Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 15

• Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth: In January, Lyft said it raised $1 billion, which is helping fuel the spending spree and steal market share from Uber Technologies Inc. To keep costs in check, Lyft has promised investors to cap its losses at no more than $50 million a month, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.Meanwhile, Uber has been working to fulfill its own promise to shareholders and employees that it would achieve profitability in North America by the second quarter of 2016, a milestone it says it has now reached in the U.S. and Canada. In February, Uber earned an average of 19¢ per ride in the U.S., according to previously undisclosed financial documents. Uber takes about a 25 percent cut of a typical fare, most of which goes to antifraud efforts, credit-card processing, customer support, marketing, and software development, the documents show. Not included in Uber’s profitability calculations are interest, taxes, or equity-based compensation for employees. Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick’s commitment to profitability has left an opening for Lyft, and the smaller upstart’s free-spending strategy is starting to pay off.  Lyft says it has captured 45 percent of trips in Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles and 43 percent in San Francisco, where both companies are based. Uber says it had 55 percent of ride-hailing sales in Austin, 75 percent in Los Angeles, and 66 percent in San Francisco, citing third-party credit card data from the first two weeks of March. Uber says Lyft has shaken loose only a few percentage points. “From everything I’m looking at, we’re gaining share in all top 20 markets, which is where 80 percent to 90 percent of rides happen,” says Lyft President John Zimmer. “This continues to prove what we said all along, which is once you hit a certain level of scale, it’s a natural duopoly.” Outside of big cities, though, it’s still Uber country. Of 169 million trips booked through Uber worldwide in March, the company says 50 million of those were in the U.S. Lyft says it did 11 million U.S. rides that month, up from 7 million in October. Lyft continues to devise new—and often expensive—ways to expand in the U.S., the only country in which it operates. When a Lyft driver refers someone to sign up as a new driver, both get a $750 bonus in some cities. And Lyft has the capacity to keep spending. Zimmer says the company still has “by far the majority” of the $2 billion it’s raised from investors. “This allows us to control our own destiny. We do not need to raise any additional capital, and it’s just a fantastic position to be in.” Whether Lyft’s gains will stick remains to be seen. Uber says customers lured away by subsidies are the most likely to return if Lyft’s prices go up. “It’s easy enough to buy trips with heavy subsidies for drivers and discounts for riders,” Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Uber, wrote in an e-mail. “But to build a successful, long-term business, you need a path to profitability—which Uber has always had.”

• Rocket Internet Drops in Frankfurt Amid $222 Million Loss: Rocket Internet SE, Europe’s biggest startup factory, fell the most in more than two months in Frankfurt trading after reporting a loss of 197.8 million euros ($222 million) for last year. While Rocket-backed companies continued to increase sales, operating losses widened at several of them, including at food delivery startup HelloFresh and e-commerce site Lazada, which drew an investment from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. this week. Rocket had net income of about 429 million euros the previous year, according to the Berlin-based company’s statement Thursday. The shares fell 10 percent to 26.09 euros at 11:42 a.m. local time after dropping as much as 12 percent, the biggest intraday decline since Jan. 15.

• Whatever Happened to Facebook’s Slack Competitor Facebook at Work? Do you remember Facebook at Work? The version of Facebook specifically built for your office? The one that would send Slack and Yammer and email running for the hills? We almost forgot, too. But hidden among the Internet-beaming drones and 360-degree video cameras Facebook showed off this week at its annual developer conference in San Francisco was a Facebook at Work booth, a small, unheralded reminder that the future of workplace communications is also on Facebook’s radar. Add it to the list. When we last spoke to Facebook about Work, the company was gearing up to launch a freemium version of the software to the masses before the end of 2015. It’s now mid-April 2016, and Facebook at Work is still in a closed beta. So what happened? Is Facebook at Work still part of the game plan? So things are still moving. Just slowly. And that matters because Facebook’s top competition, tech startup Slack, is growing quickly in the interim. Facebook said it has 450 companies using the pilot, up from 100 in August, including some big companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has more than 100,000 employees. More importantly, though, Facebook says it has 60,000 businesses that have signed up for its waiting list. That’s a lot of interested customers, but it’s unclear how many of them would actually pay for Work or use the free model. Slack, for comparison, has more than two million users and more than 675,000 users who pay (or have employers who pay for them). That’s more than 100,000 new paid users since December, the same time we thought Facebook would be out on the open market. Facebook has a tendency to turn small numbers into big numbers very quickly, so it’s not as though a few months’ delay means Facebook at Work can’t ultimately be a hit. But at a conference dedicated to Facebook’s future, Facebook at Work was a side note. And side notes can be hard to remember.

