Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 14th

• Modeled After Ants, Team of Just Six Tiny Robots Can Move 2-Ton Car: Archimedes pointed out that with a lever he could move the world. He most likely would have been surprised to learn that a team of six microrobots, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, could pull a car weighing 3,900 pounds. A group of researchers at the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory at Stanford University has been exploring the limits of friction in the design of tiny robots that have the ability to pull thousands of times their weight, wander like gecko lizards on vertical surfaces or mimic bats. Now they have pushed biomimicry in a new direction. They have taken their inspiration from tiny ants that work as teams to move massive objects. In this case, they are not just taking ideas from nature — the movie “Big Hero 6” made a great deal of what swarms of microrobots could do, including tossing cars. The researchers’ approach is counterintuitive. Rather than striking powerful blows like a football player making a tackle or a jackhammer, they have focused on synchronizing the smooth application of very tiny forces. The microrobots work in concert, if slowly. The researchers observed that the ants get great cooperative force by each using three of their six legs simultaneously. Their new demonstration is the functional equivalent of a team of six humans moving a weight equivalent to that of an Eiffel Tower and three Statues of Liberty, Mr. Christensen said. The car is the one he uses for commuting to campus. Part of the magic is the use of a special adhesive that was inspired by gecko toes. 

• India's Micromax, once a rising star, struggles: A year ago, Micromax vaulted past Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to become India's leading smartphone brand. Today, its market share has nearly halved, several top executives have resigned, and the company is looking for growth outside India. In Micromax's slide to second place is a tale of the promise and peril of India's booming but hyper-competitive smartphone industry. India is the world's fastest-growing smartphone market. Shipments of smartphones jumped 29 percent to 103 million units last year. Rapid growth has helped nurture a crop of local brands, led by Micromax, that outsourced production to Chinese manufacturers. Now, as Samsung rolls out more affordable phones, the same Chinese factories are entering the Indian market with their own brands, depressing prices and forcing Indian mobile makers to rethink their strategies. "What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing the same to Indian brands now, and over the next year we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers," said Tarun Pathak, analyst at Counterpoint Research in New Delhi. Micromax, which was founded in New Delhi by four partners in 2000 but only began selling mobile phones in 2008, built its market share by working with Chinese manufacturers such as Coolpad, Gionee and Oppo to offer affordable phones quickly. In 2015, it launched more than 40 new models. In 2014, the founders brought in outside managers to lead the company at a time when Micromax was challenging Samsung to become the largest mobile phone maker in India. But tensions arose soon after between founders and the newly hired executives, six former executives told Reuters. These conflicts undermined Micromax's attempts to raise funds for expansion, say former executives. Last May, Alibaba walked away from a mooted $1.2 billion purchase of a 20 percent stake, citing a lack of clarity on growth plans, according to one executive involved in the discussion. Former executives said the lack of fresh funding undermined a proposal by the new executives to move Micromax's research and design operations, which had previously been outsourced, in-house. The move was intended to help Micromax differentiate itself from generic Android clones. "We hired about 80-90 people in Bangalore to do in-house software and design, but with no money from the investors and little interest from the founders, that team fizzled away and that office has been partially shut down now," said a former executive. After Alibaba walked away, Micromax struggled to attract other investors who would have been key to Micromax's plan to invest in software R&D and hardware design. The company was forced to scale down the in-house R&D project, a top executive involved in the fundraising plan said. Meanwhile, Chinese handset makers, including Coolpad and Oppo, to which Micromax outsources its manufacturing, were sharpening their focus on India. Samsung, too, began to introduce more affordable models there. In 2015, Chinese brands doubled their market share to 18 percent, according to Counterpoint Research, taking away business from Indian budget phone makers such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. Indian brands' market share fell from 48 to 43 percent last year.

• How a simple typo helped stop a $1 billion digital bank heist: It was just a few letters off: Someone misspelled "foundation" as "fandation" on an online payment transfer request. But that simple typo helped stop hackers from getting away with a nearly $1 billion digital heist last month, Reuters reports. Hackers broke into the Bangladeshi central bank's computer systems, according to anonymous officials at the financial institution cited by Reuters, stealing the credentials needed to authorize payment transfers. The attackers used the stolen information to ask the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to make massive money transfers -- nearly three dozen of them -- from the Bangladeshi bank's account with the Fed to accounts at other financial institutions overseas. Four transfers to accounts in the Philippines, totaling abut $80 million, worked. But then a fifth request, for $20 million to be sent to an apparently fictitious Sri Lankan nonprofit, was flagged as suspicious by a routing bank due to the "fandation" error. The Bangladesh central bank was able to stop that transaction after the routing bank asked for confirmation. "The Sri Lankan bank did not disburse it immediately, and we could recover the full amount," the central bank told the Financial Times. The requests waiting to be processed -- amounting to a total of between $850 million and $870 million, according to an unnamed official cited by Reuters -- were also halted. So if it weren't for that typo, the attackers may have escaped with an even bigger payday. Bangladesh's finance minister has blamed the incident on the Federal Reserve and said his government will "file a case in the international court against" the financial institution, according to local outlet the Dhaka Tribune. A New York Fed spokesperson denied the accusation, telling The Washington Post in a statement that "there is no evidence of any attempt to penetrate Federal Reserve systems in connection with the payments in question" or that the institution's systems were compromised. According to the spokesperson, the payment instructions were "fully authenticated" using standard methods.

