Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 1st,

• Souq, Online Retailer in Middle East, Gets a $275 Million Boost:  Souq.com, an online retailer based in the United Arab Emirates, said on Monday that it had raised $275 million from international investors. It was a vote of confidence for digital commerce in the Middle East, which has made little headway compared with elsewhere. Souq, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, was founded in 2005 on an eBay-like online auction model, but it subsequently evolved into more of an Amazon-style set-price retailer. It has been a rare success story in a region where online businesses face logistical problems, political challenges, stifling bureaucracy and regulations that vary greatly from country to country. Souq’s latest round of funding included money from the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management, as well as from Standard Chartered Private Equity and the International Finance Corporation, which is an arm of the World Bank. Souq, which means market in Arabic, did not provide details on what the funding round meant for its overall valuation, and it has not released details on its annual sales or profit. The $275 million funding round was, however, the largest ever disclosed by a technology start-up in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Wamda, a research firm based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. Even after multiple fund-raising rounds, the Jabbar Internet Group — which sold Maktoob, a news site, to Yahoo for more than $150 million in 2009 — still holds a majority stake. Souq, now the largest online retailer in the Arab world, ships hundreds of thousands of products across the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also has operations in Egypt.

• For the first time, Google’s self-driving car takes some blame for a crash: A Google self-driving car sideswiped a bus this month, the first blemish on the otherwise spotless driving record of the company’s vehicles. Google’s 53 vehicles have driven more than 1.4 million miles autonomously and been in 17 crashes, but never been at fault before. The crash took place at 3:20 p.m. Feb. 14, about three miles from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google’s car was attempting to make a right-hand turn on red, and moved to the right side of a wide lane on El Camino Real to pass traffic stopped at the light. But as Google’s car neared the intersection of Castro Street, its path was blocked by sandbags around a storm drain, according to a report Google filed with the California DMV. Google’s car tried to go around the sandbags by cutting into the line of vehicles on the left side of the lane. Instead, it struck a metal piece connecting the two halves of an accordion-style bus, according to a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority spokeswoman. Google said its car was going less than 2 mph and the bus was moving at 15 mph. Both parties said there were no injuries and described the crash as minor. The 15 passengers on the bus were transferred to another bus following the accident. Google characterized the crash as a misunderstanding and a learning experience, saying its cars will learn that large vehicles are less likely to yield than other types of vehicles.

• This Water Pitcher Orders New Filters From Amazon Using Wi-Fi. It Could Be the Future of Shopping. The future often seems silly in the present. Case in point: Brita’s new “smart” water pitcher. The “device” is indeed primarily a water pitcher, designed — you know — to clean and hold water. But the pitcher, which goes on sale today on Amazon, does something else that helps explain why Brita is charging $45 for it, compared to $20 to $32 for other Brita pitchers that hold the same amount of water. It connects to the Internet and senses when a given filter has purified all the water it was meant to, after about 40 gallons. It then pings Amazon.com and automatically orders a new $5.99 filter for delivery. Call it programmatic commerce, and expect it to be around for a long time. The partnership between Brita and Amazon is part of a bigger initiative at Amazon dubbed the Dash Replenishment System. The goal is to allow products like water pitchers, computer printers and pet food dispensers automatically to order related, necessary items from Amazon without a human lifting a finger (after a one-time setup). At a higher level, it fits perfectly into Amazon’s ongoing mission to shrink the time between wanting and buying. What started with one-click purchasing has escalated to Wi-Fi connected physical buttons to order mac and cheese, reordering items by talking to the Amazon Echo speaker and now filter-summoning pitchers.

• Raspberry Pi 3 Launches — 50% Faster, With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth And An Eye On IoT: A major new Raspberry Pi microprocessor has been announced today: the Pi 3 Model B board becomes the new top-of-the-line Pi, with a 64bit 1.2GHz quad-core chipset and 1GB RAM it’s being slated to offer a 50 per cent power bump over the Pi 2. But is still priced at just $35 — the original Model B Pi price-tag, four years on from its debut. Round about this time last year the Pi Foundation launched the 900Mhz quad-core Pi 2 — which was 6x faster than the then top-of-the-Pi-line Model B+ board, and dubbed an affordable “entry-level PC”. Also priced at $35. The Foundation is touting the Pi 3 as opening up “even more possibilities for IoT and embedded projects”. Speaking to the BBC, Pi founder Eben Upton said: “This is the first Pi you can stick behind your TV and completely forget about.” “The two main things that people do with their Pi are use it as a PC replacement or use it as an embedded computer,” he added. “The Pi 3 is doubling down on both those things rather than going looking for new things to do.” The really big deal here is the inclusion of built in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. The Pi 2 had Ethernet but makers wanting the board to support wireless connectivity had to add a wi-fi or Bluetooth dongle. The Pi 3 removes the need to buy wireless add-ons, so it’s being positioned for out-of-the-box IoT development and as a powerful IoT hub that can link together multiple in-home connected devices. Back in November, the Pi Foundation launched another new board: the single core 1GHz Pi Zero delivers a lot less on the processing performance front and lacks on-board connectivity options (a wi-fi dongle can be plugged into its micro-USB port) but it costs just $5 — a price-point that’s clearly targeting makers wanting to build individual IoT/connected devices. The more powerful and well connected Pi 3 doubles down on the growth in IoT devices the Pi Zero was seeking to encourage — following on from the Pi 2, which was capable of running a version of Microsoft Windows that’s designed to support IoT apps (aka Windows 10 IoT; formerly called Windows Embedded). At a launch event today the Foundation said it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full compatibility between the new Pi 3 board and Windows 10 IoT.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 15

• Creating a Computer Voice That People Like: The challenge of creating a computer “personality” is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction.Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones. Voices have been added to a wide range of everyday objects like cars and toys, as well as household information “appliances” like the home-companion robots Pepper and Jibo, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo speaker device. A new design science is emerging in the pursuit of building what are called “conversational agents,” software programs that understand natural language and speech and can respond to human voice commands. However, the creation of such systems, led by researchers in a field known as human-computer interaction design, is still as much an art as it is a science. It is not yet possible to create a computerized voice that is indistinguishable from a human one for anything longer than short phrases that might be used for weather forecasts or communicating driving directions.Most software designers acknowledge that they are still faced with crossing the “uncanny valley,” in which voices that are almost human-sounding are actually disturbing or jarring. The phrase was coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He observed that as graphical animations became more humanlike, there was a point at which they would become creepy and weird before improving to become indistinguishable from videos of humans. Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language. Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machine-learning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

• Why robots and smart thermostats keep America’s spy chief up at night: Some people are already used to having their personal information exposed in massive data breaches. But the rise of artificial intelligence and connected computers in everything from toasters to implanted medical device could dramatically raise the stakes of digital security. In fact, they topped a long list of "global threats" that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper unveiled Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services committee. "The Internet of Things will connect tens of billions of new physical devices that could be exploited," Clapper wrote in his Senate testimony. "Artificial intelligence will enable computers to make autonomous decisions" that hackers could disrupt to cause chaos. For the nation's spy chief to place those threats so high on his list is a big deal, and it reflects how deeply concerned the intelligence community is about the potential pitfalls of these technologies. But Clapper also found a silver lining, writing in his assessment that the technology can "also create new opportunities for our own intelligence collectors." In other words, you can expect America's intelligence community to use driverless cars, smart thermostats and automated networks for spying purposes, too. And indeed, in the written assessment Clapper notes that "intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," in the future. Back in 2013, for example, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a company that sold web-connected cameras. The privacy watchdog alleged that faulty software packaged with the devices, which were marketed as secure, left private video feeds exposed online, eventually allowing hackers to share links to live streams from 700 customers' homes online. More alarming is the potential for people to be able exploit devices to cause lethal results, from medical equipment to cars. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration warned hospitals not to use one kind of drug pump after researchers uncovered a flaw that "could allow an unauthorized user to control the device and change the dosage the pump delivers, which could lead to over- or under-infusion of critical patient therapies."