• GoPro’s developer program aims to connect its cameras to cars, toys and apps: GoPro on Thursday very quietly took the wraps off its new developer program, by which it hopes to get its action cameras hooked into as many third-party devices, vehicles and services as possible. The program was announced at a private event in San Francisco, where it showed off the fruits of various partnerships. The Periscope integration announced earlier this year is an example of what the company is hoping to achieve. There was also a snap-on time-code system that you can use to sync your footage (announced last week, but still new), a mount for kids’ toys from Fisher-Price and add-ons for tracking your route and vital statistics when parasailing, skiing and other extreme activities — you get the general idea. Partnerships with BMW and Toyota also suggest more automotive applications in the future. Perhaps the coolest item, shown off at the end of this highlight video, was a gesture-based camera control system for when your motorcycle gloves or [insert extreme garment here] prevent you from operating the app.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 13

• Facebook Bets on a Bot Resurgence, Chattier Than Ever: On Tuesday, Facebook underlined the rise of bots at its annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. Facebook said it was opening up Messenger, its own messaging app, so that any outside company — from Applebee’s to Zara — could create a bot capable of interacting with people through the chat program. With the move, Facebook is aiming to usher in a new era of customer service by bringing together the 900 million regular monthly users of Messenger with the more than 15 million businesses that have an official brand page on Facebook. Facebook is kicking off the project with partners like Spring, 1-800-Flowers, a weather and travel app called Poncho and news partners like CNN. Facebook is also testing advertising on chatbots as a potential source of revenue. “We’re conversational creatures,” David A. Marcus, vice president of messaging at Facebook, said of chat. “That’s the way our brain functions. That’s the way we’re wired. As a result, it’s probably the most natural interface there is.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also sketched out his grand vision at the conference for the company’s future over the next five, 10 and 15 years. Under his plan, people would accompany Facebook as it builds out a comprehensive global system of communications, virtual reality and shopping. “We all have a desire to be understood and relate to each other,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “We’re always trying to get closer to capturing the purest form.” Facebook’s push into chatbots, which is part of that vision, follows other recent signs of bot life. Late last month, Microsoft released a bot called Tay that was designed to have discussions with people on Twitter — only to curtail the effort when people taught the software to repeat racist and other offensive remarks. Still, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella,trumpeted bots days later at a developer conference, saying the software could be used to produce new methods of interaction.

• Facebook built a 360-degree video camera, and it’s giving away the plans: Facebook finally shipped its new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, a niche product that will likely be as cool as the games and videos you’re able to use with it. That means that Facebook has extra incentive (pressure?) to get people making great content for VR. At its F8 developer conference on Tuesday Facebook plans to unveil part of its plan to do just that: A new camera specifically for filming 360-degree videos, the kind of video that lets you pan or rotate within a scene so you can get a full 360-degree perspective. On top of the hardware, Facebook built a software program to stitch all the video together to create seamless 360-degree views of anything the filmmaker shoots. There’s just one catch: You can’t actually buy this camera anywhere. That’s because Facebook isn’t mass producing or selling the camera to the public. Instead, it’s open sourcing the camera’s specs and design, meaning the info needed to build the camera will be available to the public so that anyone with the time and money could build it on their own. So why would Facebook build a fancy 360-degree video camera and hand over the blueprints? Because Facebook has no interest in mass producing another piece of hardware. It wants 360-degree video content, but it doesn’t need to manufacture a camera to get it. It just needs to show others how to make the camera instead. Oculus did something similar with the first version of its VR headset. Facebook is into all kinds of video content, not just 360-degree video. It’s also making a big push into live video,paying celebrities and media companies to use it new live video feature and putting the tool front and center in its main Facebook app in hopes more people will use it. The idea behind all of this is that getting more people to watch videos on Facebook will help the company sell video ads, which are more lucrative than static or banner ads.It isn’t the only company interested in 360-degree video either. Google partnered with GoPro a year ago for its own 360-degree camera, and it has been delayed by almost six months. Perhaps not coincidentally, Facebook’s 17-lens camera is one lens larger than Google’s 16-lens camera. Apparently size matters, even if you’re handing out the blueprints for free.