• Top Start-Up Investors Are Betting on Growth, Not Waiting for It: For the last few years, the spotlight in start-up investing has largely shone on those who poured money into a company when it was already well along on a growth path. It turns out that spotlight may have been misdirected. While some investors are throwing giant sums into more mature start-ups like Uber and Airbnb at soaring valuations, it is the venture capitalists who identify a promising company at its infancy and bet on its growth who often come out on top. Known as early-stage investors, they dominate a list of the top 20 venture capitalists worldwide that was recently created by the research firm CB Insights. About three-quarters of the top 20 are investors who put money into start-ups during their early rounds of financing. Only a handful on the list are focused on investing at a later stage in a company’s life. Early-stage investments have accounted for the lion’s share of the venture industry’s gains since 1994, according to Cambridge Associates, a research firm that studied the quarterly financial reports of dozens of venture firms. Since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the industry’s returns have been generated by early-stage investments in any given year. But the value of investing in a company when it is still nascent has been somewhat obscured in recent years as hordes of nontraditional start-up investors — including mutual funds, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds — have piled into private tech companies, often when those start-ups are already proven growth stories. When Uber raised around $2.1 billion in December, for example, one of its investors was Tiger Global Management, a New York investment firm with a hedge fund component. Rebecca Lynn, a managing director and co-founder of Canvas Ventures who is on the CB Insights list, said early-stage investments generally pay off more because “investors can get more of an ownership stake and you’re also part of the team.” Ms. Lynn, who invested early in the alternative lending platform Lending Club, which went public in 2014, added that “later-stage investing is more like a stock bet. You’re along for the ride.”

• Instacart Gets Red Bull and Doritos to Pay Your Delivery Fees: Online shoppers hate paying delivery fees. So Instacart Inc. is getting Pepsi to foot the bill. The grocery delivery startup is working with General Mills Inc., Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc., Unilever NV, and other consumer goods makers to cover the cost of delivery or provide other discounts when customers buy their products. In addition to the coupons, the companies pay Instacart to advertise on its website. Since introducing the program about six months ago, it now accounts for 15 percent of Instacart’s revenue, said Apoorva Mehta, the company’s chief executive officer. Shoppers can find discounts when filling up their carts with brands such as Degree, Doritos, DiGiorno, Häagen-Dazs, Quaker Oats, and Stella Artois. Instacart ads promise free delivery if you spend $10 on Red Bull, or consumers can get 75 cents off any Dove soap. Mehta compares the ads to those offered on the side of Google search results. “It’s like AdWords for groceries,” he said. In its quest to build a profitable business, Instacart is searching for new sources of revenue that won’t turn off shoppers. The company, which was valued at $2 billion by investors last year, had previously made up some of its costs by selling products for more than what the grocery stores charged. Customers complained, and Instacart backtracked. The company recently cut pay for some workers, according to reports this week in Quartz and Re/code. Instacart said it costs much more to deliver an order than the $5.99 it charges shoppers, but customers are unwilling to pay more.

Daily Tech Snippet: 12 February 2016

• Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself:  Pandora Media, the largest Internet radio service, has held discussions about selling the company, according to people briefed on the talks. Pandora is working with Morgan Stanley to meet with potential buyers, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The talks are preliminary and may not lead to a deal, the people said. For Pandora, it would be a curious time to sell. Its shares are yielding a market value of $1.8 billion, down from more than $7 billion two years ago. The stock has fallen more than 60 percent since October. Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, and, after falling to about 78 million in the third quarter of 2015, ended the year with 81.1 million. The company is spending heavily to attract users, and its ability to make money from those users may be waning. In the third quarter, Pandora lowered its full-year financial guidance, expecting its adjusted earnings to be $51 million to $56 million, down from the $75 million to $85 million it projected in the quarter before. “It has lots of users but can’t grow revenue quickly enough,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. “It is another stumbling pioneer.”

• For Analysts, Loving LinkedIn Was Wrong: It’s not often Wall Street says “I’m sorry.” But after LinkedIn reported its earnings on Feb. 4, about a dozen financial analysts with varying strategies and sensibilities issued mea culpas. Some had rated LinkedIn a buy a few hours before its downgraded forecast. They watched in horror as its stock fell more than 40 percent, bottoming out below $104 on Feb. 5. Some put it more simply than others. “We were wrong,” SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Bob Peck wrote in a Feb. 5 note downgrading the stock to “neutral.” (He’d praised LinkedIn’s odds of continued progress two weeks earlier.) Mizuho Securities lamented the company’s “significantly slower” growth prospects, while James Cakmak at Monness Crespi Hardt said he was no longer sure even LinkedIn’s slower growth would be sustainable. LinkedIn took a beating even though its earnings report was consistent with recent performance. As usual, it beat earnings expectations, then issued a lower-than-expected sales forecast for the year. It delivered a similarly disappointing projection in last year’s second quarter, at which point its stock dipped 19 percent. But now Wall Street is more skeptical of the tech stocks it once assumed would grow forever. Until Feb. 5, LinkedIn looked like an ideal tech stock to own, almost like a combination of Facebook and Salesforce.com. A free network for professionals, it has the ingredients to grow virally, like a social media company. It sells services to recruiters, salespeople, and marketers, giving it several ways to snag recurring revenue. “This was considered one of the preeminent names, like Facebook and Google,” says Peck. Now reality is setting in, and to expand, LinkedIn has to do more difficult and expensive things, like developing and selling more product lines. “When companies hit these growth walls, people just react really strongly,” says Lemkin. Walls are springing up all over. On its earnings call, LinkedIn announced it had shut down Sales Accelerator, a software tool designed to connect businesses with potential customers, because of a lack of interest. Analysts had said the feature would be worth millions. LinkedIn’s overall user growth slowed, it got tougher to hold on to paid users, and the company had to lean harder on its sales staff. Small factors added up, and analysts were “blindsided,” says Monness Crespi’s Cakmak.