• Apple May Ditch Samsung For Next iPhone Chip: Apple and Samsung have been asymmetric competitors for years, fighting to grab smartphone market share and partnering when it comes to chips. According to a recent report from The Electronic Times, TSMC (the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) will be the only company manufacturing the A10 for the next iPhone. Samsung won’t be working with Apple for the next iPhone. This isn’t an overnight change as Apple has already been working with TSMC in the past. The A9 chips in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are currently manufactured by both TSMC and Samsung. Before that, TSMC was the sole supplier of the A8 for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Using multiple manufacturing partners provide different advantages. First, it’s a good way to make sure that you won’t have any supply shortage. Given that Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones per quarter, it’s unclear whether Samsung alone or TSMC alone can manufacture enough chips for all these phones. Samsung and TSMC also manufacture chips for other phones as well. Second, negotiating with multiple companies lets you get better prices. It’s unclear whether Samsung is more expensive than TSMC, but Apple can drive the prices down as the A10 represents a huge contract. Finally, Apple can pick the most efficient design. TSMC’s A9 was slightly better when it comes to battery life. So Apple might favor TSMC for this reason as well. According to The Electronic Times, TSMC should start production of the A10 in June ahead of the iPhone 7 release this Fall. It could feature a 10nm design. We’ll have to wait for an iPhone 7 teardown to learn more about the A10. For the end customer, it doesn’t change much if your iPhone chip is manufactured by TSMC or Samsung. Both companies implement Apple’s own CPU design. But Samsung’s chip business could take a hit from this failed contract.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 4

• Lenovo Tumbles as Sputtering PC, Phone Demand Hammers Sales: Lenovo Group Ltd. plunged in Hong Kong trading after quarterly revenue declined for the first time in more than six years on stalling demand for phones and computers. Shares fell 10 percent in their biggest decline in two years. The world’s largest PC maker said revenue dropped 8 percent in the three months ended December, even as broadening cost cuts delivered a surprise rise in net income. Lenovo is relying on cutting $1.35 billion from annual costs and eliminating 3,200 jobs to shield its earnings from intensifying smartphone competition and a shrinking market for PCs. While it’s expanding into other businesses, the company still gets more than half of revenue from a market that Intel Corp. last month warned was off to a “soft” start in 2016 amid tepid economic growth. Focusing internationally helped Lenovo lift the proportion of smartphone shipments from outside China to 83 percent from 59 percent. Expansion into markets from India to the U.S. helped shore up margins even as its global market share slipped about 1.5 percentage points to 5.1 percent in the period. The company once hailed as a symbol of global ambitions for Chinese corporations now faces the twin challenges of a competitive global smartphone and PC environment and a home country growing at its slowest pace in a quarter-century.

• GoPro forecasts revenue below estimates, names new CFO: GoPro forecast current-quarter revenue well below analysts' estimates on weak demand for its wearable cameras and the company named Brian McGee as its new chief financial officer. GoPro said McGee, who joined the company from Qualcomm in 2015, would succeed Jack Lazar as CFO on March 11. The camera maker's shares fell 10 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Demand for GoPro's helmet- and body-mounted cameras has been declining as rivals such as China's Xiaomi XTC.UL offer cheaper products and smartphone cameras turn increasingly advanced. GoPro forecast revenue of $160 million to $180 million for the first quarter ending March. The company's revenue fell 31 percent to $436.6 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing the average analyst estimate of $496.1 million. GoPro, which had already released its quarterly numbers last month, reported an adjusted loss of 8 cents per share. Analysts had expected the company to break even on a per-share basis. The company's shares were trading at $9.72 after the bell. Up to Wednesday's close, the stock had fallen more than 80 percent in the past 12 months.

• Cisco to pay $1.4 billion for Internet of Things firm Jasper: Cisco Systems Inc said on Wednesday it was buying Jasper Technologies Inc, a startup that connects devices like cars and medical devices to the Internet, for $1.4 billion in cash and equity awards, its largest acquisition since 2013. Legacy technology companies like Cisco have been trying to find paths for growth while new technology developments, such as the rise of cloud computing, threaten their core businesses. The so called Internet of Things, the area Jasper specializes in, offers Cisco a chance to offer cutting-edge technology to its current customers such as telecommunications companies. Jasper connects devices like cars, jet engines and pacemakers to the Internet and also makes a software platform that helps monitor these devices once they are online. Jasper had been planning an initial public offering and had banks to help it prepare. Its investors such as Singapore's Temasek, Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital, will now get a chance to cash out without having to brave the rocky equity markets which have seen no technology IPOs this year. Jasper's chief executive Jahangir Mohammed will stay on with Cisco and run a new Internet of Things Software Business Unit once the deal closes in the third quarter.

• Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but It Is Still in the Game: There are no obvious signs of distress at the lavish San Francisco headquarters of the cloud storage company Dropbox, where on any given day, its hallways bustle with upbeat, well-compensated tech workers enjoying the customary trappings of start-up life. Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. But that isn’t the image of Dropbox you’d encounter in the news media. Two years ago, the company raised a round of financing that valued it at $10 billion, making it one of the most highly prized start-ups of the tech boom. Now it faces a stock market that has turned unfriendly to initial public offerings of tech companies, not to mention stiff competition from publicly traded companies like Microsoft, Google and Box, the similarly named firm in a similar line of business. As a result, Dropbox’s valuation has been battered by a series of “markdowns” from large investors who appear to have turned skeptical about its future. For instance, the mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price now considers Dropbox’s shares to be worth half what they were at the time of the last fund-raising round. So what’s really going on at Dropbox? Is it thriving or dying? Neither one, yet. When you look inside the company, you find something that defies Silicon Valley’s typical straight-up or straight-down narrative: a complicated story of incremental and potentially accelerating success, but one clouded by outsize dreams of yesteryear. It’s a fate that other Silicon Valley start-ups may be facing, especially with the dip in public and private markets for funding tech ventures. Dropbox’s problems have less to do with the strength of its current business than with a delay, so far, in realizing the towering expectations that once surrounded the company. The start-up is like the college basketball star who manages to turn pro but is still regarded with doubt because everyone has now realized he might never be the next LeBron James. What happens to a company once thought to be worth $10 billion when it turns out to be worth only $5 billion, or $2 billion? According to Dropbox’s executives, nothing too terrible — it can just wait out the market freeze and perhaps grow into its $10 billion valuation. In other words, Dropbox can keep working and may yet turn into LeBron. The murkier issue is not whether Dropbox can build a good business, but whether it can ever become the $10 billion goose that investors had once seen it as. Reports of Dropbox’s demise are premature. But so are reports of its comeback.

• Amit Singhal, head of Search, to retire - will be repaced by head of AI: Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of its global computer system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. He has been involved with many of the technologies that have made Alphabet an engineering powerhouse and one of the world’s most valuable companies. His replacement, John Giannandrea, currently works in artificial intelligence, or A.I., at Alphabet. A.I. has been increasingly important to Google and other companies like Amazon, as they seek to build products that can do things like respond to voice commands, deliver complex alerts about changes to a user’s schedule, or drive a car. In a post to the Google Plus social network, Mr. Singhal indicated that he wished to spend time with his family and intended to give away some of his fortune. “It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate, and make time for my family,” he wrote. Mr. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. A native of India, he has a doctorate in computer science from Cornell and worked at AT&T Labs before Google. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms developed by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google was one of many search engines, but it distinguished itself both in the quality of its results and in building features like spell check, which could offer correct answers to misspelled queries. The early engineering team also developed search-related tools for its advertising, which quickly turned into a very profitable business. Unlike some other early Google employees who scaled back their efforts or left the company altogether, Mr. Singhal appeared to remain fully engaged in advancing search. In an interview last summer, he described his job as looking at “what’s beyond the horizon,” particularly in building ways that people can easily get information from mobile devices. Mr. Giannandrea, 50, came to Google from the 2010 acquisition of another company, Metaweb Technologies. He has played an important role in incorporating machine learning into various Google products, like the image recognition in Google Photos and smart replies in Gmail’s Inbox. In addition to Mr. Singhal’s stated philanthropic and family interests, it is likely that his skills in building large computer networks and in A.I. will still be in demand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 21

• Amazon in talks to lease Boeing jets to launch air-cargo business: report: Amazon.com is negotiating to lease 20 Boeing Co (BA.N) 767 jets to start its own air-delivery service next month, seeking to avoid delays from third-party carriers, the Seattle Times reported, citing cargo-industry executives. Amazon has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up the planes, the newspaper reported on Friday, citing a senior aircraft-leasing company executive familiar with matter.