• Vietnam's young tech talent pulls foreign funds to booming startup scene: Vietnam's tech startups are emerging as a force to be reckoned with as foreign private equity funds bet the country's talented young brains will yield more successes like the international hit game Flappy Bird. Just last month, financial powerhouses Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered PLC raised their investment in the operator of e-wallet MoMo by $28 million, while Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist 500 Startups announced a $10 million Vietnam-focused fund. One of 500 Startups' shoestring investments is in automated marketing service Beeketing, founded by college drop-out Truong Manh Quan, 26, who estimates revenue this year of $2 million predominantly from customers in the United States. The startup boom is the latest chapter of Vietnam's growing presence in the global tech industry. In the three years since Hanoi-based .GEARS released Flappy Bird, Vietnam emerged from relative obscurity to become the Southeast Asian production hub of South Korean giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. Meanwhile, global tech firms that have long had factories in Vietnam - such as LG Electronics Inc, Panasonic Corp, and Toshiba Corp - have also been expanding into research and development. Part of Vietnam's appeal is a cheaper workforce than in China, as well as membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bloc and free trade deals with the European Union, plus incentives aimed at luring investment away from neighbors. Of particular interest to venture capitalists, however, is Vietnam's tech-savvy population with a median age of just 30.

• Alibaba Expands in Southeast Asia With $1 Billion Lazada Deal: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is making its largest overseas investment with a $1 billion deal for control of Lazada Group SA, taking the Chinese e-commerce giant to Southeast Asia and closer to a goal of shedding its home-market reliance. China’s largest online emporium will pay $500 million for new shares in the closely held company and purchase an equal amount from existing investors, Alibaba said in a statement. Investors selling include Germany’s Rocket Internet SE, British supermarket chain Tesco Plc and Investment AB Kinnevik. The Chinese company is buying its way into a region on the cusp of an online shopping boom, as fast-growing mobile and Internet usage propels consumer spending. Billionaire Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has set a goal of getting at least half the company’s revenue from overseas, with the Lazada deal adding sales of clothing and electronics in six Southeast Asian markets. While the deal is Alibaba’s biggest deal abroad to date, the e-commerce giant is no stranger to mega-acquisitions. It agreed to pay about $5 billion to take full control of Chinese video service Youku Tudou Inc. in 2015. Alibaba shares were little changed in U.S. trading at $77.86 and have dropped 4.2 percent this year. The agreement values Lazada at $1.5 billion, Rocket said in a separate statement. It’s selling a 9.1 percent stake in Lazada and keeping an 8.8 percent slice. Alibaba’s deal values its entire stake in the company at about 15 times its total invested capital of 18 million euros ($21 million), the German technology company incubator said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 25