• Delivery Start-Ups Face Road Bumps in Quest to Capture Untapped Market: DoorDash, one of a multitude of start-ups with a mobile app that lets people order and get food sent to their doorsteps, relies on contract drivers like Brian Navarro to make the deliveries. The problem is that workers like Mr. Navarro don’t always stick around. Mr. Navarro began driving for DoorDash and another delivery start-up, Postmates, in Los Angeles about four months ago. Mr. Navarro, 40, who previously drove for the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, said he had seen plenty of contractors quit DoorDash and other delivery companies during the time he has worked with them. The issue is just one headache now troubling delivery start-ups, which have been among the hottest sectors of start-up activity in recent years. Based on a belief that the companies would succeed once they grew to enormous scale, investors poured more than $730 million into delivery firms like DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates from early 2014 through the first half of 2015, up more than 1,100 percent from the same period a year and a half ago, according to data from CB Insights, a venture capital analytics firm. But entrepreneurs and investors are beginning to find that the economics of making a delivery service work are far from easy. Good Eggs, an organic grocery delivery service, laid off more than 100 employees and shuttered its offices outside its San Francisco headquarters in August. Instacart, the grocery delivery service, recently laid off 12 recruiters, which the company said was “part of an overall plan to slow down hiring” after a growth spree last year. And DoorDash has been turned down by some venture capitalists as it has tried to raise new financing, according to three people familiar with the company’s plans. The problems are rooted in the high operating costs of the start-ups, which typically act as middlemen between consumers and restaurants or grocery stores. The companies not only have to pay for large fleets of drivers, they also have big groups of employees who receive customer orders from the apps and who then manually make calls to the restaurants to order food. At the same time, to attract customers, many of the start-ups offer introductory prices and discounts, often making delivery free for first-time users. As DoorDash’s experience with drivers shows, the start-ups’ costs don’t necessarily decline over time. For some drivers, who are paid a fee per delivery, it can be difficult to make enough deliveries in an hour to make it financially worthwhile for them. And when drivers move on, the companies must spend again to recruit replacements.

• Groupon Soars 23% On Favorable Earnings: Not dead yet, deal site Groupon soared 23% in initial after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings release. The company beat revenue forecasts, bringing in $917 million, instead of the anticipated $846 million, and a 9% year-over-year increase.  Adjusted earnings per share was a four cents, whereas Wall Street was expecting zero. This is quite the bright spot for the company — until today, the stock had been down 71% in the past year. Shares closed Thursday at $2.24, a far cry from the $20 per share the company saw when it went public in November 2011. Groupon has expanded beyond its core local deal business, acquiring services like Ideel, for fashion discounts and OrderUp, for food delivery. But perhaps until now, nothing has been able to change investor perception that the Groupon brand is tarnished. At one point, the company held acquisition conversations with Google, around a $6 billion price tag.  Today, Groupon closed the day with a market cap of $1.4 billion.

• The Difference Between Facebook and Twitter: Twitter Is Lonely for New Users: The simplest reason Facebook has built a massive gap between the two companies over the past three years is that you don’t feel alone on Facebook. It’s easy to find connections because everyone you’ve ever met and their mother is already on the social network. (Seriously, all my friend’s moms have Facebook accounts.) Posting isn’t intimidating because you know who’s going to see it (your approved friends), and you’re almost always guaranteed some kind of feedback on what you share. It may be a “pity Like” from your cousin or your college roommate, but I can’t recall ever seeing a Facebook post that didn’t have at least one like or comment. I don’t care who you are, social validation feels good. Twitter, on the other hand, is lonely, especially for new users. Unless you’re a politician or a celebrity, signing up for Twitter probably means spending your first few days on the service (if not weeks or months) with close to zero followers. Tweeting into a black hole is not fun. Finding relevant conversations is not easy, and venturing into strangers’ conversations takes courage. It’s still too hard to find people to follow when you first sign up on Twitter. The company has made it easier to follow celebrities and media organizations you might want to hear from, but finding people you might actually interact with is a massive challenge the company still hasn’t figured out. I see engagement-less tweets all the time. These things hurt Twitter’s growth because they push people away before they ever see benefit from the platform. That’s why, as of two years ago, nearly a billion people had signed up for Twitter, most of whom never stuck around. (The numbers of deserters is probably much higher today.) The easiest way to fix this problem is to fix Twitter’s feed, which does a great job funneling in a constant stream of live updates and a horrible job helping your tweets get seen. I have 11,000 followers, people I assume follow me because they want to see what I’m tweeting. I tweeted 22 times last week, and my tweets were seen, on average, 3,500 times apiece. (This includes one super-popular tweet that got lots of views thanks to a retweet from an NFL player with a big following.)

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 30

• Instacart’s crazy-growth days may be coming to an end: the $2 Billion Grocery Delivery Startup, Lays Off 12 In-House Recruiters:  The grocery delivery startup, which investors valued at $2 billion last year, laid off 12 in-house recruiters earlier this month, according to multiple sources. A spokeswoman confirmed the layoffs, but did not disclose how many recruiters the company still employs. In a statement, CEO Apoorva Mehta attributed the job cuts to the company’s plans to be less aggressive in hiring in 2016 than it was in 2015, when its staff tripled, from just under 100 employees to a little more than 300. A person familiar with the move, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company likely should have employed fewer full-time recruiters and more contractors since it was unlikely that last year’s pace of hiring would continue indefinitely. Those affected by the cuts will be paid through the end of January, this person said. Instacart delivers groceries in 18 American cities from big chains like Whole Foods, Costco and Target and smaller grocers like Fairway and Zabar’s in New York City. Customers place orders through Instacart’s website or app, and the goods are whisked from local stores to customer doors, usually within an hour. A substantial portion of Instacart’s revenue originally came from marking up the in-store price of a given item, but the company now often charges the same price as the grocer, but takes a cut of the sales from the store. Earlier this year, Instacart finally began being transparent about when it was charging higher prices than its partner grocers.

• First Look at New Foldable Google Glass for the Workplace: The division of Google responsible for wearable technology, Project Aura, has been hard at work on numerous iterations based on the original Glass headset. Now we’ve got a glimpse at what one of those devices may look like. In FCC filings published today, a version of Glass designed for the workplace shows a familiar-looking device with a glass prism, but equipped with a hinge so that it can be folded and placed in pockets like a standard pair of glasses.

