- Wall Street Tours the Tesla Factory—and Loves What It Sees: Wall Street analysts have been touring Tesla’s massive factory in Fremont, Calif., and they're returning with the same conclusion: Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company is getting ready for something big. In a sign of this enthusiasm, Robert W. Baird & Co. upgraded its Tesla rating on Monday morning following a factory tour. Last week, Stifel analysts returned from their fourth visit in four years to Tesla’s flagship factory in Fremont. “In roughly one year since our last visit,” wrote analyst James Albertine, “the progress witnessed is truly stunning." Tesla shares have jumped 45 percent in the past month as Musk, the chief executive, sought to reassure investors that the company is still on track after the challenging and much-delayed launch of the Model X luxury SUV. Stifel and Credit Suisse both noted Tesla's new aluminum stamping press, which Credit Suisse's Galves says has 10 to 20 times the output of Tesla's older machine. The bodies of the Model S and Model X are both made of aluminum, which costs twice as much as steel but weighs less. Tesla hasn't yet disclosed the composition of the Model 3. Keeping the weight down on electric vehicles helps achieve the maximum range on the battery, but maintaining a balance between cost and performance is crucial for a mass-market plug-in car. Tesla has built a new state-of-the-art paint shop that's capable of scaling up to 500,000 cars a year. That happens to be Tesla's production forecast for 2020, a 10-fold increase from last year's sales. If Tesla is to achieve that lofty goal, paint jobs won't be a holdup.
- What New Delhi’s free clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system: Rupandeep Kaur, 20 weeks pregnant, arrived at a medical clinic looking fatigued and ready to collapse. After being asked her name and address, she was taken to see a physician who reviewed her medical history, asked several questions, and ordered a series of tests including blood and urine. These tests revealed that her fetus was healthy but Kaur had dangerously low hemoglobin and blood pressure levels. The physician, Alka Choudhry, ordered an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital. All of this, including the medical tests, happened in 15 minutes at the Peeragarhi Relief Camp in New Delhi, India. The entire process was automated — from check-in, to retrieval of medical records, to testing and analysis and ambulance dispatch. The hospital also received Kaur’s medical records electronically. There was no paperwork filled out, no bills sent to the patient or insurance company, no delay of any kind. Yes, it was all free. The hospital treated Kaur for mineral and protein deficiencies and released her the same day. Had she not received timely treatment, she may have had a miscarriage or lost her life. The technology that made the instant diagnosis possible at Peeragarhi was medical device called the Swasthya Slate. This $600 device, the size of a cake tin, performs 33 common medical tests including blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, urine protein and glucose. And it tests for diseases such as malaria, dengue, hepatitis, HIV, and typhoid. Each test only takes a minute or two and the device uploads its data to a cloud-based medical-record management system that can be accessed by the patient. The Swasthya Slate was developed by Kanav Kahol, who was a biomedical engineer and researcher at Arizona State University’s department of biomedical informatics until he became frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the cost of diagnostic testing. He worried that billions of people were getting no medical care or substandard care because of the medical industry’s motivation in keeping prices high. In 2011, he returned home to New Delhi to develop a solution. By Jan. 2013, Kahol had built the Swasthya Slate and persuaded the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Northern India, to allow its use in six underserved districts with a population of 2.1 million people. The device is now in use at 498 clinics there. Focusing on reproductive maternal and child health, the system has been used to provide antenatal care to more than 22,000 mothers. Of these, 277 mothers were diagnosed as high risk and provided timely care. Mothers are getting care in their villages now instead of having to travel to clinics in cities. A newer version of the Slate, called HealthCube, was tested last month by nine teams of physicians and technology, operations, and marketing experts at Peru’s leading hospital, Clinica Internacional. They tested its accuracy against the western equipment that they use, its durability in emergency room and clinical settings, the ability of minimally trained clinicians to use it in rural settings, and its acceptability to patients. Clinica’s general manager, Alvaro Chavez Tori, told me in an email that the tests were highly successful and “acceptance of the technology was amazingly high.” He sees this technology as a way of helping the millions of people in Peru and Latin America who lack access to quality diagnostics.