• A Plunge in China Rattles Markets Across the Globe: Concerns about China’s ability to be a powerful engine of global economic growth have added to worries about the potential impact of higher interest rates in the United States, driving stocks sharply lower in Asia and Europe on Monday. When trading opened in New York, the major market measures went into what was essentially a free fall. While the steepest losses ended within minutes, share prices spent the rest of the day sharply rising and reversing course multiple times. When the day’s roller-coaster ride ended, the benchmark for stocks, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, was down 3.9 percent. That left the index off 11 percent from its May high, in what in market parlance is called a “correction,” its first since 2011. On Monday, the Shanghai composite index closed down 8.7 percent. In Europe, benchmark indexes in Germany, Britain and France fell nearly 5 percent or more. A number of emerging markets were also lower, with leading indexes in Brazil and Indonesia both down around 4 percent. In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 1,000 points before regaining ground. Major US indices recovered some ground but still ended the day down over 3.5% each. The Treasury market was a beneficiary of the fear in stocks. The demand for bonds pushed the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note to as low as 1.90 percent before it settled at 2.01 percent. The recent market tumult began two weeks ago when the Chinese government unexpectedly allowed the value of its currency to drop, partly in response to indications that the country’s economy is weakening. The Chinese moves played into the continuing drop in the price of oil, which has taken the price of a barrel of crude oil down 65 percent over the last year. On Monday, the price of oil, as measured by a benchmark New York contract, dropped below $40. The selling in China has accelerated despite extraordinary government intervention in the last two months aimed at propping up share prices. On Sunday, the Chinese government said that the country’s pension funds would be allowed to invest in stocks for the first time. But the slide on Monday highlighted that the new policy, and several similar recent moves, have not been successful. Many investors are now hoping that the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, will cut the ratio of deposits that banks are required to keep on reserve in a bid to encourage lending and spur economic growth.


• How the stock selloff could kill off some tech unicorns: With so much uncertainty and market volatility, Silicon Valley firms could postpone initial public offerings, cooling a white-hot market for venture funding that has fueled the most lucrative environment for startups in history. Already, executives at RainDance Technologies, a firm that makes genomic tools to detect cancer and other diseases, announced Monday they have pulled their plan to go public, according to Reuters. And the big question is what will happen to the hundreds of startups -- a record 131 are valued at more than $1 billion -- that are now all dressed up for IPOs but with no place to go. "Tech stocks have been getting crushed the past 6 weeks. Many names are down 25-50% from their highs. Today was very tough," Gurley wrote in a tweet last week. "One might reasonably assume that this would have an adverse impact on late stage private market liquidity and valuation. I certainly do. If so, we may be nearing the end of a cycle where growth is valued more than profitability. It could be at an inflection point." Known as "unicorns," the venture-funded firms with valuations of more than $1 billion have exploded in number to 131 companies valued at a total of $485 billion, according to venture capital research firm CB Insights. The sheer quantity of unicorns has for months caused concern of a startup-bubble, with investors racing to put money into bleeding edge innovators and their many imitators, when logically not all will thrive or even survive.


• Visa says its users more likely to complete online purchases than those using PayPal: Visa said on Monday online shoppers using its payment service are 17 percentage points more likely to complete their purchases than those using PayPal. Visa Checkout, which allows shoppers to store their payment information without having to re-enter it every time they make a purchase online, said 66 percent of its enrolled customers completed their transactions after putting items in their shopping cart compared to 49 percent of PayPal's Express Checkout customers. The data was collated for Visa by retail analytics firm ComScore. PayPal's online payment service offers a similar convenience by allowing customers to log into their accounts on a merchant's website. Paypal has not seen this report yet, said Anuj Nayar, senior director of platform, merchant and next gen commerce engagement. Nayar said in addition to PayPal Express Checkout the company has launched a new online payment service called PayPal One Touch, which makes using PayPal faster on any device with a single touch. "Initial reports indicate that One Touch radically improves checkout conversion for merchants and time to checkout for consumers beyond anything else available in the market today," he said. Retailers and payment industry experts have often blamed the high rates of unfinished online transactions, after shoppers add items to their shopping carts, on the tiring process of re-entering payment information every time one makes a purchase. "What has become more and more pronounced is as the size of the screen gets smaller, whether it's a tablet, mobile or a watch, the less likely it becomes a consumer will finish his purchase," Sam Shrauger, senior vice president of Visa's digital solutions, told Reuters.