• Sidecar Squeezed Out by Uber and Lyft, Will Shut Down on Dec. 31: Sidecar, the third-biggest U.S. car-hailing service, said it will end its ride and delivery operations as the company is squeezed out by better-known competitors Uber and Lyft. One of the pioneers of the ride-sharing concept, Sidecar will end its service on Dec. 31, co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a blog post. The move will help pave the way for the "next big adventure in 2016," according to the letter. Founded four years ago, Sidecar created one of the first apps to try ride-destination tracking, discounted carpooling and deliveries that placed people and packages on the same route, according to its founders. The closely held San Francisco-based company shifted from transporting passengers to goods after struggling to compete with Uber and Lyft, according to CB Insights. "They’re competing with very heavily funded companies, and they didn’t have the same pull with drivers that these other companies might have," said Nikhil Krishnan, a technology analyst at CB Insights. "Even when it pivoted to transporting goods, it still had to compete with Postmates, and even Uber is transporting goods." Sidecar has raised about $35 million, according to Margaret Ryan, a company spokeswoman. That number pales in comparison to venture capital raised by Uber and Lyft. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Uber is seeking $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion. Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing service, is currently seeking to raise $500 million, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg last month. Sidecar’s investors include Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, and Richard Branson.

• Foodpanda India to sack about 330 employees: Foodpanda India is laying off one in seven staffers, continuing its clean-up drive after allegations of operational irregularities rattled the Rocket Internet-owned food ordering marketplace. The company said on Tuesday it will sack 15 per cent of its employees, or 330 people, as increased automation of 98 per cent in order processing has reduced the need for staffers. Foodpanda joins a raft of food-tech startups such as Zomato and TinyOwl in laying off employees amid a tightening in fund flow from investors due to high cash burn and growing profitability concerns. Before the job cuts, Foodpanda had 2,200 employees on its rolls. The company said it will provide affected employees due remuneration and help them explore job options.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday September 16

• Want to Donate to a Political Candidate? Now There's a Tweet for That Twitter said it had partnered with Square Inc., a mobile payment company, to give U.S. political candidates a way to collect donations through tweets. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square, is running both companies after taking an interim CEO job at Twitter, making their cooperation on the donations tool convenient. "This is the fastest, easiest way to make an online donation, and the most effective way for campaigns to execute tailored digital fundraising, in real time, on the platform where Americans are already talking about the 2016 election and the issues they are passionate about," Jenna Golden, head of Twitter's political advertising sales, said in a post on the company's website. The new service comes after a U.S. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2012 that cleared the way for donations by text message and as candidates seek ways to increase the number of small donations from supporters.  Twitter's service allows a user to select a donation amount, pay with a debit card and submit information required by the FEC. Square charges a 1.9 percent transaction fee, according to its website. Twitter doesn't take a cut of the donation, according to the social media company. Campaigns can pay to promote tweets soliciting donations to specific users.

• Facebook weighs a "Dislike" button: Facebook’s famous “like” button, with its silhouette of an upturned thumb, will soon be accompanied by an alternative: a way to “dislike” a post. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Facebook was “very close to shipping a test” of a dislike button. He suggested that the new button would probably be more nuanced than a simple thumbs-down option. His comments nevertheless raised the possibility that Facebook, the world’s largest forum for self-expression, could soon become a less friendly place. The prospect of a new dislike button has been polarizing among Facebook users. As for Facebook’s business — selling ads — a dislike button could cut both ways. It could increase the level of engagement that people have with posts, and therefore the number of ads they eventually see. But a dislike button could also be disconcerting to marketers, who prefer their messages to be surrounded by happy emotions. Over all, it’s probably a good thing to enable people to express feelings and emotions that they can’t express through a like button,” Ms. Williamson said. “But Facebook needs to be careful as to how they enable that capability with regard to advertising and all the potentially inflammatory discussions that could occur online.” Mr. Zuckerberg clearly has such concerns in mind. He stressed that Facebook would test the new button before introducing it broadly, and refine it based on user feedback. “Hopefully we’ll deliver something that meets the needs of our community,” he said. Facebook’s decision to experiment with a new button came after much deliberation. In December, Mr. Zuckerberg told a similar meeting of users that the company had been working on the idea but had not figured out how to add a dislike button “so that it ends up being a force for good and not a force for bad.”

• Hewlett-Packard to Cut About 30,000 Jobs, About 10 Percent of Work Force: About 10 percent of the jobs at the current HP, or perhaps 30,000 of its 300,000 employees, will be eliminated, company officials said. “We’re looking forward to operating as two industry-leading companies,” said Ms. Whitman, HP’s chief executive, speaking at a meeting of financial analysts. “You’ll see us doing more pruning of businesses that don’t fit.” Ms. Whitman became the head of HP in 2011. As part of a restructuring announced in 2012, 54,000 jobs have been cut at the company. The new cuts are on top of that. In November, Ms. Whitman will become the chief executive of HP Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell things like computer servers, data storage, software and services to business. The other company, called HP Inc., will focus on printers and personal computers. Ms. Whitman has said the division will enable both businesses to react faster to changing markets. The big job cuts will come from HP Enterprise, in particular jobs at call centers and other service centers in developed countries. HP plans to automate many of the jobs, and build out positions in countries like India and Costa Rica. The services business had been largely dependent on just a few customers, and in 2014 it lost important accounts.

• Salesforce Plans to Give Customers Amazon-Type Analytics: Salesforce.com was one of the early giants of the cloud-computing revolution. Now it wants to be at the center of two of the next big things — big data and so-called computational intelligence everywhere. Marc Benioff, the co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce, is expected to make its “Internet of Things Cloud” a centerpiece of the company’s customer conference in San Francisco this week. Mr. Benioff, who has been skilled at predicting and positioning his company on major tech trends, sometimes with mixed success, hopes he can give nontechnical companies automated customer service and recommendations, the kind of activities done by computing-intensive companies like Amazon. If successful, Salesforce’s Internet of Things could vastly increase the amount of personalization we now see in many products and services. It could also justify the company’s highflying stock price, by making it much more attractive to its own customers. The Internet of Things is a term for online data from machines about their behavior. This service would combine data from devices like sensors and smartphones with customer information already inside Salesforce, like personal profiles and previous transactions. In one example from Salesforce, an insurance company would get data from a car’s bumpers and airbag indicating a collision, and could then send to its customer’s phone messages about current coverage, nearby tow trucks and service centers. Salesforce hopes to bring that capability to thousands of companies, which work with millions of customers. Nothing like that has been done before, let alone in a way that people skilled only in basic spreadsheets could manage. That means Salesforce has to build a powerful sorting and computing technology, and a series of customizable templates that can be easily used in a lot of different businesses. No major company has successfully done that.