- Google Will Let Mobile Games Stream in Search So That Mobile Game Makers Will Buy Search Ads: Google will let you try out a mobile game right inside the search results page, before downloading it. And Google will let game developers pay for the privilege. It’s part of Google’s ongoing effort to squeeze more ad revenue from mobile and its business cornerstone, search. For developers, the trick offers a new avenue — paid search — for recruiting new users. Most money for gamers is made inside the app, so some developers may be reluctant to move away from direct downloads. But, in theory, the streaming method lets them grab devoted game players who have tried out the game, like it, and will stick around and buy stuff therein. For Google, it’s another way to nab the ample flow of app promotional dollars — a flow that Facebook has largely cornered. Over the past year, Google has rolled out a stream of mobile app advertising tools as the company has prioritized ways to fortify its central business. It added ads to the Play store so developers could pay to get noticed there. In November, Google started testing app streaming in organic search results with a handful of apps; it brought the feature to ads within apps a month later. Now, developers can promote their apps with streaming inside search, too. Google’s share of app advertising is rising steadily, although Facebook is still out in front, according to industry sources.
- Infibeam turns profitable; to open first IPO by an Indian e-com venture on March 21: The parent of horizontal e-commerce platform Infibeam and e-commerce enabler BuildaBazaar, is to hit the market with its initial public offer (IPO) on March 21. This would make it the first among peers, including those several times bigger, to go public. Infibeam had received a green signal from securities market regulator SEBI for its initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to Rs 450 crore last October. Founded in 2010 by a former Amazon executive, Vishal Mehta, Infibeam would also become one of the youngest firms to list on a national bourse. Having restricted itself from raising private capital, unlike its peers, it did not get too aggressive in customer acquisition to drive the B2C business and has been especially pushing the B2B e-commerce enabler platform BuildaBazaar. Infibeam would be the first pure-play e-commerce firm in the country to float an IPO in India and would test the general investors’ appetite for the sector. E-commerce in India has absorbed billions of dollars over the past four years, much of it from foreign private equity and venture capital firms. Infibeam happens to be an exception as it has not approached any major private investor for funds till now. It is promoted by a Gujarat-based affluent family whose business interest straddles a dealership for Toyota cars. Interestingly, Infibeam made profit in the first six months of the current financial year. It reported net revenues of Rs 171.27 crore for the April-September 2015 period with EBITDA of close to Rs 15 crore and net profit (adjusted for prior period items) of Rs 6.5 crore. It had clocked net loss of just under Rs 10 crore for 2014-15. As of December 31, 2015, it had 48,724 registered merchants on the BuildaBazaar platform. In Infibeam.com e-retail site, in addition to direct sales procured from suppliers, it had more than 5,000 registered merchants, and claimed to have more than 7.8 million active users (based on last login in the immediately preceding 12 months). To its credit, it is one of the rare horizontal e-commerce platforms to have survived without large external funding. Others like IndiaPlaza shut down as they failed to get follow-on funding, and as a consequence, investors funding got concentrated to the troika of Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues. Global e-commerce behemoth Amazon itself has built a big presence in India and is among the top three ventures in the country. Infibeam’s only external equity funding has come from media house Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, which bet around Rs 33.3 crore through the ad-for-equity investment platform Brand Equity Treaties Ltd (BETL). BETL owns a 1.8 per cent stake in the firm. BETL also pitched in with Rs 2 crore of non-convertible debentures, which are outstanding.