• Jabong biggest loss-maker among top Rocket Internet ventures: Rocket Internet-incubated Indian fashion and lifestyle venture Jabong has become the top money losing initiative for the German emerging markets and Europe focused internet company. Jabong’s operating loss margin rose far ahead of Southeast Asian lifestyle e-commerce firm Lazada and Latin American e-commerce marketplace Linio in the first quarter of 2015, making it the most operating loss making property among Rocket Internet’s top ventures. Jabong had EBITDA loss margin of (-) 56 per cent last year, an improvement from 2013 when it posted (-) 68.5 per cent. This possibly signals how the firm is trying to push its sales faster with more discounting. This could also possibly reflect net revenues are failing to keep pace with operating expenses. Last year, in the same quarter Lazada sported the biggest EBITDA (earnings before interest tax and depreciation and amortisation) loss margin with Jabong and Linio being neck to neck, as per data shared by Rocket Internet. Also the average selling price of third-party vendors appears to be around 15 per cent higher than that of what Jabong direct e-tails to the customers. The average transaction value (including what it sells directly and products sold by other merchants) in Q1 stood at Rs 1,690 compared with a tad over Rs 1,500 in Q1 2014 and for full calendar year 2014. In the same period, average basket value of products sold directly by Jabong has risen marginally to around Rs 1,423. Third party vendors now represent around one in three transactions on Jabong every day. Meanwhile, Jabong was valued at around $480 million as of last December in its last funding round, according to Rocket Internet’s annual report. This means the firm was valued at around Rs 3,050 crore or 2.3 times its GMV for the year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 12

Amazon quietly shutters product ads that drove traffic to outside sites: Amazon.com Inc quietly shuttered a pay-per-click advertising program that allowed businesses to divert traffic from the retailer's platform to their own websites on Tuesday, saying it would permanently discontinue the program in October. The program allowed many businesses that are not necessarily sellers on Amazon's online marketplace to buy ad space on its website. Targeted ads for specific items would pop up on Amazon's website and drive shoppers to the retailer or manufacturer's own site. "Our customers performed really well with it because it provided a middle ground of being able to partner with Amazon but also not allowing them to see all their transaction data," said Scot Wingo, the executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor, which helps retailers and manufacturers sell on ecommerce platforms. Wingo said the program was known for its high conversion rate and said advertisers were surprised when they received an email from Amazon notifying them of the change this week. Amazon's overall advertising business could bring in $1.26 billion in 2015 worldwide and grow to $1.83 billion by 2018, according to estimates from eMarketer, which tracks online advertising.

Alibaba Is Planning Its Comeback From the World’s Biggest Wipeout of Market Value: It took less than a year for Alibaba to turn from a stock-market darling into the biggest source of shareholder losses worldwide. Alibaba’s fiscal first-quarter sales are projected to climb 33 percent, the weakest pace in at least three years, to 21 billion yuan ($3.3 billion), according to the average of 26 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with a mean growth rate of 56 percent for the previous 12 quarters. Alibaba shares closed Tuesday at $77.34, down 35 percent from their Nov. 10 high. While the stock is still trading above its initial public offering price in September, the company has lost the equivalent of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s entire market capitalization since its peak -- the world’s biggest destruction of market value. The Hangzhou-based company is now ranked 24th worldwide with a value of $194 billion. After its record $25 billion IPO and 75 percent surge in the first two months of trading, Alibaba has been hit by a succession of bad news. Now, China’s biggest e-commerce operator is plotting its comeback. This week’s purchase of a stake in Suning -- Chairman Jack Ma’s largest deal ever -- is part of the company’s push to reach millions of new customers in rural China and abroad through a bigger logistics network. Ma is counting on expansion outside China’s largest cities to offset a slowdown in sales growth that helped erase more than $90 billion of market value since Alibaba shares peaked in November. While the strategy may take time to bear fruit, Wall Street is keeping its faith before the release of Alibaba’s quarterly results on Wednesday. Share-price forecasts tracked by Bloomberg imply a 35 percent rally over the next year, the second-biggest projected return among the world’s 25 largest companies.