• Snapchat is going to charge for extra replays. Snapchat announced a new plan for making money Tuesday — it's going to let you pay for extra replays. According to the company's blog, the ephemeral messaging service wants to let you get a tiny bit more permanent. Users already get one free replay per day, but now Snapchat will let users pay 99 cents for up to three additional chances to see a snap again. "We’ve provided one Replay per Snapchatter per day, sometimes frustrating the millions of Snapchatters who receive many daily Snaps deserving of a Replay," the company said in an official blog post. "But then we realized — a Replay is like a compliment! So why stop at just one?" According to Snapchat, the replays work like this: you can use a replay on any snap you receive but, crucially, can only replay any single snap once. To this point, Snapchat has made its money off advertising, and has not previously charged users for any part of its service. The company, which reportedly turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, has been valued at roughly $19 billion on private markets. But a recent report from Gawker, citing leaked financial documents, indicated that Snapchat had generated just $3.1 million in revenue last year.

• Target Teams With Instacart to Challenge Amazon on Groceries: Target is teaming up with Instacart Inc. to offer same-day delivery of groceries and household items for $3.99 in its hometown of Minneapolis as the big-box retailer rolls out an alternative to Amazon.com’s $299-a-year Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. Target will be Instacart’s second-largest retail partner by revenue, behind Costco, significantly expanding inventory for the San Francisco-based startup as it positions itself as the antidote to Amazon for brick-and-mortar retailers. Instacart delivery charges start at $3.99 per order, depending on its size. Even as sales of books, electronics and clothing shift online, shoppers still prefer supermarkets for food. Companies expect that grocery sales may move to the Web as well and are experimenting to find the best approach. Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, has promoted its grocery delivery service with free 30-day trials in some markets. Google last week announced plans to begin testing a delivery service for groceries and fresh food later this year in San Francisco and one other city.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 13

• Cash burns fast for Uber-like startups that grow city by city - "You have an operations team that is on a city-by-city basis, but you make sure your engineering team is not city-by-city" : The list of city-by-city startups includes mobile car-booking companies Uber Technologies and Lyft, food delivery startup Munchery, parking provider SpotHero, shopping service Instacart and laundry startup Washio. While they rely on technology to deliver new products and services, their business models are a departure from the low-cost ventures built by a few programmers working in a cramped office. Instead, they're setting up kitchens, renting warehouses and hiring local staff. Among the startups that raised a third financing round in 2013 or 2014, 14 are expanding from city to city and have attracted an average of $65 million in funding, more than double the amount raised by the rest, according to PitchBook Data, a financial information provider. Uber is leading the pack, with a presence in almost 300 cities in 55 countries. Valued at $40 billion, the mobile car-hailing startup is on a hiring spree for operations staff, with more than 200 job postings for staff outside of the company's headquarters in San Francisco, from Miami to Moscow. CEO Travis Kalanick's steady ramp-up has required Uber to raise an enormous amount of cash totaling more than $5 billion. In January, Bloomberg News reported the car-booking startup raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt, and that it was still on the lookout to collect more financing. Some investors warn that cash-intensive startups are at risk of flopping, pointing to previous attempts by delivery companies Kozmo.com and Webvan, which also sought to expand city to city in the late 1990s, only to crash when the dot-com bubble burst in the new millennium. Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley investor and startup veteran, cautioned last year that enterprises rapidly burning cash may be unable to survive in an adverse environment.1 Apoorva Mehta, Instacart's CEO, is betting his delivery startup will be nimble enough to avert a crunch. The San Francisco-based company, which raised $220 million at a $2 billion valuation in January, initially sold groceries to customers with a markup. Now, Instacart is more focused on cutting deals with food stores to deliver produce and other goods for a fee. Instacart needs less cash to expand (compared with Amazon, which also delivers groceries in some urban areas) since it doesn't have to build warehouses or large stores. "You have an operations team that is on a city-by-city basis, but you make sure your engineering team is not city-by-city," Mehta said.

• Alibaba hiring in Amazon, Microsoft backyard as U.S. cloud unit expands: Alibaba has begun hunting staff in Seattle, home turf of Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, focusing on savvy cloud computing hires as it ramps up U.S. operations. Several recruiters in the region said they had registered the firm's hiring drive, suggesting Alibaba is eyeing staff at rival Amazon as well as Microsoft and Facebook Inc. According to LinkedIn's data, Alibaba has already hired staff away from Microsoft and Amazon. LinkedIn data list Microsoft as the top company from which former employees have joined Alibaba, not specifying the location of the hires, with 20 recruits for unspecified posts at the Chinese company having previously worked at the software giant. With the job openings Alibaba joins the increasingly fierce fight for cloud computing talent in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where it opened a research and development center in what is Microsoft and Amazon's backyard late last year. The Chinese company's arrival on the tech job market is - for now - unlikely to pose a concern to major industry incumbents, who in past years have resorted to increasingly imaginative tactics to recruit scant human resources. Alibaba's moves in the region are at an early stage, and the amount of hiring still comparatively low, said recruiters. The company has fewer than 300 employees in the United States. But Alibaba is looking at Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook in the Seattle area for new blood, particularly developers, said Jerry Taylor, president of Executive Recruiters Inc in Bellevue, Washington. "I'm sure they're going to be web-based as well as mobile-type folks," he said. "They're trying to get a footprint in the United States. What better place to go than their direct competitor in Amazon?" An Alibaba spokesman declined to give details of recruitment. Alibaba's talent hunt coincides with a broader push in the United States this year to win over U.S. business, offering American retailers new ways to sell to China's vast and growing middle class. On March 4 it launched a cloud computing hub in Silicon Valley, its first outside of China. Alibaba has hired at least 10 software engineers or computing experts from either Microsoft or Amazon since July 2014, all but one based in the greater Seattle area, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Li Xiaolong, one of the 10 and a senior staff engineer at Alibaba, openly advertises for like-minded talent on his profile: "We are actively hiring talents in machine learning, data mining and distributed computing, as well as hardcore software engineers to improve the world's biggest e-commerce platform. The location can be Seattle, Silicon Valley, Beijing or Hangzhou."

