Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 1st

• Where's the lane? Self-driving cars confused by shabby U.S. roadways, Volvo CEO is not amused: Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. "It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!" Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings "crazy," complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars. In other developed countries, greater standardization of road signs and markings makes it easier for robot cars to navigate. In the U.S., however, traffic lights can be aligned vertically, horizontally or "dog-house" style in two columns. Pavement markings use paint with different degrees of reflectivity - or don't exist at all. "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose," said Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails." To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost. Mercedes says the "drive pilot" system found in its recently unveiled luxury E Class 2017 sedans works even with no lane markings. The system - which incorporates 23 sensors - takes into account guard rails, barriers, and other cars to keep cars in their lanes up to 84 miles (135km) per hour, under "suitable circumstances." Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add $4,000 to a car's price.

• Facebook’s Live Video Effort Entices Media Companies: When severe weather passed through the Atlanta area early this month, Brad Nitz, a meteorologist for a local television station, WSB-TV, fed viewers live video updates on the station’s website, as he has done for years. But then he did something new: He turned away from the television camera and addressed an iPhone that was streaming him live — on Facebook. And the station’s social media manager, Jonathan Anker, watched this new Facebook audience swell. At its peak, the stream reached 8,800 viewers at once, and the segment has been played more than 77,000 times in total, far more than the station’s typical online audience. The numbers, Mr. Anker said, were “seriously out of whack, in a delightful way.” Experiences like this have media companies swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago. For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos? How do you reach people on their mobile devices? And how do you get more out of Facebook’s 1.6 billion users? Now, they hope, they have found a key for all three. Yet it is also raising some questions inside the companies about if — and when — they will see any meaningful money come from the push. The feature, called Facebook Live, has largely lived under the radar so far. But it is one of the company’s highest-priority projects, according to three people directly involved with the initiative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Internally, Facebook Live is seen as a way to move beyond hosting conversations about television and live events to becoming a venue for both. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has made Facebook Live one of his pet projects, two of the people said, devoting significant resources and effort to the initiative. Facebook plans to announce a suite of new features and partners in early April and at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco later in the month. Facebook, though, has prioritized getting live video in front of as many users as possible. The company has been eager to talk with media companies about getting started with streaming, but remains vague in conversations about revenue sharing or subscription models. It is pushing a build-first, make-money-later philosophy, one that can be frustrating to media partners, particularly those struggling to navigate broader changes in the online media industry. But whatever the frustrations, they are outweighed by the prospect of reaching Facebook’s huge audience.

• LinkedIn Buddies Up Closer to Lynda.com, Adds Course Recommendations Based on Your Career: LinkedIn is finding more ways to pair its professional network with Lynda.com, the online video library it bought for $1.5 billion last April. The most recent integration: LinkedIn is using data around which jobs are most popular among its users to suggest collections of videos that can help train someone interested in that career. If you were interested in becoming a Web designer, for example, Lynda.com could now recommend a collection of classes to help you learn the skills necessary for that job. Some extra revenue would be great news for the company, and would also help justify the $1.5 billion it paid for the video library last year. It’s one of the reasons LinkedIn is also putting Lynda.com courses on Virgin America flights. LinkedIn stock has fallen by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year, and just this week Barclay’s analyst Paul Vogel downgraded the stock over fear of slowing revenue growth. It’s unclear whether a “shopping list” of videos will actually open any wallets, but it certainly can’t hurt.

• Government report details Theranos quality control issues: A government report released late Thursday accuses Theranos of producing inaccurate test results, of failing to meet its own lab standards and hiring unqualified personnel. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service visited Theranos’ main facilities in Newark, California last November and found the one drop blood test startup’s machines produced wildly inaccurate test results – including one for cancer detection, according to a redacted version of the report put out by the Wall Street Journal. The newly released 121-page report, obtained in full by the WSJ details quality control issues – including the failure to meet Theranos own standards. According to the report, erratic test results were frequent when tested in July 2014, and from February to June of 2015 on Theranos’ proprietary blood test machine Edison. One example – a test to measure a hormone affecting testosterone levels failed 87 percent of the time when run on Edison. It is unfathomable Theranos would be allowed to run test results for the public during this time. and these new details provide an inside look at some very real issues surrounding Theranos as a company, particularly around its code-named Edison technology – the supporting reason for the company’s $9 billion valuation.

