Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 31st

• With $340 million in revenue, Nest is underperforming, and its future at Google is at risk:  Nest generated about $340 million in sales last year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. That’s an impressive figure for a company in the very nascent market of Internet-connected devices. Nest currently sells three products: The flagship smart thermostat; Protect, its smoke detector; and Nest Cam, the home-monitoring video predecessor to Dropcam. But it’s below the initial expectations Google had set for Nest when it bought the startup in 2014 for a whopping $3.2 billion. The company’s sales performance may face even deeper scrutiny inside Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, where Nest now sits, as the hardware maker faces its most critical year ever. Alphabet, whose execs have spoken regularly about controlling costs at the non-Google companies, may become less charitable. And in the meanwhile, Nest's CEO got slammed in a column in TechCrunch for the culture there: though the company currently manufactures three products — its thermostat, a smoke alarm, and its Nest cam (via its Dropcam acquisition) — it has repeatedly delayed product releases and disappointed its customers, particularly given the billing that Nest’s products receive. In one of the more visible cases of customer dissatisfaction, a New York Times reporter said in January that a software bug drained his Nest thermostat’s battery, a discovery he made only when his infant began crying from his chilly bedroom in the middle of the night. Nest’s smart smoke alarm has also been plagued by software glitches. In the meantime, says The Information, Google has moved forward on similar efforts, including its OnHub wireless router and a stealth project to create a competitor to Amazon’s Echo. That Google has done so without Nest’s involvement must be demoralizing to Nest’s current employees, who were presumably drawn to the challenge of helping Nest become one of the world’s great hardware companies. But there’s reason for even more concern going forward: Fadell has created a culture that’s increasingly unlikely to attract the world’s best engineers, which has always been the top priority for its parent company. (Google, in stark contrast, is consistently ranked as one of thebest places to work.) If Alphabet wants to maintain its feel-good reputation, it may be time to part ways with Fadell, or at least to demote him. He’s now had more than two years to prove himself. What Fadell has shown instead is that he’s unable to get out of his own way — or Nest’s.

• Car-Pooling Helps Uber Go the Extra Mile: One day not long ago, an Uber driver picked up a passenger in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district. Let’s call our passenger Abby, because her real name has been lost to database anonymization, an effort to keep her identity private. Abby needed to go to Noe Valley, a 25-minute drive that might ordinarily have cost about $15. But she had chosen UberPool, the ride-hailing company’s 18-month-old car-pooling program. In the process she had unwittingly initiated one of the service’s more epic recent trips. Unlike a standard Uber ride, in which a single rider starts a one-time trip, UberPool works like a party line for cars. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, describes it as the future of his company — and thus the future of transportation in America. Call up the app, specify your destination, and in exchange for a significant discount, UberPool matches you with other riders going the same way. The service might create a ride just for you, but just as often, it puts you in a ride that began long ago — one that has spanned several drop-offs and pickups, a kind of instant bus line created from collective urban demand. In total, Uber collected about $48 for the ride, of which the driver kept $35. The company had collapsed five separate rides into a single trip, saving about six miles of travel and removing several cars from the road. For riders, the discounts amounted to savings of at least half of a standard Uber trip. For the driver, an hourlong trip with no idle time resulted in steady earnings (Uber drivers make money only when riders are in the car). And though Uber made less from the single ride than it would have from multiple rides, the company benefited by installing itself as a fixture in people’s lives. UberPool may push us to re-evaluate how we think about Uber and its impact on the world.

• People Are Spending Lots of Time, Not Money, on Their Phones: Shopping on mobile phones is growing at its fastest rate ever. But there’s still a huge gap between how much time shoppers spend on mobile websites and apps, and the percentage of total e-commerce sales that happen on these mobile sites. One big reason for this 44 percent gap: Entering in credit card and shipping details on a phone can be a pain, both on mobile websites and in apps. Services like Apple Pay and Android Pay have eliminated a lot of that work in partnering apps, by filling in those details automatically. And as Re/code reported, Apple Pay will be coming to mobile websites soon, too. If the gap between time spent and dollars spent on mobile sites is going to close, these services are going to be a big reason why.

• Elon Musk has a lot riding on his new Tesla: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is poised to reveal his newest creation, the Model 3, at an event on Thursday. Starting at $35,000, the car represents Tesla's first electric vehicle aimed at price-conscious, mainstream consumers. And how it fares is going to have a major impact on Tesla's long-term future as a company — and the future of electric cars more broadly. That's why this unveiling is an incredibly important moment. Back in 2006, Musk laid out this vision in a blog post on Tesla's website: The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model. In other words, this is the endgame. Although the company had focused first on high-end cars — the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, and the Model X — the ultimate goal was to bring the electric car to the masses. So for Tesla to have reached this point is going to be, naturally, a very big deal in the company's history. But that's not the only reason the Model 3 is significant. Tesla's new car is important in a very immediate sense because it offers Tesla a big chance at reversing some of the headwinds facing the company. You may recall that in October, Consumer Reports dinged the Model S for reliability problems, even though the same publication had otherwise issued aglowing review of the vehicle. Meanwhile, Tesla sales may have been affected by low oil prices that could be suppressing demand for electric vehicles, even as internal production issues hindered the company's supply. Not all of that is Tesla's fault, but it has prompted analysts to sour on Tesla's stock. Over the latter half of 2015, shares of Tesla fell roughly 15 percent from about $280 a share to $240. (It's now hovering at $230.) The Model 3 could be Tesla's opportunity to regain momentum.

• Amazon Assembly, Installation Services Bolster Big-Product Sales: Amazon.com Inc. wants to sell bigger things. To do so, the Web retailer has put together an army of workers who can handle everything from mounting flat TVs on walls to assembling treadmills. In the year since it rolled out Amazon Home Services, which also offers professional jobs such as painting, plumbing and yoga instruction, the online store has expanded the service to 30 cities from an initial four. Amazon now offers more than 1,200 services, the Seattle-based company said on Wednesday. It’s part of a push by Amazon to expand beyond products, and also a way to make it easier for consumers to buy big items that require an extra pair of hands to set up. Amazon has also increased its warehouse capacity for large items like furniture and flat-screen televisions. A new shipping hub in Kansas announced last week will be among about a dozen Amazon warehouses specifically designed for big products. Others are in Connecticut and California. Amazon now sells more than 1 million items that give shoppers the option of requesting assembly, installation or other related services, which is boosting the sale of home-improvement products, said Erika Takeuchi, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The most popular services requested are mounting flat-screen televisions to walls and assembling treadmills, she said. Amazon’s home services also include a wide range of offerings that don’t require purchases from the online store. Housecleaning is the third most popular job requested, according to Amazon. Other services include landscaping, gutter cleaning, pet grooming and yoga instruction. But most service requests are tied to a purchase.