• Brands Are Now Posting More to Instagram Than Facebook Photo app is marketers' new fave: 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. Facebook does not comment on Instagram's growth outside of official announcements. However, considering the Instagram audience was 100 million two years ago, that tripling of users approaches Facebook's biggest leaps. Facebook went from 100 million to 300 million in an even shorter time span. 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. UPDATE: The survey focused on 250 of the world's top brands, and Facebook counts more than 2 million advertisers. Here's a look at what else L2 and Olapic, the social marketing technology firm, found: Brands post an average of 9.3 times a week to Instagram, up from 7.5 posts a year ago. Facebook posts decreased, meanwhile, from 11.1 to 8.8 per week. Brand fan bases rose an average of 26 percent over the past year. Photos perform better than videos. Users engage with photos 1.03 percent of the time and with videos 0.79 percent of the time. Instagram's Hyperlapse app, which speeds up video into fast-motion action, has fallen out of favor with just 2.4 percent of brands using it since its August launch.

• F.C.C. Sets Net Neutrality Rules: The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday released extensive details of how it would regulate broadband Internet providers as a public utility, producing official wording that almost certainly sets the stage for extended legal fights. The release of the rules had been eagerly anticipated by advocates and lawmakers, as well as broadband and technology companies, since the agency approved new rules for Internet service two weeks ago. The details came in a 313-page document that included the new rules and the legal justifications for them. The rules revealed how the strict laws would be modified for Internet providers, exempting the companies from the sort of price controls typically applied to utilities, for example. But the full text of the new order also raised uncertainties about broad and subjective regulation. One catchall provision, requiring “just and reasonable” conduct, allows the F.C.C. to decide what is acceptable on a case-by-case basis. Opponents of the rules, including many of the leading Internet providers, spent Thursday poring over the document. It was not known who would file the first legal challenges, or exactly what legal arguments would be made. Many experts, though, said the document included plenty of opportunity for different interpretations. The “just and reasonable” provision, said Roger Entner, the lead analyst at Recon Analytics in Boston, “can be stretched like chewing gum.” He suggested that it would inspire a flood of proactive, permission-seeking petitions from businesses large and small. He pointed to mobile-messaging companies like Snapchat or WhatsApp that may be transmitting voice or video and seeking money from investors who want legal assurances before signing checks. “Before acting, you need to know: Is this kosher with the F.C.C.?” The debate about how to preserve the open Internet has persisted for more than a decade, and the F.C.C.’s new rules are not its first attempt to protect it. But the issue picked up momentum in the last year, with President Obama taking the unusual action of publicly urging the independent agency to approve strong regulation. The agency’s order reclassifies high-speed Internet as a telecommunications service rather than an information one, subjecting providers to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act. Its aim is to protect the open Internet, advancing principles of so-called net neutrality by prohibiting broadband providers from elevating one kind of content over another. “Threats to Internet openness remain today,” the agency wrote in the document released on Thursday. “The record reflects that broadband providers hold all the tools necessary to deceive consumers, degrade content or disfavor the content that they don’t like.” Comcast and Verizon, two leading Internet service providers, declined to comment. Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, called the order’s publication the beginning of “a period of uncertainty” that the company was confident would be resolved “by bipartisan action by Congress or a future F.C.C., or by the courts.”

• Educational toy maker LeapFrog, once unique, is battered by the app disruption: Battered by a growing variety of cheaper alternatives, LeapFrog, a dominant maker of educational toys and games, has watched its sales plummet. It has become the target of short-sellers, investors who bet on a company’s failures, and was most recently sued by shareholders who claimed it had drastically overestimated consumer demand for its products. “As each year passes by and more apps are for free and they’re lower priced, it becomes a tougher sell,” said Jim Silver, the editor in chief of TTPM, a toy review website. Slow to adapt, critics say, LeapFrog has become something of a modern-day fable for how quickly technology has unseated the toy industry’s titans. Mike Wood, a lawyer, created the company upon realizing how few educational products existed for his 3-year-old son, who was having trouble learning to read. He founded the company in 1995, and in 1999 introduced the first LeapPad, an electronic book with audio and pen that helped children learn to read. As technology evolved, LeapFrog seized the opportunity to create a tablet just for children: no web-browsing abilities and a limited set of games. It introduced the original LeapPad tablet in 2011 for $100 at a time when the average tablet in the United States sold for about $470, according to data from Euromonitor. Sales skyrocketed. Sean McGowan, an analyst with Needham and Company, estimates that the company sold 1.2 million tablets the first year, and more than doubled that in 2012, when the LeapPad 2 came out. The hardware, combined with its software and content, most likely made up more than half of the company’s revenue, Mr. McGowan said. “Back then, not every family had an adult tablet they were willing to give to their child,” said Gerrick Johnson, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets. Just a few years later, however, the idea of a tablet that appeals precisely because it can do a limited set of tasks seems almost quaint. Older generations of iPads have become hand-me-downs from parents to children, while tablets get cheaper every year. Parents can program their grown-up devices with educational games, instead of buying a separate specialized system. Sales of various LeapPads to retailers began to plateau in 2013, according to Mr. McGowan, who estimates that they dropped more than 40 percent in 2014. On a weekday afternoon, Flora Bojadziev, a chef from Harlem, browsed through a Toys “R” Us in Manhattan. She was looking for educational toys for her 2 ½-year-old son, who plays with her iPad. But she balked at the idea of spending $130 on LeapFrog’s LeapPad Ultra XDi, an educational tablet for children, on sale in the aisle a few steps away. “With that money, I’ll buy him so many apps,” said Ms. Bojadziev, who is 33. That is precisely the problem for LeapFrog, which built a multimillion-dollar company on children’s devices before babies learned to swipe the screens of iPads.