• Amazon Expands Buttons for Reordering Essentials -- Like Doritos: Amazon.com Inc. is expanding the number of products available for instant re-ordering through its wireless Dash Buttons, citing high customer demand. After last year rolling out the WiFi-connected plastic tabs that can be mounted to the fridge, washing machine or kitchen cupboard, the online retailing giant is increasing the number of brands that can be re-ordered by pushing a button to more than 100, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. Now Amazon Prime customers who suddenly find themselves low on supplies -- from Trojan condoms to Doritos chips, Energizer batteries, Purina dog food and more -- can hit the button to reorder the product and get it delivered for free. The buttons cost $4.99 each, with the cost reimbursed after the first order through Dash. When the buttons were first introduced in March 2015 they were met with some skepticism as to whether people would want or use them. But Amazon said orders placed through Dash have grown by more than 75 percent in the last three months alone and now take place more than once a minute. 

• Inside the Little-Known Japan Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones: The little-known Japanese company at the center of a legal tussle between Apple Inc. and the U.S. government over the hacking of an iPhone built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the mobile phone security business almost by accident. Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd. worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected in a terrorist attack, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. Neither Cellebrite nor the FBI have confirmed the link, and a spokesman from parent Sun Corp. on Thursday said the company isn’t able to comment on specific criminal cases. Sun, based in a small town of 100,000 southwest of Tokyo, has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan’s pachinko parlors since the 1970s but has often displayed bigger tech ambitions. The Konan, Aichi-based company developed personal computers in the late 1970s, computer games and more recently, iPhone mahjong apps. In 2007, as sales slumped, Sun acquired Petah Tikva, Israel-based Cellebrite. Cellebrite hadn’t ventured into forensics at the time, and the purchase was mainly to add phone-to-phone data transfer to Sun’s fledgling telecommunications business, said the Japanese company’s spokesman Hidefumi Sugaya. When Cellebrite later took on investigative agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation as clients, the business took off, he said in a telephone interview. Today, the bulk of Sun’s mobile data solutions business comes from Cellebrite, said Sugaya. "Although the FBI didn’t get a legal decision that would require Apple to hack around its own security software, it created a situation where they can go to third parties to do that," said Matt Larson, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. "Companies like Cellebrite may have found a niche industry of assisting the FBI unlock personal devices in select cases moving forward." Cellebrite sells hardware and software for extracting data from hand-held devices, even if it has been encrypted or deleted. It employs more than 500 people and has offices in Israel, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Singapore and the U.K., according to its website.Founded in 1999, Cellebrite was bought by Sun Corp. for a reported $17.5 million. 

• Huawei 2015 revenue jumps 37 percent, strongest in seven years: China's Huawei on Friday posted its strongest revenue growth since 2008 as China's adoption of fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology and strong smartphone sales worldwide boosted sales for one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers. The Shenzhen-based company said global revenue rose 37 percent to 395 billion yuan ($61.10 billion) in 2015, slightly above its forecast of 390 billion yuan. Net profit rose 32 percent to 36.9 billion yuan, from 27.9 billion yuan a year earlier, while operating margins dipped to 11.6 percent from 11.9 percent.Revenue in Huawei's carrier business, which competes with Sweden's Ericsson for the top spot globally for telecommunication equipment, increased 21.4 percent in 2015 on strong demand for 4G telecommunication equipment. In Huawei's enterprise division, which builds private networks for companies and organizations, revenue rose 43.8 percent.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday March 2