• Foxconn unit Hon Hai's Quarterly Profit Slides as Smartphone Demand Wilts: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.’s quarterly profit dropped for the first time in more than three years after the main assembler of Apple’s devices fell prey to slowing iPhone sales and intensifying competition in contract manufacturing. The largest member of billionaire Terry Gou’s Foxconn Technology Group reported a 7 percent slide in fourth-quarter net income to NT$52.9 billion ($1.6 billion), compared with the NT$59.1 billion average of analysts’ estimates. The fall in profit was Hon Hai’s first since the second quarter of 2012 on a comparable basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Hon Hai’s 2015 profit exceeded expectations but it’s grappling with a slowdown in smartphone demand. The Taiwanese company gets half its revenue from Apple, whichwarned in January of its first quarterly sales decline in over a decade as China decelerates. The iPhone maker has since launched a smaller and cheaper version of its marquee device, which investors are counting on to rejuvenate the business. Gou is seeking to broaden Foxconn’s remit, transforming the contract manufacturer into a company that also makes key electronics components and devices. Hon Hai and several other Foxconn affiliates on Wednesday announced a deal to take control of Sharp Corp. for about $3.5 billion, adding the Japanese supplier of displays for smartphones to Gou’s corporate empire. Researchers at IDC predicted in December that global smartphone growth will dip below 10 percent this year for the first time. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 26

• Baidu Shares Rise 14% On Revenue Beat: Baidu Inc. posted revenue that topped analysts’ estimates as the Chinese Internet search provider’s investments in mobile begin to bear fruit and attract advertising. Sales rose 33 percent to 18.7 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) in the December quarter from a year earlier, the Beijing-based company said in a statement. That beat the average analyst estimate of 18.5 billion yuan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Mobile revenue made up 56 percent of total sales in the quarter, up from 42 percent a year earlier, Baidu said. The company’s dominance in search as more users shift to using mobile devices is helping offset the impact of a Chinese economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years. Chairman Robin Li is also investing in services such as home delivery and online video to drive growth beyond advertising and help Baidu compete with Alibaba and Tencent. Baidu’s American depositary receipts rose as much as 14 percent to $179.90 in extended U.S. trading after the results were released. The stock has lost 16 percent this year. Investors are keeping a close eye on Baidu’s margins. Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are now vying for supremacy in an on-demand services industry primed for growth as more people turn to their smartphones or the Web to order food, schedule beauty treatments or hire helpers. Users of such services could rise 29 percent to 400 million by next year, according to Shanghai-based IResearch. The rising cost of competing in online services is spurring consolidation, including the combinations last year of fashion sites Meilishuo and Mogujie, travel-site operators Ctrip and Qunar, and group-buying startups Meituan.com and Dianping.com. Baidu has had to keep spending on its video-streaming service IQiyi and main online commerce site Nuomi to keep pace with Alibaba’s and Tencent’s expanding rival platforms. Chairman Li and another executive this month offered to buy Baidu’s entire 80.5 percent stake in the IQiyi business, a deal that will shore up the search giant’s margins while setting up a potential initial public offering for the unit. “These bold steps help to reveal its core operating margins and the earning power of its monopoly-like search engine business,” HSBC Securities analysts led by Chi Tsang wrote in a report. Selling IQiyi could expand Baidu’s operating margins to 26 percent this year from 20 percent, even while unabated spending on on-demand services erases about 30 percentage points of profitability, they estimated.

• Anonmyous Flyers Posted At Palantir's Campus Warn Employees That Stock Is Worthless - Flyers Are False: Employees of data-analysis company Palantir  may have seen flyers posted on lampposts around their Silicon Valley offices this week featuring a disemboweled unicorn with rainbow blood streaming from its midsection. The posting, dated Feb. 23, warned: "Palantir workers: your common shares are worth $0.00." Palantir staff can relax a bit. The terms of recent fundraising rounds don't contain many of the provisions that can crush the value of common shares held by employees.Fundraising talks last year valued Palantir at $20 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said in June. While Palantir shares are trading lower on secondary markets than they were last year, the same can be said for many stocks, private and public, thanks to a global economic slowdown. Palantir common stock fetches $8.50 to $10 a share on secondary markets before fees, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing private share sales. That's a long way from zero. Palantir declined to comment. Several flyers have already been removed, according to Quartz. Someone posting on an online community forum under the pseudonym Palantir_Watcher claimed responsibility for creating the handouts. The person didn't respond to a request for comment. However, the guerilla campaign tapped into an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear about what private companies in Silicon Valley are worth after a wave ofwritedowns and cost-cutting at startups. Venture capitalists and other institutional investors typically hold preferred shares. They are worth more on secondary markets than common stock, which is what is given to employees, often representing a significant portion of their compensation. However, Palantir hasn't given newer investors the sort of preferential treatment awarded to shareholders of companies such as DocuSign Inc., Honest Co., and Stripe Inc., according to an analysis by the technology website the Information. The proportion of funding rounds that gave senior liquidation preferences to new investors was on the rise last year among companies with valuations of at least $1 billion, according to a study by law firm Fenwick & West. That allows those new investors to cash out before common shareholders, as well as earlier investors with preferred shares. During the fourth quarter of 2015, 42 percent of deals had such provisions, compared with 15 percent in the previous two quarters. Investors were also given the right to block an initial public offering that didn't meet their valuation threshold in 33 percent of deals in the fourth quarter, compared with 20 percent in the second quarter, the study said. Palantir had neither provision.