• Alibaba Heads Into 2016 Struggling With Knock-Off Reputation: Cash-strapped Star Wars fans can pick up Darth Vader figurines and light sabers for as little as $4.59. Tom Brady jerseys go for about a 10th of those on the National Football League’s store. A pair of red Beats Solo headphones can be had for just $107 -- about half its official price. It’s bargains galore at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao: the EBay-like bazaar where buyers meet up with sellers. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma is struggling to shake the company’s reputation as a haven for cheap knock-offs and unauthorized merchandise, 21 months after calling counterfeits cancerous. He heads into 2016 after a bruising year that saw more than $50 billion wiped off its market value amid lawsuits and criticism from Chinese and U.S. regulators. Cleaning up its image next year is crucial to Alibaba’s goal of winning the trust of merchants and shoppers overseas, from where Jack Ma wants to get more than half the company’s revenue within a decade. A cooling Chinese economy makes that effort even more pressing. At home, JD.com Inc. is winning customers partly because it holds the inventory itself and sells directly to consumers, similar to Amazon, a business model easier to police and regulate, said Michelle Ma, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “By now, management should have eliminated this problem,” said Cyrus Mewawalla, managing director of London-based CM Research. “The fact that they haven’t is a worrying sign forinvestors.”

• Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation: Last year, as the deadly and highly contagious Ebola virus threatened to spread around the globe, Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up, was scrambling to find a test that could quickly detect if a person was infected. This was exactly the sort of thing the company was supposed to do. Its fundamental promise was to revolutionize laboratory testing by offering hundreds of different blood tests that could be done through a simple finger stick for a fraction of the cost of typical lab blood work. More than that, Elizabeth Holmes, who started the company in 2003, had a higher-minded purpose. She also wanted to defeat epidemics. The company devoted significant resources to the Ebola effort. “We stopped everything for Ebola — for the world,” says Richard Kovacevich, the former chief executive of Wells Fargo, who joined Theranos as a director in 2013. And then, nothing. Even as other companies received approval from regulators, Theranos watched from the sidelines. “I have no doubt we would have” gotten the green light for the tests, Mr. Kovacevich said. But the crisis ebbed, and the company says getting approval for that test is no longer a priority. Now, after a surprise inspection last summer, the Food and Drug Administration is requiring that Theranos’s equipment and individual tests go through the regulatory process and get approval. This will determine whether its foundational technology is a reality — or, like that Ebola test, an unfulfilled grand promise. While Theranos says it has conducted millions of tests, largely through a partnership with Walgreens, the drugstore chain, no one from outside Theranos has ever verified the technology. Institutions whose names were often linked with Theranos, like the Cleveland Clinic, insist they have not yet had a chance to use the technology. It has struggled to forge business relationships with other potential partners, like Safeway.

• Twitter Stock Closes at an All-Time Low: Twitter stock fell 4 percent Thursday, finishing the session at $23.31, the lowest the stock has ever closed. Yahoo Finance lists the stock’s 52-week low at $21.01, but that was during intra-day trading back in August (the stock closed at $25.17 that day). The stock market was crummy in general on Thursday. But it has also been a tough quarter for Twitter, which has dropped 11 percent since Jack Dorsey was named CEO back in early October. Twitter announced last week that it would finally start showing ads to its logged-out audience, which created a nice stock spike, but it’s clear that investors are looking for more.

• Waze Could Be Google’s Ace in the Hole in a Self-Driving Car War With Uber: It’s 2025. You’re in a big city and have somewhere to be. Fire up an app and an autonomous car — with a driver at the wheel or maybe without one — picks you up. Odds are good the company behind that car will be Uber or Google. The two are set to vie for the reigning position as the transit service platform of the future. Uber has advantages — for one, its name is becoming the verb for ride-hailing, the way Google’s has for search. But Google has the mobile platform, the lead in self-driving tech and deeper pockets. It has another edge: Deep ties with local governments, critical players in making autonomous vehicles a reality. This proximity is thanks to Waze, the mapping startup Google bought in 2013, which has invested heavily in building data-sharing agreements with cities around the world. If autonomous cars are going to work, there needs to be tight coordination of transit data between governments and private companies. Before you can hail a self-driving car, there’ll likely need to be a host of things (designated lanes, re-zonings, ordinances) that let it drive itself. Then there is the planning to ensure they drive effectively. That’s why Google has cut data deals with its flagship mapping product, and why Uber is scrambling to build similar programs. Waze is, from what we can tell, ahead. In its program, called the Connected Citizens Program, Waze hands over info reported by its users, like accidents and road closures, to urban governments free of charge. It has cut deals with 51 cities worldwide; they get fresh data from the app’s users every two minutes. For cities, the program gives them timely, unprecedented data that helps manage traffic flows, safety and (ideally) costs. In Boston, a city not known for its sober traffic design, officials are using Waze data to measure the impact of their planning changes. “We heard that traffic improved anecdotally,” said Connor McKay, a data scientist for the city. “Now we can say that, quantitatively, traffic has improved.” In return, cities give Waze their own traffic data. (This is why you may see some Uber drivers using Waze to get around.) Accurate road information is critical to making self-driving cars work — hence, Uber hurriedly pouring its investor stockpile into a mapping operation. The ballooning ride-hailing startup has had less success currying favor with city officials. It has proved it can get its way in cities, but usually after some messy standoffs. This summer, Waze rolled out its first flirtation with Uber’s turf: A trial in Tel Aviv that lets Waze users pick up passengers along their commute routes. It has since expanded to a few suburbs around the city. A Waze rep would only share that the Google unit is “quite pleased with the results.” Waze also insists that its trial is not like Uber — drivers aren’t making money, and the program is framed as a way for cities to tackle congestion problems. It’s a key framing. When governments begin to approach autonomy, they are likely to turn to tech partners they know best.

• How Intelligent Lighting Is Ushering In The Internet Of Buildings:  The LED revolution is over. To no one’s surprise, LEDs have won. Solid-state lighting is changing how we light the world, successfully displacing traditional illumination sources across every part of the global lighting market. Over the next few years, billions of sockets will be in play. This transition has kicked off a new phase of LED adoption — the race to connect every socket. The stakes are high for consumers and vendors alike. A trifecta of qualities — ubiquity, network connectivity and access to power — make intelligent lights a perfect platform on which the promise of the Internet of Things can start to come to life. Behind the scenes, this race to own sockets is really a contest to see who will control the infrastructure of the IoT across our built environment. These intelligent, networked, sensor-laden lights of the near future will form the central nervous system of every smart building. Beyond simple illumination, this “Internet of Buildings” built on top of next-generation lighting systems will forever change the way we interact with the spaces in which we live. In your kids’ elementary school, biometric sensors will track students’ alertness, subtly shifting spectrum to automatically boost their focus any time it starts to wane. Around the corner at the grocery store, beacons embedded in connected fixtures will track every movement you (or your mobile phone) make — from produce to dairy — beaming coupons at you along the way. Even the lights around your home will be intelligent, learning from and responding to the steady stream of data generated by your wearable devices — using light to help de-stress you after a long day or to perk you up on a cold, dark winter morning. Consumer-facing tech giants — Apple, Google, Amazon — see residential lighting as a key step toward the connected home. Why settle for one or two thermostats or smart toasters when you can gather data from dozens of sensor-enabled lights scattered throughout every house and apartment? For networking companies — Cisco, Qualcomm and their ilk — intelligent lighting is an infrastructure play. Billions of connected lights will need new routing fabric, if only to handle the massive amount of new data traffic they will produce. Even the largest building management systems companies — Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, Johnson Controls — see the threat posed to their core businesses in HVAC and physical security as the next generation of intelligent buildings are built on top of new lighting networks. Of course, the traditional lighting players — Acuity, Philips, GE — are deeply engaged in this shift, too. But their success is far from guaranteed. The land grab is on. Who will win?

