mr. Shu of Deliveroo, these rivals are only a small fraction of his overall competition, which also includes people cooking for themselves at home and traditional restaurants.

• Amazon Makes Holiday Shopping Season Tough for Target and Walmart: Neither Target nor Walmart needed a reminder about the distance between their online businesses and Amazon’s. Their third-quarter sales numbers provided it anyway. Walmart’s online sales grew just 10 percent in the third quarter, slower than the 15 percent industry average, while Target’s grew 20 percent, well below the company’s stated goal of 30 percent, the companies announced last week. These numbers might not spell all-out trouble if it weren’t for Amazon’s performance during the same period: The company’s electronics and general merchandise business — basically the core of its retail operation — grew 35 percent in North America in the quarter, marking the segment’s highest growth rate in several years. The third-quarter headwinds of the traditional retailers coupled with Amazon’s momentum makes this e-commerce holiday season an even more critical one for Walmart and Target. It doesn’t help that Amazon’s huge logistics investments over the last few years mean it can flex its muscles the most during the holiday with its arsenal of express shipping capabilities when customers are often looking for last-minute gifts. If Walmart and Target going to close the gap, now has to be the time. But history isn’t on their side.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

• Singapore Post, Like Amazon, Tests Package Delivery by Drone: Singapore Post Ltd. is testing package delivery by drone, echoing attempts by Amazon.com Inc. to extend the commercial capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The company known as SingPost said a drone it developed with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore carried a packet containing a letter and T-shirt on a five-minute, two-kilometer (1.2 miles) flight. This marks the first time any postal service has successfully used a drone for “point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery,” it said in a statement Thursday. SingPost is looking to such unmanned aircraft as online transactions increase in the Asia-Pacific region and as Singapore plans to develop itself into a so-called Smart Nation through technology usage. There is “immense potential” in drone technology for last-mile mail and e-commerce delivery, Bernard Leong, SingPost’s head of digital services, said in the statement.

• An Amazon Rival, Jet.com, Eliminates Its Membership Fee: Just three months after its introduction, Jet.com, the much-hyped rival to Amazon and Costco, has done a 180-degree turn in its business model by making its members-only shopping club freely accessible. On Wednesday, Jet said it would eliminate its $50 annual membership fee, but continue to provide better prices on items, along with high-quality customer service and free shipping on orders of more than $35, among other benefits. The about-face raises questions of whether Jet was struggling to gain the traction it needed to expand its business. But Marc Lore, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said. While eliminating a membership fee may help expand Jet.com’s customer base, the move could diminish the company’s chances of turning a healthy profit. Mr. Lore had raised more than $200 million from investors to fund the site. In an interview with The New York Times, he had predicted that the company would take five years to grow to a point where it was not losing money on every shipment. The $50 membership fee would have been a major revenue stream contributing to Jet’s profit. Now Jet’s revenue will rely on raking in commissions on sales from retailers. Discounts for customers come from what Jet calls Smart Cart savings, which let shoppers lower costs by adding more products to their shopping carts, resulting in orders that are more efficient and cheaper to fulfill.

• Amazon Seeks Cloud Computing Growth With New Data Products: Amazon Web Services announced products Wednesday that give businesses new ways to transfer, manipulate and derive insights from data they store in the company’s cloud. The products span diverse areas of information technology from a business intelligence service named Quicksight, to security systems, to new tools to help people migrate databases from proprietary versions into free ones hosted within Amazon. The company also unveiled a new product, called Snowball, that is a hardware device that lets businesses securely transfer large amounts of data into the Amazon Web Services cloud. And Amazon announced a deal with consulting giant Accenture Plc to focus on corporate customers. The products and services shown at the company’s re:invent customer conference in Las Vegas represent a further expansion by Amazon into competitors’ territories, whether database vendors such as Oracle Corp. or business intelligence companies such as Tableau Software. The effort also keeps the pressure on traditional hardware providers, who are seeing their businesses slow as more of their customers opt for cloud computing offered by Amazon and others. Amazon’s Web Services division generated $1.8 billion in sales in the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarter and almost $400 million in operating profit. The e-commerce company created the AWS division almost 10 years ago, giving it a lead on competitors such as Microsoft, Google  and IBM. that were slow to release their own cloud services. In recent years that has changed. Microsoft is now a major competitor to AWS via its Azure service, and companies like Oracle are converting more applications to run in the cloud.