• On display at Mobile World Congress: an uneasy relationship between tech and telecom: Despite the numerous networking events and business deals, there is a love-hate relationship involving some of the world’s largest mobile carriers and tech giants like Facebook and Google. Both sides rely on each other to provide customers worldwide with high-speed Internet access and online services like music streaming and social networking. Yet as smartphones increasingly become the principal means by which people manage their everyday lives, the telecom and tech giants are jockeying to position themselves as consumers’ main conduit for using the Internet on mobile devices. “Mobile has become the heart of the Internet,” This shift has led to some uneasy relationships between telecom and tech companies. For many carriers, which have invested billions of dollars in recent years to upgrade their networks, growing consumer appetite for services like streaming from Netflix has raised fears that telecom operators will be relegated merely to providing the infrastructure that powers the boom in mobile Internet. Telecom executives worry that this role will force operators to miss out on the growing revenue that flows into smartphone applications, Internet gaming and other services, which all run on top of their networks. The concerns come as many carriers’ revenues — particularly in Europe, whose economy continues to stutter — have leveled off. Some industry insiders also have expressed frustration that American tech giants like Google and Amazon, which have used complicated tax structures to reduce their global tax burdens, do not face the same levels of regulatory scrutiny as carriers. That includes the F.C.C.’s net neutrality decision last week, which will allow the agency to treat broadband Internet access as a public utility for regulatory purposes. At the same time, several tech giants have gained footholds in areas traditionally dominated by the big telecom companies. Google, for example, is introducing fiber-optic networks in several American cities, offering television and Internet services at speeds of up to one gigabit a second, 100 times as fast as the average Internet connection. The search giant is running other pilot projects in emerging markets, including Kampala, Uganda, to build Internet infrastructure not offered by local carriers. And Facebook now competes head-on with traditional telecom players after acquiring WhatsApp, the Internet messaging service, last year for $19 billion. Along with Facebook Messenger, the company’s separate messaging service, Facebook now has hundreds of millions of mobile users who have shifted from traditional text messaging — a once highly lucrative revenue source for carriers — to free Internet messaging on their mobile devices. “Operators only have themselves to blame,” said Steven Hartley, a telecom analyst at the research company Ovum in London. “They didn’t adapt to the mobile shifts in the industry. They can’t complain when others beat them to the punch.”

• IRCTC ties up with Amazon to monetize traffic by selling products online: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a subsidiary of the government controlled Indian Railways, has now tied up with Amazon to sell products online. Last year Techcircle.in had reported that IRCTC was in talks with Amazon and Flipkart for a tie-up. In his previous conversation with Techcircle.in, a senior railway official had told that this move will leverage the site’s huge database of over 21 million registered users and convert them into potential customers for third party e-commerce players and in turn act as an additional source of revenue through a fee or other mechanism for IRCTC. IRCTC handles the catering, tourism and online ticketing operations of the Indian Railways. It is the sole seller of railway tickets even though other OTAs come across as additional sales channel for booking in association with IRCTC. Under the agreement, IRCTC will leverage the huge traffic it generates being a virtual monopoly for train e-ticketing to sell products such as consumer electronic, books, shoes, apparel etc. It has added a “shop on Amazon” tab on its homepage which redirects to a separate landing page on Amazon.in.

• Airbnb looking to raise $1B at $20B valuation: Airbnb Inc. is raising money from investors in a financing round that would value the room-sharing service at $20 billion or more, people with knowledge of the deal said. Airbnb may bring in about $1 billion in the funding, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The closely held company, backed by venture-capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Founders Fund, was given a value of $10 billion last year in a round led by TPG Capital Management. Airbnb has raised more than $700 million before the latest financing. At $20 billion, San Francisco-based Airbnb would join the ranks of the most highly valued private U.S. technology companies, including Uber Technologies Inc., Space Exploration Technologies Inc., Snapchat Inc., Dropbox Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc. It also would be worth almost seven times more than HomeAway Inc., a publicly traded vacation-rental site.