• FoxConn Agrees To Buy Sharp, Then Pulls Back On Discovering New Liabilities: Taiwan's Foxconn has put its takeover of Sharp Corp on hold after discovering previously undisclosed liabilities, sources said, throwing the acquisition in doubt and sending shares of the Japanese electronics maker tumbling. Loss-making Sharp announced on Thursday that it had agreed to be bought by Foxconn, a contract manufacturing firm formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and major Apple Inc supplier. Just hours later, Foxconn said it would not sign the deal until it had clarified some "new material information" from Sharp. It did not elaborate. Shares slid 14 percent on Friday morning, adding to a drop of 14 percent a day earlier as the planned share dilution looked larger than expected. "That puts the entire deal in jeopardy," Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal said in a note to clients. "This is especially so given the dramatic back and forth that happened between Sharp and Foxconn in 2012, when Foxconn agreed to acquire a stake in Sharp but then later walked away." Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said the Japanese group had contingent liabilities that amounted to "hundreds of billions of yen." The sources did not elaborate on the nature of the liabilities or the exact amount. Reuters has not seen any documents regarding the new information. The 11th hour delay jeopardizes a deal that would have marked the conclusion to five years of courting by Foxconn founder and billionaire Terry Gou and the opening up of Japan's insular tech sector to foreign investment. The loss-making display maker said on Thursday that it would issue around $4.4 billion worth of new shares to give Foxconn a two-thirds stake. Foxconn's investment is set to total more than 650 billion yen ($5.8 billion), a separate source familiar with the matter said. If a deal does go through, it would boost Foxconn's position as Apple's main contract manufacturer and enable Sharp to start mass-producing organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens by 2018, around the time Apple is expected to adopt the next-generation displays for its iPhones. But efforts to patch up the deal could be impeded by lingering distrust over the collapse of the 2012 deal to form capital ties. That distrust was one reason Sharp officials, until recently, preferred a lower offer by the state-backed Innovation Network Corp of Japan.

• Microsoft will pay about $400 million for software developer tools startup Xamarin, according to people with knowledge of the agreement.The deal was announced Wednesday by both companies without terms. Xamarin had sales of about $30 million for 2015 and expects to approximately double that in the current year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details of the purchase aren’t public. Microsoft Is Buying a Company That Is Key to Its Cross-Platform Future: Microsoft today says it's acquiring mobile app development startup Xamarin for an undisclosed sum, giving the company a tool for building mobile apps that can work across iOS, Android, and Windows phones. Xamarin, which has 15,000 customers including large brand names like Coca-Cola and JetBlue, allows developers to code in a single programming language while designing an app to look native to each platform. Xamarin also offers a way for developers to test those apps using thousands of cloud-hosted devices. One of the four-year-old startup's main products relies on Microsoft's Visual Studio software, so this acquisition is a natural pairing.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 19

Foxconn, Alibaba, others invest $500M in Snapdeal; eBay pares stake: Online marketplace Snapdeal raised $500 million in fresh funding led by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and existing investor SoftBank. Its other existing investors Temasek, BlackRock, Myriad and PremjiInvest also participated in this round, as per a press statement. Separately, e-commerce giant eBay said it has sold a portion of its holding in Snapdeal, 18 months after leading a $134 million funding round in the Gurgaon-based company. Snapdeal will use the money to expand geographical reach and enhance services in a bid to better compete with well-funded rivals such as US-headquartered Amazon and Bangalore-based Flipkart. The announcement confirms a previous report that said Snapdeal has raised $500 million, citing sources. With the latest funding, Alibaba is now backing two companies (Snapdeal and Paytm) who are directly slugging it out for supremacy in India’s consumer internet space.

Upstarts Raid Giants for Talent in Silicon Valley: The unicorns, a class of hot start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, are all aggressively pursuing the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley with promises of talked-about workplaces and eye-popping payouts. Amid a general scramble for talent, Google, the Internet search company, has undergone specific raids from unicorns for engineers who specialize in crucial technologies like mapping. In particular, Uber — the largest unicorn, with a valuation of more than $50 billion — has plundered Google’s mapping unit over the last 12 months, aiming to bolster its own map research. Airbnb, the popular short-term rental start-up, has gone on a more general hiring spree, poaching more than 100 workers. While the unicorns typically pick off small groups of engineers at a time, making little impression on a large company’s total employee numbers, the poaching attacks are often aimed at siphoning off the best talent in strategic technologies. That can sting the likes of a Google, where executives have said one skilled engineer can be worth many times the average. To snag employees from large rivals, unicorns have a simple recruiting pitch: They are on a path to success, as illustrated by their rising valuations. Many offer generous equity packages of restricted stock units that can later translate to big paydays for employees if the unicorn goes public or is sold — a lure that neither Google nor any other public tech company can dangle. Also, the unicorns say they are far more fleet-footed and cutting-edge than large organizations.

Alibaba Cash-Burning Buybacks Make Internet Bonds China’s Worst: China’s Internet bonds are lagging behind as disappointing earnings and plans for buybacks to shore up slumping shares fuel concern finances will deteriorate. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, announced a $4 billion share repurchase last week, while Baidu, its most-popular search engine, unveiled a $1 billion plan in July. Their bonds have contributed to a 0.4 percent loss on technology notes this quarter, the worst sector in a Bank of America Merrill Lynch investment-grade dollar note index for China that gained 0.4 percent. That’s a turnaround after Baidu’s 2012 debut in global debt markets gave it a self-proclaimed “war chest” and Alibaba’s $8 billion sale in 2014 became Asia’s biggest corporate dollar bond offering. The companies’ shares have slumped at least 9 percent this quarter as authorities tighten controls on Web content and crack down on fake goods online. “Companies such as Baidu and Alibaba came out with weaker results, and have announced cash-burning buybacks or acquisitions, which triggered a sell-off,” said Anthony Leung, a credit analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong, said. “In addition, regular negative headlines such as the sale of counterfeit goods, have hurt their bonds.”

Lenovo Joins Smartphone Compatriots for ’Make in India’: Lenovo started making smartphones in India, becoming the largest Chinese company to produce mobile devices there after the government raised import taxes. Lenovo will use contract manufacturer Flex’s factory outside the southeastern city of Chennai for its Lenovo and Motorola brands, Amar Babu, chairman of Lenovo India, said Tuesday in a phone interview. The brands will have a combined annual capacity of 6 million units, Lenovo said in a statement. Foxconn Technology Group this year began producing smartphones in India for China’s Xiaomi and OnePlus after the Indian government raised taxes on some foreign-made goods to attract investment in manufacturing. Lenovo’s announcement marks the largest Chinese name yet to be lured by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India campaign as competitors vie for a share of the world’s third-largest smartphone market. “Output from the plants is focused mainly on serving the Indian market,” Babu said. Lenovo has no immediate plans to develop phones specifically for India, he said. Lenovo considered adding smartphone manufacturing to its own personal-computer plant in Puducherry in the southeast before deciding to outsource to Flex’s existing factory in Sriperumbudur, Babu said.