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 29

• Flipboard's Fanfare Fades as Executives Exit, Sale Talks Stall: Flipboard Inc. debuted in 2010 with the kind of fanfare any startup would envy. The news-reading app piggybacked perfectly on the debut of Apple’s iPad tablet and Steve Jobs’s promise of a new era for digital media. Critics loved Flipboard’s magazine-like layout, created by one of the first software designers of the iPhone, and investors poured money into the company. Almost five years later, Flipboard is struggling to live up to the praise. Several senior executives have departed, including co-founder Evan Doll, and talks to sell the company haven’t reached the finish line, according to people familiar with the plans, who asked not be named discussing private matters. Flipboard’s woes are indicative of a larger malaise gripping startups across the technology landscape as questions emerge about the sustainability of the tech-investment boom. Flipboard is performing well enough -- and, after raising more capital earlier this year, is at no risk of going out of business -- but is no longer a breakaway hit. People are finding media through their Facebook or Twitter feeds, limiting the need for a stand-alone application like Flipboard. Meanwhile, advertising rates -- the company’s main revenue stream-- have been in decline. While Flipboard’s reading app was a showpiece for the iPad five years ago, the company is now working to adjust to a changing digital-news market and live up to its $800 million valuation. Other companies facing similar questions about whether they can make good on early investor expectations -- and lofty private-market valuations -- include online storage service Dropbox Inc., note-taking company Evernote Corp., music-streaming service Deezer SA and blood-testing company Theranos Inc., said Anand Sanwal, chief executive officer of CB Insights, a firm that tracks startup investing. The companies face a challenge in that they could be too expensive for another company to buy, yet may not have the business fundamentals to justify their valuations to public investors through an initial public offering, he said.

• Samsung Deploys Cash Pile With $10 Billion Buyback, Capex Boost, As Phones Fail To Revive Growth: Samsung Electronics is tapping its $50 billion cash pile to buy back shares and invest in its components business after struggles in the smartphone division battered investors. Shares surged. The company will buy back and cancel 11.3 trillion won ($10 billion) of shares and boost capital spending by 14 percent this year, Samsung said Thursday. The announcements came after the company posted profit that trailed analyst estimates. Capital expenditure will rise to 27 trillion won this year as the company invests in chips and display plants.  Samsung is struggling for an answer to Apple Inc. in high-end smartphones, trying price cuts, a $120 rebate program and new models to tempt consumers from buying iPhones. That has prompted a renewed focus on making components for earnings growth, with new semiconductor and display plants to get its parts into other vendors devices. Samsung said it will increase capital spending after posting profit that missed analysts’ estimates as price cuts on new Galaxy S6 smartphones failed to sway consumers from buying iPhones. Capital expenditure will rise 14 percent to 27 trillion won ($24 billion) this year, the company said Thursday. Net income, excluding minority interests, was 5.31 trillion won ($4.7 billion) in the third quarter with profit to fall in the current period, Samsung said. Increased marketing spending, including a $120 rebate program, hasn’t sparked sales of the premium devices that generate fatter profit margins. Samsung is investing in computer chip plants as it tries to revive Galaxy smartphone demand through a new mobile payment service and by releasing larger devices at least a month before the new iPhones to recapture market share from Apple Inc. Shares of Samsung rose 4.9 percent in Seoul, the highest since May. The rally erased their decline for the year.

• Ebay Exceeds Expectations While Paypal Flops: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman defended his strategy of inking deals with big merchants and smartphone applications and offering free peer-to-peer payments as investors sent shares down on concerns the efforts are hurting the company’s quarterly profit. PayPal, in its first quarter as a stand-alone company separate from EBay Inc., said it added 4 million accounts to reach 173 million users. Its total payments volume gained 20 percent to $69.7 billion from a year earlier. But investors reacted to the company’s declining take rate, a measure of how much money PayPal keeps from each payment made on its platform. That metric fell to 3.24 percent in the third quarter from 3.39 percent a year earlier, the company reported Wednesday in a statement, and shares dropped as much as 7.8 percent in extended trading. The goal of the July split with EBay was to make sure that each company could focus on their main businesses. EBay last week reported quarterly profit and sales that topped analysts’ estimates and raised its outlook, sending shares up the most in 10 years. PayPal’s strategy is to attract more customers and merchants and offer them expanded services as competition in the payments industry intensifies with startups Square Inc. and Stripe Inc. as well has Apple Inc. and Google Inc. who are trying to create digital wallets. Even JPMorgan Chase & Co., entered the digital payments race Monday. PayPal is processing more payments in stores like Macy’s and on popular smartphone applications like Uber and Airbnb. But PayPal keeps less money from each transaction because the clients that bring bigger volume to the payments company also have the leverage to negotiate lower rates. The downside of that strategy was on display when Square disclosed its money-losing relationship with Starbucks Corp. The challenge for Schulman is to differentiate PayPal as competition intensifies. Among the additional services the company offers is a merchant cash advance program called PayPal Working Capital, which gives preapproved loans to businesses that process payments through PayPal. PayPal also is getting into the international money-transfer business by purchasing Xoom Corp. for $890 million in a deal announced in July.

• Yelp - struggling so far this year - beats Street expectations on revenue sending shares up 7%: Yelp reported a bigger-than-expected 40 percent jump in quarterly revenue as more local businesses advertised on Yelp.com, its consumer review website. Shares of the company, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, rose about 7 percent after the bell on Wednesday. To Wednesday's close of $22.07, Yelp's stock had fallen nearly 60 percent this year. San Francisco-based Yelp, which gets about four-fifths of its revenue from local advertisers, said the number of local advertising accounts rose about 37 percent to 104,200 in the third quarter. Yelp has been investing to grow its website beyond user reviews by investing in services such as restaurant reservations, food ordering and delivery. The company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $8.1 million, or 11 cents per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a profit of $3.6 million, or 5 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $143.6 million from $102.5 million.

• Verizon says Internet of Things revenue at $500 million year-to-date. Aimed at connecting to the Internet everything from household devices to industrial machines, the business is growing at a "double-digit" rate, Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon said at an event in San Francisco. "A large portion of our revenue comes through connectivity but a significant part of it comes from the application layer already," he said in a phone interview after introducing a platform to help customers develop applications in healthcare, agriculture, utilities and connected cars. Last year, Verizon's annual revenue from the business totaled $585 million. The global Internet of Things market is expected to grow to $1.7 trillion in 2020 from $656 billion in 2014, according to market research firm IDC. Examples include Verizon's fleet management tracking application and a partnership with Intel Corp (INTC.O) to provide water management sensors in vineyards, Lanman said. At the event, Verizon also unveiled a chip that Lanman said halves the cost of connecting low data usage devices like dog trackers to high-speed networks. AT&T has also been working on growing its "Internet of Things" business and previously launched initiatives such as a cloud-based data-analytics platform for companies and a global SIM card for connected cars. AT&T said last week it added 1.6 million connected devices including 1 million connected cars in the third quarter of 2015.