• Alibaba's direct-from-farm purchases, Baidu's smart chopsticks seek to reassure Chinese consumers amid food safety concerns: Controlling China’s sprawling food supply chain has proved a frustrating endeavor. Government regulators and state-owned agriculture companies have tried to tackle the problem in a number of ways — increasing factory inspections, conducting mass laboratory tests, enhancing enforcement procedures, even with prosecutions and executions — but food safety scandals still emerge too often. Chinese technology companies believe they can do it better. From the farm to the table, the country’s biggest players are looking to upgrade archaic systems with robust data collection, smartphone apps, online marketplaces and fancy gadgetry. The founder of the computer maker Lenovo started Joyvio, the agricultural company that tracks kiwis and other fruit from planting to delivery. The Internet giant Alibaba directly connects consumers with farmers via an online produce-delivery service. A gaming entrepreneur is running a pig farm on the side. And Baidu, the country’s leading search engine, is developing a “smart” chopstick that tests whether food is contaminated. City dwellers can buy directly from farmers through Jutudi, a pilot program created by Alibaba that has about 10,000 users. An e-commerce twist on the “buy local” movement, Jutudi lets users buy regular deliveries of vegetables and fruits from farms across China. Consumers can even pick their own plots in a sort of virtual farming, although deliveries may come from multiple places. Baidu’s smart chopsticks were supposed to be a joke for April Fools’ Day. The search engine giant published a fake advertisement for a set of chopsticks that would determine whether food had been cooked with gutter oil. The ad struck a chord, and it quickly went viral on Chinese social media sites. With such a strong response, Baidu decided to create a real product. Embedded with sensors, the chopsticks primarily test for gutter oil, but they also indicate pH levels and temperature. The product’s charger allows consumers to identify different fruits and vegetables as well as where they were grown and the calories they contain. The company is debating whether to add a feature that would indicate salinity, allowing users to determine whether mineral water is fake. Baidu is currently manufacturing a small batch of prototypes for testing. The company says it has not yet decided when to release the product or how much it will cost. Even so, it has already generated interest. Alibaba is tapping into consumers’ nostalgia for their rural roots with a heavy dose of marketing. The site features a Socialist Realist illustration of two women in a field of golden grain — harking back to the days of Mao Zedong, when farmers were lionized by propaganda. With images of shiny, red tomatoes, well-groomed pigs and other succulent fruits and vegetables, the program also promotes quality. Higher-end packages include tours of the farms.

• As Apple readies for smartwatch launch,..:For Apple, the hard part — making a smartwatch — is nearly over. Soon it will be time for the harder part: selling the long-anticipated Apple Watch to consumers who, so far, are not very excited about the idea of wearing computers on their bodies. The first batch of smartwatches from companies like Samsung Electronics, Motorola and LG did not sell well, nor were they particularly well reviewed. And wearable devices like the Google Glass eyewear that got mainstream attention — if not sales — were greeted with considerable skepticism. But Apple has been in this situation before. Most consumers didn’t care about computer tablets before Apple released the iPad, nor did they generally think about buying smartphones before the release of the iPhone. In both cases, the company overcame initial skepticism. Apple has marketed it as a device that can appeal to a range of customers like fitness buffs and luxury watch collectors. But it has limited its functions, making it more like a watch, more easily relatable than a tech doodad that happens to look like a watch, said Ben Bajarin, a consumer technology analyst for Creative Strategies. “This is a brand-new category. Most people have no frame of reference with a smartwatch,” said Mr. Bajarin. In late February, Apple sent out invitations to the media for an event to remind people about the best features of the watch and share some new details about the product, according to two people with knowledge of the event. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, is expected to be the host. Apple is expected to say more about price. The starting price for a basic Apple Watch is $350. Apple has not yet said how much people will have to pay for higher-end models, like the Apple Watch Edition, which is made of 18-karat gold, though watch enthusiasts estimate that it will cost upward of $10,000.