Airbnb partners with China Broadband, Sequoia to expand in China: Online home-rental marketplace Airbnb Inc said on Tuesday it was partnering with investment firms China Broadband Capital and Sequoia China to expand into the Chinese market and find a chief executive for its operations in the country. The company, which was recently reported to have completed a $1.5 billion private funding round, said in a blog post it was also working with a larger group of investors, including Horizon Ventures, GGV Capital and China-based Hillhouse Capital. Airbnb, which matches people wishing to rent out all or part of their homes to temporary guests, has grown quickly and is valued at more than $20 billion. Airbnb said the number of outbound Chinese travelers using its service grew 700 percent in the past year. China Broadband and Sequoia China will help it customize technology for the Chinese market and establish a "localized presence" in the country, it added.

Twitter to accelerate push for content partnerships in Asia: Twitter said on Tuesday it plans to accelerate its push for content partnerships in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It has appointed a Singapore-based executive, Rishi Jaitly, to boost teams in major markets such as Australia, India, and Japan as well as to expand into Greater China and Southeast Asia, the company said in a statement. Jaitly was previously Twitter's market director for India and Southeast Asia. Twitter has been aggressively expanding its capabilities to carry pictures, video and interactive content.

Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation: Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation. The app has 240 million registered users and claims that 40 percent of American teenagers are actively on Kik. The deal doesn’t mean the two apps are planning to integrate, but they will have a strategic partnership moving forward, according to Kik co-founder Chris Best. That means sharing things like data and app information, he added. He also said that Kik won’t be targeting China anytime soon (seems obvious now given WeChat’s foothold there) but plans to use the money to grow the company’s employee base.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, August 10

Taiwan's Foxconn plans $5 billion investment over five years in Indian facility: Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer and a key supplier to Apple, on Saturday signed a pact with India's Maharashtra state to invest $5 billion over five years on a new electronics manufacturing facility. The announcement was made by Foxconn founder Terry Gou and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis after the signing of an accord in the state capital Mumbai. The Foxconn announcement will bolster Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Make in India" campaign, which aims to turn Asia's third-largest economy into a manufacturing powerhouse. Gou said Foxconn, the trade name for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd which also counts Blackberry, Xiaomi and Amazon as clients, was looking for local partners for the facility in the western Indian state. He declined to say if the Taiwan-based company would make mobile phones at the facility. On Tuesday, Gou said in New Delhi that he was looking at setting up manufacturing units in various Indian states and possible partnerships in the world's fastest growing smartphone market. He had said in May that Foxconn was aiming to develop 10-12 facilities in India, including factories and data centers, by 2020.

Insight: Tesla burns cash, loses more than $4,000 on every car sold: The Silicon Valley automaker is losing more than $4,000 on every Model S electric sedan it sells, using its reckoning of operating losses, and it burned $359 million in cash last quarter in a bull market for luxury vehicles. The company on Wednesday cut its production targets for this year and next. Chief Executive Elon Musk said he's considering options to raise more capital, and didn't rule out selling more stock. Musk has taken investors on a thrill ride since taking Tesla public in 2010. Now he's given himself a deadline, promising that by the first quarter of 2016 Tesla will be making enough money to fund a jump from making one expensive, low volume car to mass producing multiple models, and expanding a venture to manufacture electric power storage systems. Tesla's shares fell almost 9 percent on Thursday and slipped another 2 percent on Friday as investors and analysts weighed the risks of Musk's ambitious plans for expanding Tesla's auto and energy storage businesses. Tesla had just $1.15 billion on hand as of June 30, down from $2.67 billion a year earlier. Barclays analyst Brian Johnson disagreed with the company's estimates, and said he expects Tesla's capital spending will go up in 2016 and 2017 as the company ramps up its battery factory and Model 3 development. "Their small scale means the cash generation is not as great as they might have hoped for," he said. Musk said this week Tesla expects to have $1 billion in cash over the next year, and told analysts "there may be some value" in raising capital "as a risk reduction measure." Tesla's stock is still about 70 percent higher than it was two years ago, and 8 percent ahead of its level on Jan 1. With a market capitalization of $31 billion, Tesla is worth more than Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, the much larger maker of Ram pickups and Jeep Grand Cherokees. "A capital raise, given the way they're burning cash today, given the fact that they have future investment needs, seems very likely at some point," said UBS Securities analyst Colin Langan, who has a sell rating on the stock.

China's JD.com quarterly revenue tops estimates, third-quarter growth seen slowing: JD.com Inc, China's second-largest e-commerce site by sales, reported a 61 percent year-on-year rise in quarterly revenue, topping expectations, powered by a jump in the number of shoppers and goods bought on its platform. But the company's growth rate is expected to slow in the third quarter. JD.com said it sees third-quarter revenue of between 43.2 and 44.7 billion yuan, which would be up 49 to 54 percent from the previous year. JD.com, a distant rival to Alibaba, is investing heavily in its offline operations to complement its internet platform, taking activities like warehousing and deliveries into its own hands. This business model, similar in style to Amazon.com's, takes its toll and the company made a net loss of 510.4 million yuan, shrinking only slightly from the previous year's 583 million despite the leap in revenue. The catalyst for that jump was the 118 million annual active customer accounts on JD.com in the 12 months ended June 30, up 72 percent from the same period a year earlier. Those customers drove an 82 percent jump in the total value of products sold on the company's platforms in the quarter, to a total of 114.5 billion yuan. Shares in JD.com have risen 41.79 percent since the beginning of the year.