• Alphabet, Indonesian companies to expand Web access via balloons: Alphabet, the new holding company for Google, has teamed up with three Indonesian telecommunications companies to expand Internet access in that country using solar-powered balloons. Alphabet officials, including co-founder Sergey Brin, and representatives from Indonesian companies Telkomsel, XL Axiata Tbk PT (EXCL.JK) and Indosat Tbk PT (ISAT.JK) signed an agreement Wednesday to bring so-called Project Loon to the nation of 250 million people. The project sends solar-powered balloons 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) into the air to deliver Internet access through radio frequency signals to antennae connected to buildings on the ground. The balloons use algorithms to find the best winds to carry them along their charted course. Project Loon is part of Alphabet's secretive X division, where the company experiments with far-off technologies dubbed "moonshots" such as its self-driving car technology. Alphabet and its partners will deploy hundreds of balloons in 2016 over the country of more than 17,000 islands in an effort to determine where gaps in service lie as part of the tests before full-scale service is launched. The U.S. tech company has already tested the project in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia but with only a single carrier. Project Loon Vice President Mike Cassidy said the Indonesian partnership marks the first time it will send signals from multiple telecommunications companies through a single balloon, and that it will be the service's largest deployment to date and could eventually reach 100 million users. Cassidy said the effort is also a model for how Alphabet will move the product into the commercial market. He said the telecommunications companies will use the trial period to determine pricing and billing while Google works out technical issues.

• GoPro Plunges 15% After-Hours Following Q3 Earnings Miss: GoPro took a dive Wednesday after releasing Q3 financials that disappointed street expectations. At the market’s close, GoPro reported a miss on its Q3 earnings, posting an adjusted $0.25 per share on $400.3 million non-GAAP revenue during the period. Those figures compared to street expectations of a $0.29 per-share profit, and revenue of $433.6 million. The action camera maker’s $400.3 revenues represented a 43% year-over-year increase from $280.0 in Q3 2015, with EPS also up significantly from $0.12 in the corresponding quarter last year. The company shipped 1.6 million camera devices in Q3, up 46% from Q3 2014, but still less than the street had expected. Interestingly, GoPro emphasized how important foreign markets, specifically China, had been to the company’s growth. Sales outside of the U.S. reportedly made up more than 50% of the company’s revenue. The company said China was “the fastest growing market in GoPro’s history.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 9

• Facebook to Test Emoji as Reaction Icons: Despite the billions of “likes” bestowed on Facebook posts every month, something has been missing: an option to express a different emotion. On Thursday, Facebook announced it will begin testing six new emotional reactions that you can convey with a simple emoji, similar to the thumbs-up “like” icon that the social networking service has made so famous. The six new emoji depict various expressions, from an open mouth to express surprise to a scowling red face for anger. The other four emotions are love, laughter, sadness and a supportive cheer. The new reaction icons will be available to most Facebook users in Spain and Ireland by the end of this week. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Facebook’s news feed, said the company would evaluate how people in those two countries use the new buttons and refine them, before expanding the rollout to the company’s 1.5 billion users worldwide later this year.

• Facing China Slowdown, Alibaba and JD Find Solace in Russia: Russia’s plunging currency hasn’t weened consumers off foreign goods. Instead, cash-strapped shoppers are turning to online retailers for imported smartphones, jewelry and clothes, giving an unexpected boost to Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. Alibaba’s AliExpress site posted a 40 percent increase in Russian visitors to 22 million in July compared with a year earlier, according to researcher TNS. JD.com, which gets more than half its sales from electronics and home appliances, started its first international site in June in Russia, exclusively offering devices such as Xiaomi Corp. smartphones for about $214. That’s less than half of what an IPhone or Samsung Electronics Co. model with similar technical specifications costs locally. Millions of Russians are sinking into poverty as the collapse in crude prices drags down the economy of the world’s biggest energy exporter, sends the ruble into a tailspin and cuts government revenue. In August, wages fell 9.8 percent in real terms and Russians now face significantly lower disposable income than a year ago. While the economy may be in recession, Russians are embracing deliveries from China. Some 80 million people go online in Russia, making it Europe’s largest Internet market by users, according to East-West Digital News. However, the number of Web shoppers is still about a third of that, compared with 70 percent to 90 percent in the U.S. and western Europe.

• Netflix is raising its prices again. Netflix announced Thursday that it will raise its prices again, this time by $1 to $9.99 a month, giving the streaming video service more money to develop original content. The price increase will take effect on Nov. 11 for new customers. Existing customers will continue to pay the current rate, $8.99 a month, until October 2016. Longtime customers who still pay $7.99 a month will hold onto that rate until at least May 2016. The change may reflect that it is getting more expensive for Netflix and other video distributors to secure deals for television and movie content. In August, Netflix announced it would not renew a deal with cable network Epix, costing U.S. subscribers access to some high-profile movies including "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," "World War Z" and "Transformers: Age of Extinction." Rival Hulu quickly swooped in to make a deal of its own with Epix. The price hike will allow the company to offer more original content, said company spokeswoman Anne Marie Squeo. This year alone, Netflix introduced more than two dozen new series or films, including “Narcos,” a popular crime drama focusing on the life of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel.

• Microsoft’s Mission to Reignite PC Sector May Be Taking Hold: Shipments of personal computers fell nearly 11 percent last quarter, to the shock of almost no one. Sales have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it is becoming harder to remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Yet despite all that movement — or maybe because of it — something curious has emerged in recent months: optimism. “Initiatives like Surface and Surface Book have helped the industry wake up and say, ‘We’ve got to make the industry cool and sexy again,’ ” said Frank Azor, executive director and general manager of Dell’s XPS line of PCs. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business. The company said the goal was to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative. Analysts and industry executives say the strategy may be starting to work. Dell, which still sells millions of PCs, announced on Thursday several new machines that run Windows 10, a new Microsoft operating system. One of them, the XPS 12, is similar to Microsoft’s Surface Book, a “two-in-one” device that combines the keyboard of a traditional laptop with a touch-sensing screen that can be detached for use as a tablet. The Microsoft event on Tuesday, where the Surface Book was introduced, generated the kind of buzz from the tech press that’s normally reserved for an Apple event. Apple itself generated discussion last month about whether it has begun to imitate Microsoft by announcing a new big-screen tablet with a stylus, the iPad Pro. The Surface has been available with a big screen and a stylus for some time.  It remains to be seen whether these efforts will result in more sales. Microsoft has seen terrific growth in its Surface business, which has jumped to $3.6 billion in annual sales from nothing three years ago. But most other big PC makers have not been able to get customers to spend on PCs as they once did. PC owners are holding on to their machines longer, making do with systems that are good enough for their needs. At the same time, they are relying on mobile devices for more of their computing tasks. On Thursday, IDC, the technology research firm, said that global PC shipments declined 10.8 percent in the third quarter from the same period a year ago, slightly worse than the research firm had expected. (Another research firm, Gartner, had pegged the decline at 7.7 percent.)

• Amazon launches platform to build apps for 'Internet of Things': Amazon.com's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, has launched a service to help customers build applications to connect devices through the cloud, the so-called "Internet of Things". The service, called "AWS IoT", will allow factory floors, vehicles, health care systems, household appliances among other "things" to connect through cloud services, the company said on Thursday. The beta version of the service is available from Thursday, Amazon's Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels said at a company event in Las Vegas. The connection to the cloud will be fast and lightweight, making it a good fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life, Amazon said.