• ..Huawei unveils its own high-end smartwatch in an effort to beat Apple to the punch: China’s Huawei Technologies Co. unveiled its first smart watch that is aimed at the higher end of the wearables market, a week before Apple Inc. is expected to host an event to present a rival device. The 42-millimeter (1.6-inch) diameter luxury watch will be the world’s first wearable with sapphire crystal glass, Richard Yu, chief executive officer of Huawei’s consumer business group, said at an event in Barcelona Sunday, ahead of the Monday opening of the Mobile World Congress. Yu also unveiled an upgrade to Huawei’s smart band, introduced at last year’s conference. Huawei, ranked fifth in global smartphone shipments during the third quarter, is focusing on higher-end smartphones that can rival Apple’s or models by Samsung Electronics Co. All have expanded into wearables. Apple on Thursday sent out invitations to an event on March 9 in San Francisco, where it will unveil details for the release of the Apple Watch, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The connected, fitness-tracking wristwatch is the first entirely new gadget line to debut since Tim Cook took the helm at the Cupertino, California-based company. For Huawei, this year’s upgrade in accessories comes after sales of higher-end smartphones helped revenue rise about 20 percent in 2014 and operating profit improve. The maker of phone-network gear that also competes against the likes of Ericsson AB, has also been widening its product portfolio as it works toward a goal of achieving $70 billion in revenue by 2018, from $46 billion last year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday January 5

• Xiaomi 2014 revenue ~$12B (+135% Y/Y), smartphone shipments up 227% Y/Y; Huawei 2014 revenue $46B (+15% Y/Y), smartphone shipments up 40% Y/Y Xiaomi booked 74.3 billion yuan ($11.97 billion) in pre-tax sales last year, up 135 percent from 2013, the firm's chief executive Lei Jun said on his official microblog account on Sunday. Xiaomi sold a total of just over 61 million phones in 2014, up 227 percent from a year earlier, Lei added in a post on his Sina Weibo microblog account. The post did not give a related profit figure, although a filing last month showed that the firm was grappling with razor thin margins as it rapidly expands. A part of the business made around 347.5 million yuan net profit last year on revenue of 26.6 billion yuan and an operating margin of just 1.8 percent. Huawei: China's Huawei says 2014 sales revenue to rise 15 percent to $46 billion. Huawei's smartphone shipments rose by more than 40 percent last year, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters, failing to match its own target and the performance of faster-growing rivals such as Xiaomi.

• Separately, Xiaomi announces the Redmi 2, an improved version of its sub-$150 smartphone: The company’s flagship Mi devices may attract all the attention, but the sub-$150 Redmi family is its biggest seller. Back in July of last year, Xiaomi revealed it had sold 18 million Redmi (/Hongmi as it is known in China) phones and 3.56 million Redmi Note phablets. The Redmi alone accounted for one-third of total sales at the time. The Redmi 2 keeps much of the original model’s ingredients. It has the same 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 display, but under the hood there’s an upgraded 64-bit Qualcomm 410 quad-core processor. The device sports an 8-megapixel rear camera, improved 2-megapixel front camera, 1GB RAM and 8GB on-device storage. There is now dual 4G SIM support too. The Redmi 2 — which runs Xiaomi’s own MIUI version of Android — also gives a few more options for color-loving customers. ‘Lime green’ and ‘powder yellow’ are the new additions to the palette. The phone will cost 699 CNY, which is around $112, when it goes on sale on January 9. There’s no word on when it will be released outside of China, but you can be sure that the Redmi 2 will make its way to India, Indonesia and Xiaomi’s other overseas markets soon.