Raising Money Is Like Buying Dinner, Spending Money Is Like Getting Fat: How A Big Round Can Hurt Your Startup: When you’re a struggling team eating away at your meager savings and trying to get your startup profitable, venture capital funding seems like the holy grail. Raising money from investors gives you the resources to grow your team, buys you time to do things properly and gives you no small amount of credibility in the eyes of other entrepreneurs, prospective hires and even some clients — not to mention mom and dad thinking you’re now successful. While all of this is true, there’s a pervasive belief in the industry that entrepreneurs should aim to raise as much money as possible, as often as possible. It might be true in some circumstances, but here are three reasons why raising as much money as possible is often not in the best interest of the entrepreneur or the company. Raising Money Is Like Buying Dinner, Spending Money Is Like Getting Fat, and Raising Big Rounds Is Like Stunt Driving. In the end, it’s most important as an entrepreneur that you focus on the right decisions for your company. Don’t raise funds to get a big splash in the tech press. Don’t push for the biggest valuation to please preferred stockholders. And don’t optimize for the fanciest publications or the most street cred. All of those things are fleeting sugar highs of entrepreneurship. Plan for the long-term success of your company by knowing how much you actually need and stopping once you hit that number.

HTC Trading Near Cash Leaves a Smartphone Brand - Once the leader in the US - With No Value: A 56 percent plunge in HTC’s stock this year has brought its market value near to cash on hand. That means investors are effectively saying th smartphone maker’s brand, factories and buildings are almost worthless. At NT$52.2 billion ($1.6 billion), HTC’s market price is barely above the NT$47.2 billion cash it had at the end of June. A further 9.5 percent drop in its stock from the NT$63 close on Friday would bring the two figures into alignment, signaling investors put no value on the rest of the company. HTC’s fall from a market capitalization of more than NT$900 billion in 2011 charts the perils of a product and marketing strategy that’s failed in the face of stiffer competition from Samsung Electronics and Huawei Technologies. Once the best-selling brand in the U.S., the failure of its One, Butterfly and Desire smartphones to drive sales has pushed HTC outside a global top-10 now dominated by Chinese brands. Its forecast for third-quarter sales of as much as 48 percent below analyst estimates follows a 35 percent cut to projected revenue in the preceding period and indicates that the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company has little chance of regaining market share in the short-term. “HTC’s cash is the only asset of value to shareholders,” said Calvin Huang, who has a NT$46.50 price target on the stock at Sinopac Financial Holdings Co. in Taipei. “Most of the other assets shouldn’t be considered in their valuation because there’s more write-offs to come and the brand has no value.”

As private and public multiples diverge sharply, some investors bet on public companies : Airbnb’s valuation has ballooned over the last few years as large financial firms like Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have rushed to invest in the start-up. But a small San Francisco-based hedge fund called Pier 88 Investment Partners has decided that the fervor for Airbnb shares creates a different kind of opportunity. While other investors paid dearly to buy a piece of Airbnb — the start-up’s latest funding round valued it at $24 billion — Pier 88 did not invest directly in the privately held online home-rental company. Instead, Pier 88 put money into HomeAway, a publicly traded Internet company that competes with Airbnb, but has a market capitalization of just $2.95 billion. Frank Timons and LeAnne Schweitzer, the co-founders of Pier 88, believe there is money to be made on this big gap between public and private company valuations. In their view, the public companies are such relative bargains that they will make great acquisitions for purchasers that want to better compete with upstarts like Airbnb. Then, when those publicly traded companies are snapped up — often for a premium of more than 50 percent — Pier 88 can profit from the bet. Some elite start-ups are now vastly more expensive than their publicly traded cousins. Apart from Airbnb being pegged at eight times the value of HomeAway, the ride-hailing start-up Uber was recently valued at around $51 billion, compared with $7.3 billion for the rental-car company Hertz. The storage start-up Dropbox has a valuation of around $10 billion, while its publicly traded rival Box has a $1.9 billion market capitalization. It’s not perfectly accurate to directly compare market capitalization and private company valuations, since private companies keep their true financial pictures hidden. Still, “the easy private financing environment has created an interesting trade opportunity,” said Kenneth J. Heinz, the president of Hedge Fund Research, which tracks hedge funds and their performance. “With such a disparity between public and private multiples, it’s a reasonable fundamental approach to believe that in this environment, the public company valuation will come up or the company will be acquired.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 15

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• Foxconn Starts Manufacturing Smartphones in India Amid Modi Push: Foxconn Technology Group started making its first smartphones in India as part of the Taiwanese company’s plan to expand in the South Asian nation. Production has started in Andhra Pradesh state in the nation’s south east, Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo said, declining to comment further. Models for clients Xiaomi Corp. and InFocus Inc. have started shipping from a facility in Sri City according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because it’s not been officially announced. Foxconn is looking to expand in India amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to boost manufacturing in Asia’s third-largest economy. Billionaire chairman Terry Gou, whose business empire gets half its revenue from Apple expects to open as many as 12 factories and create one million jobs in India by 2020, Foxconn said in a statement citing Gou. FIH Mobile, Foxconn’s phone manufacturing unit, expects to have multiple manufacturing sites in India, with none employing more than 10,000 people, the company said in May.


• Elaborate Hoax Sends Twitter Shares up 8% on Takeover Rumors - Until Story Confirmed False: A report claiming that Twitter received an offer to be acquired for $31 billion attributed to Bloomberg LP is fake, Twitter and a spokesman for the news and financial data provider said on Tuesday. Twitter shares jumped on the report, which was distributed on the Internet and closely resembled Bloomberg's news website. Its origins could not be immediately established. Cybersecurity experts said the fake website and report did not require a high level of skill. The domain name was registered anonymously and it may take months for authorities to determine who created the site. The report appeared on a site named bloomberg.market, rather than bloomberg.com. The bloomberg.market account was suspended at mid-afternoon Tuesday. The website carrying the false report was registered on July 10, according to a domain search on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The domain was registered in Panama to WhoIsGuard, a company which puts its own information as a web site registrant to mask the identity of the actual owner. Twitter options were heavily traded on Tuesday with overall options activity surging to 330,000 contracts, or more than twice normal volume, according to Trade Alert data. A large buyer appears to have bought 12,000 near-dated call options across multiple strikes at 11:37 am ET as the fake report went out and the shares started rising. Calls betting on shares rising above $37 by Friday were bought across multiple exchanges. "If I am an attorney at the SEC, I want to contact that person to ask about the reasoning behind the large positioning in the short-dated contracts,” said Steven Spencer, partner at proprietary trading firm SMB Capital in New York. Twitter ended the session up 0.9 percent at $36.72. Earlier, it jumped as much as 8.5 percent.