• Twitter Opens Up Its Amplify Video Ad Program: Twitter just announced an expansion of its Amplify ad program that should make it accessible to more publishers and advertisers. Amplify is the company’s two-year-old program for video ads. Initially, it involved a direct and somewhat complicated relationship — the publisher would embed a short video clip in a tweet, then the advertiser would both include a short pre-roll ad in the tweet and pay to promote the tweet in Twitter. In the new, open version of Amplify, an advertiser no longer needs to work with a specific publisher. Instead, they choose a content category, then Twitter will automatically include their pre-roll ads in videos tweeted by relevant publishers. (Advertisers can also use Twitter’s other ad targeting capabilities at the same time.) This isn’t just about making the process easier for advertisers — it also gives publishers a monetary incentive to share their video clips on Twitter. We’ve heard that the revenue split is 70 percent for publishers and 30 percent for Twitter, and that publishers will be able to blacklist certain advertisers or categories if they feel like they’re not a good fit.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, August 24

On Friday, US Stocks Fell Most in 4 Years as China Dread Sank Global Markets: Turbulence in financial markets gathered momentum amid intensifying concern over slowing global growth, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a correction and giving other stock gauges their worst losses since 2011. Oil sank below $40 a barrel for the first time since 2009 and was set for its longest losing streak since 1986. More than $3.3 trillion has been erased from the value of global equities after China’s decision to devalue its currency spurred a wave of selling across emerging markets. The worries over slower economic growth come as a strong dollar and plunge in oil prices take a toll on corporate earnings at the same time the Federal Reserve is contemplating the first boost to interest rates since 2006. Investors are selling the biggest winners of 2015. Companies that have come to be known as the Fab Five -- Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple --have seen $97 billion in market value erased over two days. Losses have pushed the Nasdaq 100 Index down 7 percent, the biggest two-day decline since 2008. Apple entered a bear market, dropping 20 percent from a February high.

Hewlett-Packard Bucks Market’s Plunge After Earnings Report: Hewlett-Packard squeezed out a gain amid Friday’s market plunge after issuing an earnings report that kept negative surprises to a minimum.“For the first time in several quarters HP did not mention unexpected bad news,” Jim Suva, an analyst at Citigroup Inc., wrote in a note to investors advising they buy the stock. “Previous quarters HP reduced cash flows, stated higher separation costs, more unplanned restructuring and costs, etc. We now believe the bad news is over.” Hewlett-Packard’s shares rose less than 1 percent to close at $27.47 after advancing as much as 7.6 percent earlier in the day. The stock gave up most of the increase as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index tumbled 3.2 percent, marking the gauge’s worst day in almost four years. Hewlett-Packard sales declined across most divisions in the fiscal third quarter. PC shipments fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter, and companies are spending less on software and services.

A small Canadian city tries to drag intersections into the 21st century: Have you ever sat pointlessly at a red light? There’s no cross-traffic, but the traffic light is clueless, so you’re forced to wait. Miovision chief executive Kurtis McBride feels your pain. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been sitting at a red light with no cars around me and just wondering, ‘Why am I stuck in this situation,’ ” McBride said. His Canadian start-up is bringing modern technology to an industry that is years behind. Smart intersections could learn the traffic patterns and adjust the length of red and green lights to optimize the flow of traffic. Sitting at a pointless red light would be a thing of the past. Miovision envisions full automated intersections that are powered by algorithms. One Canadian transportation agency is currently testing Miovision’s technology in seven intersections on major arteries in Cambridge, Canada. The Waterloo Region wasn’t ready to go all-in on automated intersections, but is trying the technology to learn of malfunctioning lights, and adjust the timing of its lights. Miovision, which is based near Waterloo, raised $30 million earlier this year from investors.

Apple Raises $1.6 Billion in Record Corporate Bond Deal: Apple raised A$2.25 billion ($1.6 billion) with a debut Australian debt sale that’s the largest bond deal ever Down Under by a non-financial company. The iPhone maker sold A$1.15 billion of seven-year notes at a yield of 110 basis points more than swap rates and A$1.1 billion of four-year securities at a 65 basis point spread. Apple, which until November had only sold U.S. currency bonds, has since expanded its debt issuance to euros, yen, pounds and Swiss francs as well as Aussie dollars. The proceeds of Apple’s Kangaroo bond sale may be used to return capital to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends, sale managers said in an earlier statement announcing plans to do an Aussie transaction. The Cupertino, California-based company announced in April it was boosting its capital-return program by $70 billion through March 2017 and would be accessing both U.S. and international debt markets to help pay for it. All of the longer maturity notes from Apple will be fixed-rate securities, while at the shorter tenor they are set to issue a fixed-rate portion of A$400 million and a floating-rate tranche of A$700 million. Initial price guidance on the four-year debt was for a spread of about 70 basis points, while the price talk on the seven-year notes was a gap of about 115 basis points.

Mobile language apps help millions learn less, more often: Smartphone apps that help people learn languages for free or nearly free, a few sentences at a time, are piling pressure on established education firms and setting the pace for how to make lessons more engaging. Phone and tablet-based mobile products from newcomers like Germany's Babbel, Britain's Memrise and U.S.-based Duolingo have overtaken names like Berlitz and computer self-learning pioneer Rosetta Stone in terms of audience, if not yet sales or teaching sophistication, market researchers say. Tens of millions of users are being drawn to the flexibility of practising vocabulary or conversation on the go, either as part of a serious course of study or simply a more productive alternative to casual video gaming. "It is a matter of incremental convenience: smartphone apps offer a wide selection of content that is more easily accessible, anytime, anywhere," said Ed Cooke, founder of London-based Memrise, whose language apps are mostly free. "Binge learners tend not to come back," he said. "People who learn a little tend to come back more regularly."The best mobile apps use voice recognition, email reminders and insights from the psychology of mobile games and cognitive science to keep entry-level as well as advanced users coming back for a few minutes of practice each day. Under pressure from new competitors, Rosetta Stone, which popularized language self-learning with CD boxsets selling for$200, has been restructuring to focus more on business and school sales rather than consumers. To catch up in mobile, it bought LiveMocha, a free online learning site, and created Apple and Android phone apps that give away a bit of content for free in a bid to draw intermediate users to commit to longer courses. Virginia-based Rosetta's share price has plunged 77 percent since its stock market flotation in 2009. Recently, it saw its second-quarter revenue fall 10 percent to $51.4 million, with sales at its consumer business dropping 26 percent.

Dropbox’s Wall Street Challenge: Dropbox boasts a valuation in the $10 billion range. Last February the company hired a new CFO, which for many startups is a signal that their IPO moment is coming sooner rather than later. Nobody knows for sure of course, and Dropbox isn’t talking, but if the company does decide to move forward with a flotation, it could face several challenges in spite of its strong market presence. Dropbox could still have trouble persuading a doubtful Wall Street money machine, which has shown little love for cloud companies, that it can overcome several hurdles: For starters, it will need to convince them that the subscription business model with a different reporting methodology is viable. It must defend its hybrid consumer/enterprise approach — and perhaps face questions where it will concentrate its resources moving forward. Finally, the company with its core business in storage and file syncing has to find a way to overcome the commoditization of these services and the race to the bottom with some of the biggest names in the business.

One of Tech’s Best Investors Keeps Passing on Deals Because Valuations Are Too Damn High: Jeremy Levine knows a good deal when he sees one. As a top venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, he has invested in Pinterest, LinkedIn, Yelp and Shopify well before they reached peak popularity and watched as the last three went public. But over the last 20 months, Levine has led just one new investment, which has yet to be announced. The reason for the pause? Valuations are still just too damn high, he says. “Prices — especially for late stage deals — have been extraordinarily high for a while now and demand flawless execution and a lot of luck,” Levine said in an email following an in-person meeting. “The former is extremely hard to achieve, and the latter is obviously outside anyone’s control. Therefore, I believe a lot of the private deals that have [been] getting done recently are providing very poor risk-adjusted-returns for investors.” “Perhaps the dramatic cool-off in the public markets over the last week will start to change things in the private markets,” he added.