• IBM's stock is in a funk, and analysts call for the firm to invest in R&D rather than do share buy-backs: IBM requires an atypical activist fix. The company’s strategy of cost cuts and debt-fueled buybacks is no longer working – even though the company keeps trying. A tarnished balance sheet, lean staffing and a history of disposals rule out typical activist wheezes. Encouraging Virginia M. Rometty, the chairwoman and chief executive, to invest in IBM’s core businesses could pay off. IBM has run the same playbook for two decades. It sells low-margin businesses, cuts expenses, buys some profitable software companies and returns a lot of cash to investors. Over the last four quarters, the $152 billion company has spent more than $23 billion on dividends and buybacks. The problem is that IBM is investing too little. It has spent only about $11 billion over the last four quarters in total on research and development, capital expenditure and acquisitions. That’s a problem in technology, where old products soon become obsolete. Google spends about 16 percent of its sales on R.&D., but IBM spends 6 percent. The effect is becoming clear on the top line. Revenue has shrunk for 10 consecutive quarters. Costs have been cut to the bone, sending customers fleeing to better service providers. In a good year for stocks, IBM’s shares have fallen more than 15 percent. That means IBM has overpaid on its last three years of buybacks.

• Big data firms are starting to focus on 'unstructured data' that resides in presentations, memos and reports: data analysis is great if your information is in formats that are easy for computers to read, such as spreadsheets with numbers, or responses on a scale from one to five. But a lot of information isn't organized like that. Instead, it's in presentations, memos, reports, comments or just plain e-mail. Analysis of that kind of information -- often called "unstructured" or "dark" data -- is really tough to do by computer, and companies including Intel, SAP and HP are looking for a more reliable way to do it. Another firm, uReveal, thinks that it's cracked the code. Charles "Bucky" Clarkson, uReveal's chairman and CEO, said that software such as his makes it easier to to parse all those government reports and organize the data so that analysts can get more out of it, and more quickly. He also claims that the software is so simple to use that (gasp!) even liberal arts majors can use it.

• Tech patents are increasingly in the news: Story #1: Priceline.com's founder attempts a marketplace for tech patents, and China announces plans to triple the number of patents filed by 2020: In 1997, Jay Walker founded Priceline.com — the Web site many people use to get cheaper airfare by "naming your own price." Patenting the solution, and allowing others to use the patents for a fee, helped drive Walker's success. But, Walker argues in an interview, many patents remain underused. Now, the man who smoothed transactions for buyers and sellers of airplane tickets wants to do something similar for a key part of the nation's information economy. Walker is developing something called the United States Patent Utility. "We're going to form a utility, which works as a neutral party for both inventors of technology and users of technology. So you would be listing your patents as available for use. Then the next thing we're going to do is, we're going to say to people who are small to medium sized companies, get on the phone with us and talk to us for about 10 or 15, 20 minutes and tell us about your products and services. Send us PDFs of your sales manuals, your technical literature we can ingest, and we'll build a model of the technologies and products you use. If you're a shoe manufacturer, we can take all your specifications, all your sales materials, and we can read it all into the system. And then what we do is use a set of Big Data algorithms to take your specifications of all your products and services and run it up against the entire U.S. database of patents, which is about 2-plus million active patents. We run it against all the inactive patents, all the expired patents. Think of it as a natural-language kind of way. You don't need to be a programmer any more for it to run up against the entire database.

• Tech patents are increasingly in the news: Story #2: China announces plans to triple the number of patents filed by 2020: China is aiming to triple the number of patents it files by 2020 as Beijing looks to boost the country's high-tech economy in areas from agriculture to pharmaceuticals, according to a notice from the central government on Sunday. China is targeting 14 invention patents per 10,000 habitants by 2020 compared to four in 2013. It published 629,612 patents in 2013, over 200,000 more than the United States, according to a Thomson Reuters study in December. Beijing is also looking to reduce the length of the review process for patent and trademark applications. Patent reviews will decline to 20.2 months in 2020 from 22.3 months in 2013, while trademark reviews will fall to 9 months from 10 months. "Intellectual property (IP) is increasingly becoming a vital component of China's strategic resources and competitive ability," the statement posted on the Central People's Government website said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 24