• Uber having trouble raising China fund, expects to lose $3B over next 3 years, says report in rival-backed tech site: On Tuesday, a report emerged on Chinese tech news site Sina Tech citing a “source close to Uber” as saying that the company has had trouble finding first-tier Chinese investors. Uber has reportedly asked Goldman Sachs for help with finding Chinese investors (a technique it has used before) but the company has thusfar been met with mostly rejections from top-tier Chinese and Asian investors. According to Sina Tech’s anonymous source, when Uber first started looking for investors, it wasn’t giving out detailed financial information about its China business beyond the somewhat questionable one-million-rides-a-day number it “leaked” earlier this summer. But when investors balked at the lack of information, Uber was forced to cough up more, and those numbers apparently don’t look great. Uber reportedly expects to do US$1.1 billion in total sales in China in 2015, but it also expects to post losses of US$1.1 billion there this year. Over the next three years, Uber apparently expects its China business to lose $3 billion. Any report in the Chinese tech press that cites only anonymous sources is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. And Sina Tech’s parent company Sina, through its Sina Weibo subsidiary, does own a share in Uber rival Didi Kuaidi, so “black PR” certainly can’t be ruled out. But it does seem odd that Uber still hasn’t announced its funding round despite having reportedly nabbed one of Didi Kuaidi’s top investors weeks ago.


• Google Takes on Apple With Smartphone Location Tracking Tools: Google is stepping up efforts against Apple’s location technology with new tools to link smartphones to nearby objects. The search giant on Tuesday introduced a new format called Eddystone that lets electronic beacons provide more specific locations and other information within applications, the company said in a blog post. The tools, which compete with Apple’s iBeacon technology, will enable smartphone users at a museum, for example, to get more information on a painting they’re looking at or to gain easy access to electronic bus tickets when they’re near a bus stop. Apple rolled out iBeacon in 2013. Using a low-energy Bluetooth signal, the software makes an iPhone’s proximity to certain items easier to track with the help of $10 signaling device beacons mounted on shelves and ceilings, each no bigger than a hockey puck. Other providers also have introduced location technology. Google’s Eddystone will be open to other platforms and has features that work on Android and the iPhone, the company said. Also, the company wants to integrate the system in its Google Now service, which gives users contextual information around them before they need to search for it.


• Meet Miip, the Ad Monkey in Your App, From InMobi: Naveen Tewari, chief executive of InMobi, thinks the 1.2 billion people who see ads served by his company’s mobile ad network are tired of being bombarded with generally irrelevant marketing messages. He says advertising should be friendly, more tour guide than tout, and help people discover new products and services that they actually want to buy. To test that proposition, InMobi has developed Miip, an animated monkey character that follows you from app to app, watches what you’re doing and suggests products that you might want to buy. The Indian company unveiled the technology at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday evening. The idea is that instead of seeing a regular ad in your app, Miip would appear, with a text bubble inviting you to check out products from advertisers that it thinks are relevant. If you’re playing classic rock on an app like Spotify, for example, Miip might suggest a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd T-shirt and offer you the option to buy it right from the app. Over time, if the monkey makes smart suggestions, the company hopes, you will be more inclined to click on it when you see it pop up in other apps and perhaps even take the time to tell it what kinds of things you most want to see. InMobi has been quietly testing Miip (pronounced Meep) for six months, trying it with about 5 million users. Early advertisers include the streaming music service Spotify, the travel agents Expedia and Orbitz, niche retailers like Joyus and TheRealReal, and several major American retailers that weren’t willing to publicly disclose their involvement. The Miip ads will begin appearing in 40,000 apps on Wednesday, and InMobi hopes to eventually convert most of the 200 million ads served by its network each month to the format.


• As tech firms track your location, advertisers zero in for the sale: In recent years, major retailers have restricted mobile to 10 percent or less of their ad budgets because of difficulty gauging their effectiveness and a limited ability to target shoppers by location. Targeting is now much easier, to the extent that a consumer walking past a given retail outlet can receive ads in his or her Facebook or Google app showcasing some particular product available at that store - perhaps offering a discount coupon to lure them inside. That is a tantalizing prospect for companies if it leads to actual sales. For Facebook and Google there are early signs the new technology is already paying off. Six advertising firm executives representing more than 50 clients combined, told Reuters in interviews that clients have invested significantly more since the holiday season in mobile ads as a result of this new technology. In some cases, these advertisers, including major retailers they declined to name, are investing up to 40 percent of their advertising budgets on mobile ads, four times as much as at the end of last year. Facebook and Google are widely considered to be at the forefront of this shift. Google claimed 37 percent of U.S. mobile ad revenue share in 2014 and Facebook had 18.5 percent, according to data from research firm eMarketer. Twitter, which had the third-largest share, was far behind with 3.6 percent of the share.


• Product developers are preparing to offer a variety of items to consumers that will allow scent to become a part of digital messaging.: This fall, the start-up Vapor Communications, for example, will introduce several devices to include subtle scents with books, movies and clothing. And the company will start mass production of its oPhone Duo, a tabletop device that can emit scents based on how an iPhone photo is labeled. Another company, Scentee, already has a scent product on the market. The product, also called Scentee, is a cartridge that plugs into a smartphone’s headphone jack. It can be set up with an app to emit a puff of fragrance when a text message or email arrives. Smells tended to linger and become muddled with other smells, but Vapor Communications says it has overcome that problem with a system that includes small plastic pellets with scents that are activated when air flows over them. The scent is not dispersed widely; users have to lean in close, as if sniffing a flower, to smell anything at all. All of the products depend on a small pellet called an oChip — the “o” in the product names is for olfactory. In the oPhone, each chip contains from one to four aromas. The chips are sold in packets of eight, grouped into “families” of similar smells, called Coffee, Foodie and Memory. A person who wants to describe the smell of a pasta sauce, for example, could choose notes of tomato, rosemary and parsley, which would then command the player to position those chips so the air would flow over them, combining the scents.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 27

• An auto-generated audio version on SoundCloud (experimental)

• Foxconn Unit Seeks the Next Xiaomi in India: For FIH Mobile Ltd., being the unit of Foxconn Technology Group that doesn’t make iPhones has been a challenge. Its former name, Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., was constantly being confused with the parent, while its business model was tied to fading phone labels including Nokia and Sony. So it changed both. Two years later, FIH has a new marquee client in fast-growing smartphone brand Xiaomi Corp. and vastly-improved earnings. In anticipation of shipments climbing 50 percent this year, it’s now looking to India in its hunt for the next big thing after profit doubled in 2014. FIH will assemble its first smartphones in India before the end of this year, prompted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to raise import tariffs, Tong said. The company will have multiple sites in the country, none employing more than 10,000 workers, he said. “We still see the growth rate will be in the emerging market brands,” he said. India could see smartphone sales of 85 million to 100 million this year in a region where emerging Asia-Pacific markets will collectively outpace China over the next four years, Tong said, citing figures from Gartner Inc.