- Google story#1: Finally, Google will test ads on the Google Play Store: More coverage here and here : Google Inc. plans to show search ads targeting customers who use its application and media store for Android devices under a pilot program, as the company looks for new ways to generate revenue from mobile devices. In the next few weeks, Google will let application developers buy advertising spots that consumers can see when they search for software in the Google Play store, Michael Siliski, a product management director, said in a blog post Thursday. So, a query for coupon or travel options in the marketplace may show a sponsored result at the top of the query page, the Mountain View, California-based company said. Google, grappling with competition from Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., is looking for new ways to boost interest from businesses in advertising on wireless devices, where prices for promotions often are less than they are on desktops. The company’s share of the mobile ad market dropped to 41 percent last year from 46 percent in 2013, according to recent research by EMarketer Inc. “We’ve seen how search ads shown next to organic search results on Google.com can significantly improve content discovery for users and advertisers, both large and small,” Siliski said. “Search ads on Google Play will enable developers to drive more awareness of their apps and provide consumers new ways to discover apps that they otherwise might have missed.” Google, the world’s biggest Internet services company, is looking to expand its mobile ad presence as users favor applications such as those from Priceline Group Inc.’s Kayak on handheld devices, which bypass browser-based ads. The new service aims to bolster its appeal to developers that are looking for new ways to attract new consumers. Smartphones using Android dominate the global market with more than 80 percent of the share in 2014, according to IDC. Separately, the company also announced today it has paid out more than $7 billion to developers of games and apps on Google Play in the past year.
- Quantity and value of data is an overlooked benefit to delaying an IPO: It’s taking longer for startups to get to IPO, but that’s not necessarily bad news for investors in private companies. Why? Because startups today aren’t just valuable for their future exit potential, but for the proprietary data they produce while still private. Market statistics clearly show companies are staying private longer. The average time to IPO has doubled to nine years today from four in 1999, and the median amount raised prior to IPO has increased steadily from $48 million in 2008 to $101 million in 2013. Of the 100 largest VC rounds in history, 90 have occurred in the last five years. There are several reasons startups are staying private longer, including volatile public markets, healthy secondary markets, and a preference by some for mega-M&As. Whatever the reason startups don’t seek IPOs early, there is a real and often overlooked benefit to investors when startups stay private longer – the value of their data.
- Google story#2: Google moifies Search algorithm to increase weight of mobile-friendliness, expand indexing of app deep links: Google today announced two notable changes that will affect the rankings of search results for users accessing Google search on mobile devices. It will now take into consideration a site’s mobile-friendliness as one of its ranking signals, and information from indexed mobile applications will also begin to influence ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed on their smartphone. “As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” explains Google in its announcement. The changes follow a number of previous efforts Google has made to improve its search results for mobile users. In 2013, for example, it rolled out ranking changes that would affect sites that were misconfigured for smartphone users, including those frustrating situations where a specific URL would redirect all smartphone users to the website’s mobile homepage instead of their preferred destination. This was common among news sites, in particular, as users would often click a link to read a certain story and would end up landing on the site’s main webpage, the story nowhere to be found. Last summer, meanwhile, Google began flagging sites that wouldn’t display on mobile devices due to the technology they used – like those built with Adobe Flash, which meant they wouldn’t display on iOS devices or Android 4.1 and higher. And in November, Google began adding a “mobile-friendly” label to its search results accessed on mobile devices to indicate they would display well on your smartphone’s small screen, after first testing “warning labels” earlier in the year. It noted at the time it was also testing the use of the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal. In a blog post detailing the changes, the company points website owners to a number of resources that can help them prepare for this shift, including its guide to mobile-friendly sites, its Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, and its Mobile Usability Report. In addition, the company also said it will begin taking advantage of its efforts with deep-linking technology to begin to surface information from mobile apps higher in its search results. Deep links, for those unfamiliar, point to specific pages within mobile applications themselves. That means developers who implement these links in their apps allow Google to index their apps in a similar way as it does websites today.