• Snapdeal launches offering for farming and agriculture inputs for farmers. The store currently offers over hundred products across categories like seeds, irrigation and farming tools. The firm has started with some 300 SKUs to begin with and also plans to launch a hindi version of the store. On the face of it, the approach seems to be unique, however what could be interesting to see is how does Snapdeal makes it simpler to buy such products online or for that matter the smartphone. Moreover, how does it tackle the pain point of logistics without bloating up the cost of purchase and cash payments in remote villages. We tried checking for some random fertiliser for a remote village in eastern region in India and the site threw up a “Product cannot be delivered at your pincode location” message. But to be fair its the first day of its official launch.

• Gift cards are the best gifts, research shows: the less specific the gift, the more it will be appreciated. The sad truth is that while gift cards constitute a minority of holiday gifts, according to the National Retail Federation, they have been the most popular gift request since 2007. In studies to be presented early next year at a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers tried to analyze the emotional turmoil churned up by the exchanging of gifts, noting that the giver’s earnest intentions may often widely miss the mark of the recipient’s true desires. The closer the relationship, the more thought givers believe they should put into selecting a gift. But when subjects were asked what they would like to receive, they overwhelmingly replied that they wanted credit-card gift cards, which would give them the flexibility to choose exactly what they want.

• Huawei's smartphone sales shoot up after copying Xiaomi's online strategy: China's Huawei has taken sales of its low-price Honor brand of smartphones to 20 million from 1 million in just one year, hitting pay dirt with the disruptive online-only strategy it copied from smaller upstart Xiaomi. Privately owned Xiaomi, valued at over $45 billion, sold 15.8 million smartphones in July-September versus Huawei's 15.9 million, according to Gartner. A year earlier, Xiaomi reached just 3.6 million compared with 11.7 million for Huawei. But analysts say the low-cost strategy has fanned the price wars and thin profit margins prevalent in China, and that its spread could affect margins at all makers. Honor brand president Jeff Liu said industry transition to an online sales strategy was inevitable given the competitive pricing, afforded by reduced distribution expenses that would otherwise make up 30 percent of handset costs. "E-commerce is massively changing the traditional channels for the smartphone industry, and we needed to go in that direction too," Liu said in an interview in Beijing, where he unveiled the Honor 6 Plus smartphone last week. Honor handsets dropped the Huawei name last December and have since been marketed and distributed independently of Huawei-branded phones. They are sold in countries ranging from Belgium to Brazil, primarily via marketplaces such as those of JD.com Inc in China and Flipkart in India.

• Indian startup action: Six startups selected for Kyron’s new accelerator batch: Cubito: It has developed an employee transport system that features automated grouping, routing & driver allocation, besides information exchanges between employee & drivers. All allocations are done in real time. Xpense Manager: It is an app that aims to simplify process of expense claims & reimbursements inside companies by way of supporting the business workflow of approvals & support for policies for employee expense & reimbursements. Eywa Media Innovations: It aims to make TV watching interactive and fun. The company claims to have partnered with a leading broadcaster in India already. Viamagus : A SaaS startup, Viamagus claims it helps simplify the way businesses and individuals build & maintain their online presence and do business online. Its cloud- based tools help you build websites & portfolios, blogs, e-mail/SMS campaigns and landing pages quickly, and in a code-free and fully hosted manner. The firm has over 100 customers. Cashkumar: It is an online platform that claims to be providing the best rates for foreign currency exchange in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. With an aggregation platform backed by a reverse bidding process, travellers can buy or sell their foreign currency and travel insurance at the best possible rates. Adwyze: It is a marketing optimisation platform that allows marketers to improve the performance of their marketing budgets.