• Snapdeal invests $20M more in logistics firm gojavas: Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs online e-com marketplace Snapdeal, has invested $20 million (Rs 131 crore) more in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the gojavas brand, it said on Wednesday. Snapdeal had first invested in gojavas, which was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet, in March this year. It had not disclosed the investment amount but said it has picked a minority stake in the logistics firm. “The company’s average timeline for delivering Snapdeal orders has reduced by a full 24 hours in the last six months and our teams have worked closely to come up with innovative solutions that are enhancing customers’ shopping experience on Snapdeal. With the freshly infused funds, our aim is to help gojavas become more successful and expand their reach,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal. Snapdeal said it has invested $100 million in the last six months to improve it delivery timelines by 70 per cent and it will invest $200 million more in next 12 months to strengthen its supply chain. gojavas will be using the capital for expanding its operations to 100 more cities within 12 months. Vijay Ghadge, COO at gojavas, said the partnership with Snapdeal has helped it become one of the largest independent logistics players in the country with a revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore currently. gojavas currently manages over 1 lakh sq ft of fulfilment centres and helps more than 400 companies reach consumers in close to 350 cities and towns in more than 3,000 PIN-codes. It claims to deliver over 1.8 lakh packages every day and closed FY15 with revenues of over Rs 200 crore. It was originally an in-house delivery venture of Jabong but later spun out as a separate third-party logistics firm.

• Pandora Buys Ticketfly, a Competitor to Ticketmaster: Pandora Media, the biggest player in Internet radio, has moved into the ticketing business with an agreement to buy Ticketfly, an independent firm that competes with Ticketmaster and is popular with clubs and festivals in the United States and Canada. Pandora announced early Wednesday that it would acquire Ticketfly for $450 million, in a mix of cash and stock. The deal further expands Pandora’s interests in providing services to artists. Last year, it introduced a data system, the Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP, that shows musicians which songs are most popular on the service and where. And in May, Pandora bought Next Big Sound, another data service, which studies the listening and searching patterns of streaming music customers. Pandora, which has nearly 80 million regular listeners, said that its acquisition would benefit artists and listeners. The deal will also add a level of complexity to the sometimes delicate system of alliances in the ticketing world, which is dominated by Ticketmaster, a unit of Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketfly, which was founded in 2008 and was an early proponent of using social media and the web to market tickets, has become a popular choice for promoters that want to avoid the Ticketmaster system. Last year, according to its announcement with Pandora, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets worth more than $500 million. Among Ticketfly’s clients are the club Brooklyn Bowl and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. This year, the independent ticketing world was jolted when Ticketmaster bought Front Gate Tickets, another service popular with clubs, festivals and acts, a move that led some bands, like Wilco, to shift their alliances to other companies. Pandora’s control of Ticketfly could pose a challenge to Ticketmaster, particularly given Pandora’s history of using its user data for marketing. The company, which derives about 80 percent of its revenue from ad sales, has long pitched advertisers on its ability to identify its users based on their demographic data and listening habits — even going so far as to say it can predict its listeners’ political affiliation. “The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse.”

• Amazon considering online TV service: Amazon.com Inc is considering the creation of a live online TV service and has reached out to networks such as CBS Corp and Comcast's NBCUniversal to express interest in carrying their channels, Bloomberg reported. The e-commerce giant's talks with the networks are in preliminary stages, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Such a move would increase Amazon's already growing presence in online video. Amazon currently offers an on-demand video streaming service similar to that of Netflix. Amazon signed an exclusive deal with former "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson in July to present a new motoring show for its Amazon Prime subscription service. The company last month said it would launch six TV show pilots for its video streaming service in the United States, the UK, Germany and Austria for the 2015 fall pilot season.

• If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your Router: Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless connection in his bedroom. For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland, Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.” What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department. Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a router or try to decide which one to pick. So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal. The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too complex for their needs.

• Pure Storage Falls In Public Debut, CEO Optimistic: Pure Storage, the enterprise storage company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. After pricing at $17, shares traded down in its debut, closing the day at $16.01. CEO Scott Dietzen spoke to TechCrunch about why the company executed an IPO during what has been a lackluster year for tech stocks. “We were ready to be a public company,” said Dietzen. “We don’t worry about market conditions. Great companies can come out when it’s right for them.” The company’s IPO performance, slipping in its first day’s trading, isn’t big news. Other recent IPOs that have seen sharp declines in value following their flotation have performed more strongly. For example, Box, a tech company that went public this year, surged on its initial day as a public company. In the ensuing months, its shares have sagged. For industry watchers, any current public technology offering is a bellwether. The IPO cadence for technology firms has been infamously slow in 2015, causing concern among those both seeking liquidity for their investments, and executives worried about where their private valuation might square with the public markets. To underscore that point, Dropbox, a company that could formerly do no wrong, recently endured an embarrassing haircut. Pure Storage’s offering went off mid-range. It fell a modest 5.8 percent. These things are not the end of the world. But they may describe public investor uncertainty about the value of firms that are burning large quantities of cash to expand their top line. Box, MobileIron, and a host of others have endured related declines.