• Intel cuts revenue forecast as desktop demand weakens - shares down 5%: Intel Corp (INTC.O) slashed nearly $1 billion from its first-quarter revenue forecast as small businesses put off upgrading their personal computers, sending the chipmaker's shares down more than 5 percent. Fewer companies than Intel had expected replaced desktop PCs running on outdated Microsoft operating systems, leading to weak demand for its chips. Intel also cited "challenging" macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe. "The macro environment is not robust enough for people to upgrade their PCs the way they normally would," Topeka Capital Markets analyst Suji De Silva said. Intel said on Thursday that it expected first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion, plus or minus $300 million - about 7 percent lower than its earlier forecast of $13.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million. Though dominant in the market for chips used in PCs, Intel has been slower than rivals such as Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) to adjust in recent years to the growing popularity of smartphones. When Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) wound down support for its Windows XP operating system last April, Intel had expected a bounce in demand from small- and medium-sized businesses. But this has not happened. Businesses and consumers are taking an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude to their old PCs, Summit Research analyst Srini Sundararajan said. According to BlueFin Research Partners, 75 million-76 million PCs will be shipped worldwide in the first quarter, a decline of 8-9 percent from the preceding quarter. Intel, whose historic "Wintel" alliance with Microsoft once delivered breathtakingly high profit margins, has been trying to offset the impact of slower PC upgrades by making chips for devices such as "2-in-1s", which function as both laptop and tablet. Intel said the mid-point of its gross margin range would remain at 60 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points. Intel's shares were down 4.8 percent at $30.76 in late afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday January 14

• Instacart raises another $220M, valued at > $2B; Pinterest like UI, nimble org drive 10x growth in 2014: Instacart announced it had closed a $220 million round of venture capital from Silicon Valley investors like Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. The new round brings the total amount of funding raised to $275 million, and values the company at a whopping $2 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continuing ties to the company. It is an ambitious bet on the future of how we think about grocery shopping and delivery services. The company, which was founded in 2012, allows customers to peruse the online catalogs of their favorite grocery stores — like Whole Foods, a major Instacart partner — and schedule deliveries directly to their homes. The user interface is akin to other consumer tech start-ups, like Pinterest, and lays out everyday grocery items in a simple-to-browse grid. Instacart is currently available in 15 American cities. The concept is not entirely new. Competitors like Fresh Direct, which operates primarily in New York, have offered local grocery delivery services for more than a decade. And even larger technology giants like Google, eBay and Amazon — companies with much more money and vastly greater resources than Instacart — have tried to play in the space with their own same-day delivery services. Apoorva Mehta, Instacart’s chief executive, said his company’s size and structure is why it is likely to succeed. “We have the ability to try new things in a very quick way,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “We don’t hold inventory, we don’t own warehouses, we don’t own trucks. The changes we make are software changes.” That, Mr. Mehta said, is in stark contrast to companies like Google and eBay, which are much larger and offer a wider range of delivery items. Ebay Now, eBay’s same-day service, touts its ability to deliver anything from big-screen TVs to hammers and nails from companies like Best Buy and Home Depot. He said Instacart’s focus on one particular type of product, groceries, allows the company to be more nimble than its competitors. The proof, Mr. Mehta said, is in the growth numbers. Instacart would not provide specific financial information, but it said that its revenues grew by more than a factor of 10 in 2014, and doubled in the final quarter of last year alone. While the company employs only around 100 employees, it has more than 4,000 contract employees who do its shopping and delivery.

• IBM Introduces z13, a mainframe with potential eCommerce applications: more coverage here IBM has designed the latest version of the mainframe, which is being introduced on Wednesday, with the smartphone in mind. The new mainframe, the z13, has been engineered to cope with the huge volume of data and transactions generated by people using smartphones and tablets. IBM spent $1 billion to develop the z13, and that research generated 500 new patents, including some for encryption intended to improve the security of mobile computing. Much of the new technology, Mr. Rosamilia said, is designed for real-time analysis in business. For example, he said, the mainframe system can allow automated fraud prevention while a purchase is being made on a smartphone. Another example, he said, would be providing shoppers with personalized offers while they are in a store, by tracking their locations and tapping data on their preferences, mainly from their previous buying patterns at that retailer. These real-time applications, according to Donna Dillenberger, a distinguished engineer at IBM’s Watson lab, can be done in a mainframe environment. They are not yet possible on clusters of smaller, industry-standard computers, she said. But there are several open-source software projects, like Apache Spark, that focus on real-time data processing across large numbers of computers.TechCrunch reports: IBM claims this machine has the ability to process 2.5B transactions per day, the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every single day, or so they say. Mike Gilfix, who is director of enterprise mobile at IBM said with its latest model, the company paid particularly close attention to the growing complexity around mobile transactions and designed the system to handle the intricate interplay between systems, while maintaining security with what they are calling “real-time mobile encryption,” and providing high-end analytics on the fly. As an example, he talked about a single eCommerce transaction on a mobile device. When we touch Buy, he explained, it requires a bunch of different systems to communicate including credit card transactions, inventory control and shipping — and they all have to work in tandem. He said when you extrapolate that out into billions of transactions moving across conventional networks, the power of the z13 can eliminate much of the lag. Gilfix suggested that the majority of sales would probably come from existing customers in finance, large retail customers and healthcare, and others who have a large investment in data stored on mainframes already. Still, the company is hoping that the mobile nature of this system will attract buyers who might not have considered a mainframe in the past. One scenario Gilfix suggested is using the z13 as a private cloud and running OpenStack on it, which is certainly an interesting idea.

• Alibaba buys controlling stake in digital marketing firm AdChina: China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Wednesday it had bought a controlling stake in online marketing company AdChina, an investment aimed at bolstering its advertising business. Alibaba did not close the size of the deal or the stake it would take in AdChina, a Shanghai-based firm founded in 2007. The internet marketing firm, which generated $51 million in sales in 2011, had filed for a $100 million initial public offering in Feb. 2012, but pulled the listing a year later. The deal is the first Alibaba has disclosed this year, after spending more than $6.2 billion on acquisitions in 2014, the same year as its record-setting $25 billion New York listing. The AdChina investment is geared towards improving Alibaba's online and mobile advertising efforts through Alimama, the group's advertising arm. This unit sells marketing to merchants using Alibaba's e-commerce sites like online marketplace Taobao and online retail platform Tmall.com.