- The future of health care is a dongle attached to your smartphone: app-based diagnostics are taking off The latest development in this new direct-to-consumer health model is a new breakthrough from a team of biomedical engineering researchers at Columbia University in New York City that makes it possible to test for both HIV and syphilis in 15 minutes after hooking a plastic dongle into your smartphone’s headphone jack. You simply insert a pinprick of blood onto a disposable plastic collector, connect the plastic collector to a microfluidic chip used to analyze the sample and insert the chip with the blood sample into the dongle. Once you’ve logged into an app, your smartphone can start to determine the presence of HIV or syphilis in your blood and display the results on your smartphone’s screen 15 minutes later. More than its ease of use, the cost factor of the dongle is what makes it possible to speculate that this type of smartphone diagnostics could one day lead to a new direct-to-consumer model for health care. The equipment needed to perform a laboratory-quality HIV test can cost upwards of $18,450 apiece. Contrast that to the cost of a cheap plastic dongle, which costs an estimated $34 to make. That makes it possible to imagine a future where tests are faster, simpler and cheaper than anything available today. What makes the lab-on-a-smartphone so innovative is that, even though you’re significantly reducing cost, you’re not sacrificing power. The results delivered by the new device suggest that a full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory. Moreover, in a small field study in Rwanda, the team of researchers found that patient preference for the dongle was 97 percent compared to laboratory-based test
- Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability: Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection. In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege, according to The Cost of Connectivity, a report published Thursday by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The report compares Internet access in big American cities with access in Europe and Asia. Some surprising smaller American cities — Chattanooga, Tenn.; Kansas City (in both Kansas and Missouri); Lafayette, La.; and Bristol, Va. — tied for speed with the biggest cities abroad. In each, the high-speed Internet provider is not one of the big cable or phone companies that provide Internet to most of the United States, but a city-run network or start-up service. The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem — the lack of competition in the broadband industry. “It’s just very simple economics,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust and communications and was an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission. “The average market has one or two serious Internet providers, and they set their prices at monopoly or duopoly pricing.”
- India Startup Action: Five startups showcased at Techcircle E-commerce Forum 2015: Pumpkart.com: It is an online store for agricultural and domestic pumps. It offers a variety of pumps that include basement toilet pumps, booster pumps, car cleaning pumps, drainage pumps, hydropneumatic pumps, borewell pumps, rainwater pumps, waste water pumps, monoblock pumps, high pressure pumps, solar pumps etc. Crunch Commerce: It extends a layer of m-commerce tools to traditional e-commerce backend. Its flagship product is Crunch Adaptive, a mobile-web platform which works across mobile devices and brings an app like experience in mobile web browser. NGA Technologies Pvt Ltd: It has developed AUTOnCAB, an Android/iOS based mobile application which provides on demand one tap hailing of autorickshaws. The app also calculates distance/fare for a ride. It has the ability to monitor all drivers and rides in real time. Voconow Enterprises: Voconow’s mobile ad-tech product makes static print ads interactive and transactional and transforms them into a sales channel and a revenue centre. It connects the offline print media to the online digital media. In that sense, it operates at the intersection of print and digital. Retail Labs: It has developed Getnow.at which seeks to change how people shop in India by bringing local shopping online. Consumers can order products from stores in their city with guaranteed delivery in six hours. Local stores list their products on our marketplace and the firm handles distribution for them.
- Google story#3: Google Acquires Mobile Startup That Manages Facebook Ads: Google Inc. agreed to acquire Red Hot Labs Inc., a mobile startup that helps companies manage advertising on rival Facebook Inc., bolstering its marketing tools on wireless devices. Red Hot Labs, which provides the Toro service for application developers, will join the mobile ads team at Google, the search giant said, declining to disclose terms of the deal. San Francisco-based Red Hot Labs helps software makers boost their user numbers through Facebook, owner of the world’s largest social-networking service. “With greater resources and distribution now available at our disposal, we’re excited to join Google and continue our mission of making the lives of app developers easier,” the start-up said on its website. Google, expanding beyond its desktop-based tools, is investing in new ways to help companies market on smartphones and tablets as users increasingly access digital services via wireless devices. The Mountain View, California-based company last month reported fourth-quarter sales and profit that missed estimates as its advertising business faced more competition on mobile gadgets.