• Oppo of China to Start Handset Assembly in India for Local Push: Guangdong OPPO Electronics, a Chinese maker of smartphones, will start having its own-brand handsets manufactured in India in August as a saturated home market pushes it to seek growth abroad. Oppo will have its handsets assembled by a partner in the South Asian country, rather than replicate its experience in Indonesia, where it owns a factory, said Vice President Sky Li, who oversees the company’s international mobile business. He declined to identify the partner. “India is the top priority in our expansion in South Asia,” Li said in interview in Beijing on May 20. The company “plans to boost sales volume in the country to a comparable level with China market in five years.” The Chinese phone maker is betting on demand from consumers abroad to drive growth after the domestic market recorded first decline in smartphone shipments in six years in the first quarter, with a year-on-year drop of 4 percent to 98.8 million units, market research company IDC said on May 10. Oppo isn’t alone in seeing India in its future. Xiaomi , the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, released the MI 4i model in the South Asian country last month. Rivals Huawei Technologies and Lenovo Group are also targeting India.

• In Bid to Revive Itself, EBay to Roll Out Cost-Per-Sale Ads for Web Merchants: EBay Inc. is introducing ads that merchants will pay for only if they lead to actual sales, seeking new revenue opportunities for the online marketplace before a planned split from the PayPal payments division. The service, called Promoted Listings, will let EBay sellers specify what percent of a product’s sale price they’re willing pay in order to run an advertisement. The higher the percentage, the more prominent the ad will be, although EBay will also consider a product’s popularity and the seller’s reputation. The cost-per-sale approach is unusual because websites risk running ads that don’t generate revenue. Instead, most companies, such as Google Inc., rely on cost-per-click ads, which charge marketers each time someone clicks on a link. EBay’s new ad offering will help smaller merchants, which make up the bulk of the company’s 25 million sellers, because they won’t have to track the effectiveness of ads or pay before a sale, according to Alex Linde, EBay’s vice president of advertising and monetization. “This way, there’s no upfront risk for the seller,” Linde said. “The only lever these sellers had in the past was price, and nobody wants to grow only by discounting.” While Linde didn’t specify any revenue goals for promoted-listing ads, he said EBay’s extensive data on consumers and sellers will help it direct ads to the most likely buyers. “It’s risky to guarantee a return on an ad,” said Lauren Fisher, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. “They could end up giving away a lot of advertising.” The advertising push is part of a larger effort to reinvigorate EBay’s e-commerce business, which is lagging behind the rest of the industry. Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., sees marketplace revenue falling 4 percent to $6.7 billion, while EMarketer predicts that global e-commerce sales will rise 21 percent to $1.59 trillion in 2015. Advertising hasn’t been a priority for EBay in the past. Ad revenues are lumped into a segment that brought in $2.76 billion last year. Most of that came from banner ads promoting brands, rather than particular products. Promoted Listings will be rolled out gradually, starting in June with a few hundred sellers in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Germany. EBay also plans to come up with ways for larger merchants to promote special deals more effectively, Linde said.

• Your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000: This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission. The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each. How is this okay? First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince after he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.” In other words, Prince could make slight adjustments to the photos and call them his own. This is what he did with the Instagram photos. Although he did not alter the usernames or the photos themselves, he removed captions. He then added odd comments on each photo, such as “DVD workshops. Button down. I fit in one leg now. Will it work? Leap of faith” from the account “richardprince1234.” The account currently has 10,200 followers but not a single picture — perhaps so you can’t steal his images in return? “New Portraits” first debuted last year at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, the same location where the artist displayed the Rastafarian images he was sued for. Knowing that more legal action is unlikely, Prince appears to be enjoying the attention. He has been re-tweeting and re-posting his many critics.

• TiVo earnings: Revenue $44M, +16% Y/Y. Share Rise 6%: Digital video recorder maker TiVo reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit, helped by higher subscriptions. Shares of the company, which also said it bought Poland-based Cubiware, rose 6.2 percent in extended trading on Tuesday. TiVo's set-top boxes are in high demand from cable users as they also allow access to online video services such as Netflix , Hulu and Google 's YouTube. TiVo, whose clients lude DirecTV, is trying to partner with more cable TV operators to grow its business. TiVo sells subscriptions directly to consumers with its video recorders and also licenses its technology to cable TV operators that rent recorders to subscribers. The company sells its products through cable TV partners such as Virgin Media in the UK, ONO in Spain and Com Hem AB in Swede Total revenue costs rose about 16 percent to $44.1 million. Net revenue rose about 7.2 percent to $114.7 million.