• GoPro plunges on Apple patent win: GoPro shares plummeted 12 percent, their steepest decline since August, after Apple was granted a patent for a remote-control camera system. The stock dropped to $49.87 at the close in New York. The plunge followed Apple gaining a patent today from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a system that lets consumers control a digital camera remotely. Investors are concerned that the patent will let Apple, the world’s largest company by market valuation, make products that are similar to what GoPro offers, said Charlie Anderson, an analyst at Dougherty & Co. Apple sold more than 270 million units of its various products in fiscal 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. GoPro, which went public in June and is trading at more than twice its initial public offering price of $24 a share, has been volatile in recent months. The world’s biggest maker of wearable cameras used by surfers and sports enthusiasts to record their exploits is facing questions about its ability to create a media business around the videos that consumers post online using their GoPro devices. About half of the company’s outstanding shares will also become available on the market on Feb. 17 when a lock-up lifts on employees and other insiders’ shares, Anderson said.

• France’s BlaBlaCar comes to India with ride-sharing between cities; its first expansion outside Europe: While taxi apps like Uber and Ola find themselves in a regulatory quagmire in Indian cities, a new car pooling service has just come in for rides from one city to another. France-based BlaBlaCar launched in India today, its first stop in Asia. This follows the arrival late last year of Tripda from Brazil, another ride-sharing marketplace. “India, with its young, highly connected population, and multiple major urban hubs separated by long distances, has great potential for ridesharing. Chronically overcrowded transport infrastructure forces travellers to book their train or bus tickets weeks in advance, while the high price of fuel makes long-distance car travel often unaffordable. BlaBlaCar will make last-minute city-to-city travel both available and affordable. Car-owners will be able to offer seats to co-travelers, so they can travel together and share fuel costs,” says Nicholas Brusson, co-founder of BlaBlaCar. BlaBlaCar connect drivers who have empty seats in their cars for a long distance ride with co-travellers. The charge for the co-traveller is limited to sharing the fuel and running costs; so it’s not meant to be a profit-making avenue for drivers. The company usually takes a 10 percent cut from what the co-traveller pays or driver receives. BlaBlaCar had a US$100 million funding round last year, and operates in 13 countries in Europe. India is its first market outside Europe. BlaBlaCar will initially operate out of Delhi and its satellite town of Gurgaon, connecting cities in north India. Delhi is where Uber got into trouble last month after the arrest of a driver for raping a young woman, and still faces a ban as regulators insist on compliance with their rules. Car pooling services like BlaBlaCar, however, have yet to come under that kind of scrutiny. BlaBlaCar’s co-founder makes a distinction between a marketplace model and a taxi app. “At Uber, you don’t choose your driver,” says Brusson. “At Blablacar, there’s a two-way community where you need acceptance from both sides.”

• App Annie raises $55M in series D: App Annie, an app analytics service for developers, revealed today that it has secured US$55 million in series D funding. The investment eclipses the previous US$17 million round in May 2014, which was accompanied by news that it had acquired competitor Distimo for an undisclosed sum. App Annie’s newest input comes from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greycroft Partners, and IDG Capital Partners. App Annie claims it doubled its team to 300 employees in 2014 and tripled its revenues.

• Flipkart reports some marketplace stats: Flipkart today said it aims to help over 10,000 sellers generate business worth Rs 10 lakh through its platform this year. “In 2014, Flipkart helped over 2,000 sellers become millionaires through Flipkart sales. December 2014 alone saw over 500 sellers doing an average business of Rs 10 lakh each, while 50 sellers did an average of Rs 1 crore each,” Flipkart said in a statement. With a year on year growth of close to 30 per cent, apparels and consumer electronics categories have the most number of sellers who have crossed the millionaire mark followed by sellers of home decor, jewellery, handicrafts and large appliances. Nearly 60 per cent of millionaire sellers came from metros (Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) and the rest from the non-metros, it said. “2015 projections estimate that the numbers from the latter will double,” the statement added.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 31

• Grocery delivery startup Instacart is now valued at over $2B: Instacart has raised an additional $210 million, according to an SEC filing on Monday. The filing confirms a Series C funding round reported earlier this month, which values the company at more than $2 billion.

• Payments at a Tipping Point: Password-less authentication will drive more mobile transactions in 2015: "Today, 85 percent of transactions are still done via cash, but 2014 started changing the game for payments, and I believe we’re at an inflection point to push more payments than ever into the digital realm for 2015 thanks to innovations in authentication, shopping on social networks, and near field communication-based payment technology. The truth is only about 1 percent of commerce happens on mobile today, which is hard to believe considering there are now more mobile devices than people in the world. But I think that’s all about to change, and authentication is going to be an even bigger driver in mobile shopping and conversion in 2015."

• Good news for Chinese smartphone brands: Taiwan clears Xiaomi, others of breaching data privacy: In September, Taiwan's government began performing independent tests on Xiaomi phones after media reports said that some models automatically send user data back to the firm's servers in mainland China. Taiwanese regulators cleared on Tuesday Xiaomi and other smartphone brands of breaching local data protection laws after national security concerns triggered that proble. The probe, which also involved Chinese handset makers Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp, was a reminder of the scrutiny Chinese technology firms are subject to abroad as governments become increasingly wary of potential cyber security threats from the world's second-biggest economy. Privately owned Xiaomi, whose budget smartphones are popular throughout Asia, was previously accused of breaching data privacy. In August, the company apologized and said it would change a default feature after a Finnish security company said Xiaomi collected address book data without users' permission. 

• Uber must add 'panic buttons' to operate in Delhi: Taxi firms including Uber, the online cab-hailing company banned in New Delhi, will have to install panic buttons if they are to operate in India's capital under new rules framed after allegations that a driver for the U.S. firm raped a passenger.The Delhi government now wants all taxi operators, including aggregators such as Uber, to have a fleet of taxis running on clean fuels and fitted with tracking devices and emergency buttons. "The licensee shall ensure the facility of a panic button in the radio taxi so that in case of any distress, the signal is transmitted to the control center of the licensee and therefrom, to the nearest police station/police control room," Delhi's transport office said on its website.