Branch8 Lets Merchants Sell Via Multiple E-Commerce Sites With Fewer Headaches: Choice and competition is good for consumers, but it sure makes things tricky for merchants. Assuming that you want to reach shoppers through as many touchpoints as possible (you do), then you’re going to be using a handful of e-commerce sites to sell your stuff in Asia. Beyond just spending time on different sites and dashboards, that means you’ll be managing tricky issues — like inventory, demand, outbound packages and more — manually across a range of different (competing) websites. That’s basically a whole separate job in itself. Indeed, that’s what the founders of one new startup, Branch8, believe. With their service, they are aiming to make a difference and make selling across many sites something that any merchant can do with ease. Beyond consolidating the basic processes beyond selling via multiple services — Amazon, Lazada, Rakuten, eBay and Jumia are among the initial platforms supported — Branch8 also provides analytics to track traffic, it automates price checking and product migration, and connects to third-party logistics services. Those value-adds, Chan said, are where it believes it can really stand out for merchants. “Our differentiator is analytics,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “Few tools track traffic via SKU. While our price tracking tool and the convenience of migrating to new platforms, this process is very manual, are specifically designed to meet merchants’ pain-points.” The service is initially free to use for three months, after which a subscription-based pricing model kicks in. Packages begin at $315 per month, rising to $715 for merchants with larger product ranges and more intensive customer service requirements.

Facebook Now Sells Video Ads Inside Other Apps: Facebook, which has ramped up its own video advertising efforts over the past two years, is now selling autoplay video ads inside apps it doesn’t own. Facebook had already been selling display ads this way. It has an ad network called Audience Network, which lets advertisers use your Facebook data to serve you ads inside other apps, like Candy Crush or Tango. An update to the product Tuesday included the option to buy new ad types, like video ads and carousel ads (you can swipe between multiple images). Video advertising is no longer a rarity. Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram all offer their own video ad products. But selling video ads through Audience Network is still an important update for Facebook, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Video ads are more lucrative than traditional static or banner ads, which is why the social network has been pushing to sell them within its own apps.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 20

• As Advertising on Facebook gets Expensive, Some US Advertisers Switch back to TV: In the pre-Facebook era, with no budget for TV, newspaper or radio advertising, this would have meant we had no feasible way to gain quality exposure at a large scale for years. The Facebook advertising platform changed the course of that fate: We could now bootstrap our marketing — and that was revolutionary. Facebook offered a genuinely disruptive solution with three core strengths. First, it was one of the only platforms that allowed you to accurately measure your results in real-time, letting startups do what they do best — be agile. Second, it provided a superior level of targeting. Want to advertise only to women aged 20-23, who live in Minneapolis, have an annual income of $40K, drive a Mini Cooper and listen to Kendrick Lamar? You got it. To put this in context, to this day, Twitter doesn’t even know the gender of its followers. Third, and most importantly, combining real-time measurable results and superior targeting meant we could scale up quickly. Our marketing dollars on Facebook went a long way, and accurate targeting strategies on our end allowed our tiny budget to catapult the business to $1 million revenues in 2012. Facebook users are clicking more, and advertisers are paying for more clicks. But what are users really clicking on? Facebook calculates its CPCs as cost per every single click the user makes, whether it’s a Like, a share, or a visit to the brand’s website. But in the world of direct-response advertising, where “engagement” is an obscure term (whose impact on either sales or brand awareness no one knows how to measure), Likes and shares are worth absolutely nothing. This is how the real surge of Facebook prices is disguised: For us, Facebook CPCs — cost per any Facebook click — went up 50 percent from January 2014 to January 2015. But our real CPC value — cost per Facebook click to our website — went up by a whopping 127 percent in the same time period. That means that our real Facebook prices have more than doubled YoY, and a sizable chunk of that price increase is due to a service of Likes and shares valued at zero. Large corporate brands are unaware that a hefty share of their Facebook spend is attributed to Likes and shares; newcomers and the biggest spenders on Facebook don’t fully realize what they’re paying for. Same goes for Facebook’s targeting. Yes, Facebook offers superior targeting, but unless you’re running a narrow-niche business, the benefits of targeting have their limits. If I had a business selling on-demand $10K caviar jars that deliver only to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I would be very excited by Facebook’s granular targeting. But the biggest spenders on Facebook are mass-market brands looking for mass-market exposure, and while they may have the option to target by specific neighborhoods, elementary schools or favorite books, they have no business reason to do so. Facebook may be developing more granular targeting capabilities, but its biggest spenders don’t really need it. Big spenders on Facebook are paying a premium for a service they don’t use or need. Today, with its 2014 $6 billion advertising revenues in the U.S. alone, Facebook is exhibiting all the alarming symptoms of a bubble: a service traded in high volumes at inflated and economically irrational prices. we took the plunge and launched a national TV campaign on MTV, Bravo, Lifetime and other networks. When the results were in, we had to rub our eyes to believe it: The CPAs on TV weren’t that far off from Facebook. If I needed any further proof of the Facebook bubble and its irrationally inflated prices, there it was: Acquiring new customers on Facebook with an expert online team, optimized spend and single-image creative was almost as expensive as a full-fledged TV campaign, with third-party agency fees, not-yet-optimized spending, and three different pricey video creatives. In 2015, we have scaled back on our Facebook spend by almost two-thirds and plan to divert that budget into TV advertising. And we’re not alone. Other startups such as Birchbox, Dollar Shave Club and BaubleBar are going into TV, as well, and at least in our case, this is entirely at the expense of Facebook.