• In Freewheeling Interview Snapchat CEO Outlines Monetization Plans, Talks Tech Bubble, IPO: Evan Spiegel is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and profane enfant terrible behind one of the largest and fastest-growing social networks on the Internet. At 24, he runs a startup with 330 employees and a valuation north of $15 billion, which claims more than 100 million mostly young users. He’s also incredibly secretive about his business plans and an unknown (and arguably underestimated) figure in the intersecting gossip circles of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Now he’s ready to talk about a major turning point for his company. More than three years after Spiegel founded Snapchat at Stanford with his fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy, 26, he’s trying to turn it into a real business. After starting to run select video ads earlier this year, Snapchat is about to begin soliciting other big advertisers with some new numbers that assert its audience is bigger, younger, and more obsessive than anything on television. In a 23-page sales pitch it’s sending to ad agencies this month, the company says more than 60 percent of 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service and together view more than 2 billion videos a day. That’s already about half the number of videos people watch on Facebook, which is seven years older and has 10 times as many members. The service isn’t accessible on the conventional Web, only via smartphones, and a central tenet of the company is that video and photos should take up the entire smartphone screen. He “believes his audience is young people on mobile,” Lasky says, “and he does not believe that the audience is being appropriately serviced by the existing Silicon Valley elites.” Actual teen behavior tells a slightly different story. Seventy-one percent of all U.S. teens age 13 to 17 use Facebook, while only 4 in 10 use Snapchat, according to a study this year by the Pew Research Center. And Snapchat’s rivals aren’t sitting still. Twitter has acquired the video-sharing services Periscope and Vine, and Facebook has another way it taps young Internet users—the photo-sharing service Instagram, which it acquired in 2012. Half of all teens use Instagram, according to Pew. Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Big advertisers with large experimental budgets chalked the rate up to research and development costs and fell in line, just to be first with a chance at wooing a millennial audience. Occasionally the ads do find a satisfying symbiosis with the content. Earlier this month, for example, spots from Coca-Cola and the jobs site Indeed.com congratulated students in ads that were interspersed in daily stories culled from snaps on college campuses during graduation day. Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Big advertisers with large experimental budgets chalked the rate up to research and development costs and fell in line, just to be first with a chance at wooing a millennial audience. Occasionally the ads do find a satisfying symbiosis with the content. Earlier this month, for example, spots from Coca-Cola and the jobs site Indeed.com congratulated students in ads that were interspersed in daily stories culled from snaps on college campuses during graduation day.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 12

• Hot Billion $ News :Alibaba is investing $200 million in Snapchat at $15 billion valuation – after it declined 3B offer from facebook: With the latest deal, Snapchat would be ranked behind only mobile car-booking application Uber Technologies Inc. and Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp., according to data compiled by researcher CB Insights. Xiaomi is pegged at $45 billion, while Uber’s latest round valued it at $40 billion. Snapchat lets people take and draw on photos, then send them to select friends or add them to a public “story.” The photos and videos disappear seconds after the recipient views them. The company says its users -- the app is popular among teens -- send more than 700 million disappearing “snaps” and view more than 500 million stories daily. Evan Spiegel started Snapchat in a Stanford University fraternity house in 2011 and turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook Inc. in 2013. He raised funds from 23 investors at a $10 billion valuation last year. That increase has corresponded with a surge in venture spending to the highest level in more than a decade. Venture capitalists pumped $48.3 billion into U.S. companies last year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

• Google launched a cheap cloud storage service – promises data retrieval in 3 secs: Google is offering a new kind of data storage service called Nearline, for non-essential data. Like an AWS product called Glacier, this storage costs just a penny a month per gigabyte. Microsoft’s cheapest listed online storage is about 2.4 cents a gigabyte. While Glacier storage has a retrieval time of several hours, though, Google said Nearline data will be available in about three seconds. The name is meant to evoke the idea of being nearly online at all times, It is also designed to move easily into other Google storage products, with sub-second data retrieval. That could make it a way to sell more expensive storage, as well as more analytics tools. Google’s long game, in other words, is positioning itself as the cloud computing company for all kinds of data analysis, something that it at the heart of its search engine business.

• Instagram new marketer’s fave –teens cite its "the most important" social network”: Instagram is luring brands away from Facebook, according to a new report from research firm L2, which found that brands now post more content on the photo-sharing app.The reason? Brands know everything they post on the platform will appear in fans' feeds, the study says. But on Facebook, if brands don't pay to promote their posts, much of their content doesn't appear in followers' News Feeds. That trend is turning Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, into a growing marketing force. The report outlines how brands have been building their followings on the app, which recently topped 300 million monthly users. Another reason Instagram is a marketing darling at the moment is it's attracting younger users than Facebook, according to L2. While an estimated 3 million U.S. teens abandoned Facebook between 2011 and 2014, the same demographic now cites Instagram as "the most important" social network, the report says.

• Hot Billion $ Rumor#1 : Google may buy InMobi for $1B: Google Inc is in early talks to buy Bangalore-based start-up InMobi, in a move that would strengthen its offering in the increasingly competitive mobile advertising space, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.InMobi, which helps companies target phones and mobile devices in their advertising, was launched in 2007 and claims to have over 1 billion users across 200 countries. It counts Japan's SoftBank, an early backer of China's Alibaba, and early stage venture capital firm Sherpalo among investors.

• Hot Billion $ Rumor#2: Snapdeal might raise $ 700 million from Foxconn(Taiwan): Snapdeal.com, has attracted interest from Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, one of the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturing firms, to raise as much as $600-700 million in a fresh round of funding, at least two sources familiar with the matter told Techcircle.in. However, the talks are still at a preliminary stage and the company is yet to issue a term sheet. “Foxconn is world’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer. But they are now finding new growth drivers as revenue from the contract manufacturing business is slowing down. India being a huge retail market, this is a great opportunity for them,” said one of the persons mentioned above.

• Online retail had a bumper year ($326.6 billion), key to 2015 success: Payments, CustomerFirst, Data:Overall, the retail industry posted solid growth last year and e-commerce really knocked it out of the park. Total retail sales reached approximately $4.12 trillion in 2014 and online retail made up about 7.9% of that ($326.6 billion). Compared to 2013, 2014 “nonstore retailers” sales, which includes e-commerce, grew by 7.7%. The last quarter of 2014 was strong for e-commerce, as online sales increased by 2.3% between Q3 and Q4. After being adjusted for seasonal variance, the US Department of Commerce estimates that online retailers sold $79.6 billion worth of goods. This made up 6.7% of total retail sales, which reached $1.2 trillion. Tips for this year: Increase Payment Options: About 54% of shoppers like having the option to use payment methods beyond credit and debit. This often boils down to security concerns. Consider offering alternative payment options, such as PayPal, to give customers choices and make them feel safer. Put the Customer First: Approximately 83% of consumers require some sort of customer support while making an online purchase and if you can deliver, you’ll reap the benefits. Roughly 86% of consumers said they’d pay more for a good customer experience, and that is possible through live chat. Be clear on what shoppers are looking for, provide helpful recommendations, and answer questions in real time. Use Data Effectively: There are different kinds of data, and even more ways to use them. Even though it can be overwhelming, it is crucial for e-commerce success. It can allow retailers to provide a more personalized experience and target shoppers better when they abandon their cart. Know what they’ve added to their carts and use those items to remind them to come back. Provide great recommendations based on what they’ve previously ordered to create loyal customers. Data can even give retailers a better idea of what price is best on products based on the competitive landscape, demand, and more.