Farewell To Flash: What It Means For Digital Video Publishers: It’s been more than five years since Steve Jobs wrote his infamous “Thoughts on Flash” letter citing the high level of energy consumption, lack of performance on mobile and poor security as the reasons his company’s products would not support Adobe Flash technology. Finally, it appears we’re getting closer to the curtain closing on Flash. Over the years, Flash has become famous for a few less-than flattering features that can all play a role in hindering user experience, including intrusive experiences, increasing page-load times, lowering a site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and security flaws. Despite all these grievances, the digital-video advertising industry has been forced to use Flash because of VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition), a standard that allows a video ad and a video player to communicate with each other. VPAID provides a way to dynamically swap or customize video-ad creative based on ad decisions, and has long been used for Flash-based video ads on desktops. When you consider the fact that Flash needs to be installed (as opposed to HTML5, which requires no installation), it’s easy to see why in the long term, it didn’t stand a chance. This means that if publishers don’t upgrade their format specification, some or all of their video content may no longer be available for people to view; this will certainly affect viewer loyalty and monetization efforts. For example, Flash video ads served in a desktop Chrome browser will load in a paused state, then the user will have to click the ad for it to play. These ads will still register as impressions. However, it won’t take long for programmatic buyers to scale back their bids on video ad inventory garnering a high number of impressions with no quartiles. Publishers need to urge their buyers to prepare for the upcoming Flash-pocalypse because, despite the publishers‘ level of preparation, if their buyers don’t have the proper HTML5 creative assets, it will impact their ability to transact, having an impact on publisher revenue and the ability to successfully implement advertiser campaigns. The most crucial thing for publishers is going to be ensuring that their advertisers and demand partners (ad networks, ad exchanges and advertisers) are providing and hosting HTML5 ad creatives moving forward. Publishers themselves will also need to migrate their tech stack. Not having a complete HTML5 advertising technology stack can potentially impact their ad revenue as buyer bids will eventually subside for non-compatible inventory.

The ‘Unicorn’ Club, Now Admitting New Members: The $1 billion valuation metric was popularized two years ago by the venture investor Aileen Lee. She found that many of the start-ups that reaped the hugest riches for venture capital investors — Facebook and LinkedIn, for example — often reached a valuation of $1 billion or more while they were privately held. Because of their rarity, Ms. Lee called those companies “unicorns,” after the mythical creatures. Since then, numerous start-ups have attained the $1 billion distinction — and topped it. With investors rushing to bet on the next big thing, the ride-hailing service Uber received a valuation of around $51 billion, while Airbnb, the online room-rental service, is pegged at about $24 billion. And every month, more companies are jumping into the unicorn echelon. To find out which companies might be next to ascend, CB Insights, which tracks venture capital and start-ups, conducted an analysis for The New York Times. CB Insights used a proprietary software tool called Mosaic, which analyzes dozens of factors about a start-up, including the amount of money raised by a company, employee turnover, news and social media mentions, awards, customer growth and partnerships. It also examines the overall health of the industry in which the start-up competes, as well as what can be known about the quality of a company’s investors. CB Insights won a grant from the National Science Foundation to build Mosaic, using machine learning and data science to turn unstructured text into a quantitative tool to measure company health. The CB Insights analysis resulted in a list of 50 companies that cover the globe and span different tech sectors but speak to some of the trends from the current boom. Half of the companies on the list are based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the cradle of tech start-ups, but 10 are international, with several hailing from China and India. Ms. Lee, who coined the term unicorn, said there were more $1 billion private companies these days partly because big industries like hotels and taxis were now considered fair game for start-ups. The thing to watch, she said, is whether companies meet the expectations and goals they set when they became unicorns before they burn through the money they raised. “If they don’t do that, they’re in a dangerous position,” she said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 25

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Driven by smart acquisitions, Facebook stock at all-time high; Company valued at ~$250 billion : Facebook set an all-time high today, closing at $88.86 per share, valuing the company at just under $250 billion. However, what’s most interesting in the Facebook bump isn’t the simple fact that it is now worth more — shares and markets gyrate. Instead, it’s the reasons why analysts are more bullish that are notable: Piper cited the Oculus Rift headset as a coming revenue source, while RBC gave the top line potential of Instagram as key to Facebook’s value. Translating those points slightly, it seems that investors are taking into account the revenue side of Facebook’s past purchases, and are adjusting their expectations higher as those acquisitions mature into income streams. That concept underscores how well the social company has done its recent acquisitions.


• How Beacons Are Helping People Network at Cannes, As Festival Tests the Technology for a Second Year: The Cannes Lions festival is testing out beacon technology in the official Cannes Lions app for the second year in row, upping the number of location-based devices set up around venues from fewer than 10 last year to 100. The Around Me section of the app employs location-based targeting to find people who have check into venues. Festival goers can also see which sessions are the buzziest. On top of the geo-targeting, the app crawls LinkedIn profiles to connect online connections offline. And as many ad executives know from cold LinkedIn pitches, that often means meeting someone in real life for the first time. The app sends out mass push notifications to everyone about schedule changes and information about the event. If the beacons detect that someone has stayed in a session for 15 minutes or more, the app will automatically save the session as a favorite. The liked panels then serve as a virtual icebreaker for attendees to find common interests.


• What Online Retailers Should Know About Amazon Business: Amazon Business has replaced AmazonSupply. Amazon Business features a simplified layout with fewer ads and includes products suitable for business purchase. Plus, unlike AmazonSupply, third-party sellers are invited to join Amazon Business. Sellers must be approved to sell on Amazon Business. There are 45 active professional categories within this new marketplace umbrella. To be accepted on Amazon Business, you must meet a sales minimum and have an acceptable seller rating to demonstrate a high level of customer satisfaction. Once approved, you’ll need to set up a Business profile. You’ll then be able to use special features like business-only pricing, quantity-based pricing and more. Buyers must be approved to buy on Amazon Business. To get a buying account on Amazon Business, shoppers need to create a new account and register tax information. Once done, they can add buyers and share payment and shipping information. Amazon Business supports business credentials. Credentials include “ISO 9001 certified,” “Minority Owned” and other quality, sourcing and social responsibility goals.


• The Internet of Things Has Vast Economic Potential, McKinsey Report Says: A study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the Internet of things, a term for sensor-laden machines connected to the web, will in the year 2025 create between nearly $4 trillion to $11 trillion in economic benefits globally. That includes profits to device-makers, efficiencies, new businesses and savings to consumers from better-run products. It is difficult to measure the current economic benefit though, because most people now working with the technology are still in the early investment phase. The biggest gains will be made by companies that figure out how to adapt to the new technology, the report said. On an oil-drilling platform, for example, this might mean knowing by the temperature or chemical changes in a pump that something may have happened upstream, away from the pump. In managing city traffic, this could mean learning how to correctly balance information from cars, roads and traffic lights. “This puts a premium on predicting incidents based on data from a multitude of sources,” said Michael Chui, one of the report’s authors. But it will be a challenge for companies to find ways to both organize and take advantage of that information.


• Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up: Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No.?2 Box and No.?3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.


• Now you can use Facebook Messenger without Facebook: Are you one of the 1.44 billion people who use Facebook? Then this post isn't for you. The company made an announcement Wednesday for those other folks -- the Facebook holdouts who are probably tired of being pestered by their friends to give in and sign up already. Now they can talk to their friends on Facebook without having to open account, via Messenger. The option is limited, for now, to people in the United States, Canada, Peru and Venezuela. But non-Facebook users in those countries can use all of the Messenger features, including group and multimedia messaging, by simply signing up for a Messenger account. "With this update, more people can enjoy all the features that are available on Messenger – including photos, videos, group chats, voice and video calling, stickers and more," the company said in an official blog post. "All you need is a phone number."Communication, generally, has become a bigger focus for Facebook, which is attempting to to build a family of social apps that extends beyond its core social network. Giving Messenger a larger potential install base is an easy way for Facebook to continue that spread, although its growth shouldn't worry WhatsApp users. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no plans to merge the two services any time soon.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 29

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• Amazon offers limited free shipping on same-day delivery orders; a study shows same-day delivery, free returns get shoppers online: Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it will offer limited free same-day delivery under its Prime shipping service as retailers try to outdo each other on delivery deals, and expanded the service to San Diego and the Tampa Bay Area. Amazon offers same-day delivery to Prime members for $5.99 per order and non-members for $8.99, plus 99 cents per unit. The online retailer will allow Prime members free same-day shipping on orders over $35, Greg Greeley, head of Prime, told Reuters. "We know same-day delivery volumes will grow dramatically now that we are making it free," he said. Amazon's announcement comes within days of rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc saying it plans to test a new unlimited online shipping service this summer for $50 per year, a move that may hurt Amazon, which has an annual $99 Prime shipping service. Prime has become the cornerstone of Amazon's growth - and a testing ground for new services ranging from television programs and movies to delivery-by-drone. In 2014, Amazon spent billions of dollars on Prime shipping and has invested $1.3 billion in its Prime video service. Earlier this year Amazon said U.S. Prime membership increased 50 percent in 2014. In December, it said customers ordered more than 10 times as many items via same-day delivery this holiday season, compared to a year earlier. A recent study of 1,400 online shoppers by Walker Sands Communications found that free shipping was the feature most likely to get people to shop online, followed by free returns and one-day shipping.

• As usual, a slew of announcements at Google I/O: Google introduced technologies ranging from a brand new mobile-payments system to a virtual-reality camera rig in front of more than 6,000 software engineers at the Web company's I/O developer's conference in San Francisco. A security makeover for Android: Android M: The next iteration of Google's operating system, which runs on 79 percent of smartphones around the globe, is getting a security makeover, with more robust privacy controls and restrictions on apps' data access. Fingerprint scanning will also become a more integral part of Android, adding another layer of security. Google plays catch-up in virtual reality with Cardboard: Of all the gadgets Google unveiled at last year’s event, Google Cardboard was a surprise hit, putting virtual reality into the hands of everyday users without the high costs that come with specialized devices, such the Oculus Rift. Now, Google is taking the gadget more seriously, seeing it as a way to catch up to Facebook and Microsoft in virtual reality. It's also a way to get affordable, wow-factor technology into more peoples' hands, drawing them closer to Google's Web-based services. Unlimited free storage on Google Photos: While it might seem like a minor upgrade, Google just solved a major problem for mobile users in one fell swoop by enabling unlimited free storage for photos and videos. Google Take Maps Offline: With all the talk of cloud services and streaming media, it's easy to forget that for many people around the world, a mobile data connection is a scarce, expensive resource. To make such existing products as Maps better suited to these customers, Google is adding both search and turn-by-turn directions to the app's offline mode. An OS for the Internet of Things in Project Brillo: Google unveiled Project Brillo, a set of technologies to connect more household items to the Web. The platform aims to make it simpler for developers to build applications for everyday devices.

• Google's announcements on Android Pay and Google Wallet pit it squarely against Apple once again: Google lays out its ambitions for your phone, your home, your car and your wallet: Google made clear Thursday that it's still fighting a multifront war against its old rival, Apple -- and that the battles are as heated as ever. Google on Thursday confirmed the arrival of Android Pay and a revamped Google Wallet, an overhaul of the company’s mobile payments products. Both products are a shift from the company’s past mobile commerce efforts, which largely flopped. The new services, like the world of payments in general, are not simple. Here is how they work. Android Pay is essentially a digital payments system that consumers can use to buy things online or in stores from retailers and others who also use the service. It works almost the same way that Apple Pay, Apple’s mobile payments product, functions both in online and offline transactions. To use Android Pay, smartphone users with up-to-date versions of the Android operating system will be able to load Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover cards onto their phones. From there, they will be able to wave the phone over the terminals in more than 700,000 stores around the United States to pay for items. Android Pay will also work inside mobile apps from participating developers. Google will use a technology called tokenization to provide merchants with a customer’s payment information without having to hand over their actual credit card number. As with Apple Pay, Google will let customers verify their identity using their fingerprint, a technique which will be built into the next version of Android. Android Pay will also integrate with loyalty programs from a handful of retail partners, which will mean that any points or credits earned at —the point of sale will automatically be added to any loyalty card a customer enters. To date, Apple Pay does not offer this service, an issue that many merchants have asked for privately. Apple plans to discuss its loyalty integration plans at the company’s developer conference next month. Google Wallet, the company’s unsuccessful attempt at a mobile wallet, is not going away. It is just going to serve another purpose. Google Wallet is being reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app, which is a way for customers to quickly and easily transfer money to each other’s debit or bank accounts. That once again pits Google against PayPal, which offers its own popular peer-to-peer payments app called Venmo. It also clashes with Square Cash, yet another peer-to-peer payments app offered by Square. Such services have become popular with younger users. Now all Google, Apple and PayPal have to do is persuade consumers that these new payment methods are better than paying the same way they have always done — smartphone-free.

• Avago to buy Broadcom for $37 billion in biggest-ever chip deal: Avago Technologies agreed on Thursday to buy Broadcom Corp for $37 billion in the largest merger of chipmakers ever, turning a lesser known company run by a ferocious dealmaker into one of the biggest industry players. Avago, which serves the wireless and industrial markets, is offering Broadcom shareholders $17 billion in cash and Avago shares valued at $20 billion. Broadcom is best known for its connectivity chips, which are used widely in smartphones made by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics. The deal is the biggest so far by Avago Chief Executive Hock Tan, who has developed a small chipmaker into a $36 billion company through acquisitions since taking the helm nine years ago. Tan, a serial deal-maker, has trimmed Avago's portfolio by divesting units while bulking up in faster-growing areas. The combined company, to be based in Singapore and known as Broadcom, will be the third-largest U.S. semiconductor maker by revenue, behind Intel Corp and Qualcomm. The merger is the industry's second megadeal this year and is unlikely to be the last, analysts said. The merger will help the companies improve their bargaining position with manufacturers. Irvine, California-based Broadcom has been struggling to grow as competition in the mobile chip business intensifies. The company's revenue increased by just 1.5 percent last year. The new Broadcom would have annual revenue of $15 billion and an enterprise value of $77 billion, the companies said in a statement. Broadcom shareholders will own about 32 percent of the combined company. They would also have the option to choose between various combinations of cash and stock. Avago, which is incorporated in Singapore and also has headquarters in San Jose, California, said it intended to fund the cash portion of the deal by using funds from the combined company and new debt of $9 billion.

• Avago's $37 billion deal to buy chipmaker Broadcom Corp may force Qualcomm, the world's largest mobile chip maker to radically rethink its own strategy: Qualcomm, which has dominated the market for connectivity chips on smartphones, has been looking to extend its reach into data centers and network infrastructure, but may find its way blocked by an enlarged competitor combining Avago's strength in storage and Broadcom's power in networking. "Qualcomm has aspirations of moving into Intel's data center processor incumbency that the Avago storage and now enterprise networking (from Broadcom) capability directly overlays," said Drexel Hamilton analyst Richard Whittington. That could result in Qualcomm creating some sort of partnership with Intel Corpx he said, to combat the reach of the new company. Wall Street analysts generally cheered the deal on Thursday, despite some fretting about price, saying Broadcom's strength in wireless networking, WiFi and Bluetooth chips is a good complement to Avago's presence in industrial and wired devices. That presents a challenge to Qualcomm, which finds itself in a tough spot in the maturing microprocessor business, as smartphone makers such as Samsung, Apple and Huawei put more effort into producing their own chips. Now a Avago/Broadcom tie-up - which will take the name of Broadcom - potentially gives handset makers another viable supplier, giving them more leverage and putting even more pressure on Qualcomm, said IDC analyst Mario Morales.