• Three Months After IPO, Box, Provider of Cloud-Computing Services, Faces Make-or-Break Moment: Box conducted an initial public offering in January, but had already raised more than $500 million privately. It employs 1,200 people and is considered on the cutting edge of a new generation of companies that provide services to big business customers over cloud-computing systems. Now comes the hard part — survival. Box today is worth $2.1 billion, but losses are continuing to add up while revenue is not growing enough to suit Wall Street’s tastes. The company’s shares are down 25 percent since it went public. And rival services from tech heavyweights like Amazon and Microsoft threaten Box’s business. In its last fiscal year, Box lost $167 million on revenue of $216 million. That was a 74 percent revenue gain from the year before, with a 5 percent bigger net loss. This year, revenue is expected to grow by about 30 percent, a marked slowdown that Mr. Levie hopes the new developer strategy may also turn around. As of its latest earnings report, in March, Box had $330 million in cash. Mr. Levie and his company are nearing a make-or-break point others in this generation of young companies are also likely to soon face: Find a way to cut those losses and stay ahead of deep-pocketed competition or disappear. For Box to compete, it has to get other people to build great things on what it has built in the same way Apple and Google got app makers to create tools that made their mobile software indispensable. At a company conference this week, Box, which has so far focused on Internet data storage and collaboration technology, will explain how it plans to help other businesses build their own cloud services. The goal is to create a so-called ecosystem that ensures continued growth just as Microsoft did with PCs and Apple did with the iPhone. If the plan does not work, it is doubtful that Box will survive as an independent company, and Mr. Levie, for all those high hopes, will become a footnote, someone with a great idea who could not quite turn it into a lasting business.

• AMD Q2 earnings: Stock Drops 10%, Most Since July After Outlook Misses Estimates: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. fell the most since July after the chipmaker’s revenue forecast fell short of analysts’ estimates. Second-quarter revenue will be between $968.2 million to $1.03 billion, the Sunnyvale, California-based company forecast Thursday in a statement after markets closed. Analysts had predicted $1.14 billion, according to 23 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. AMD shares slid 10 percent to close at $2.58 on Friday as the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.5 percent amid a broad decline for stocks. AMD is trying to break away from more than 40 years as a cheaper alternative to Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker. Sales from custom chips that AMD sells for video-game consoles such as Sony Corp.’s PlayStation and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox haven’t made up for falling demand for personal-computer processors.

• China fines Alibaba $129,000 for pricing violations: China's e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, has been fined 800,000 yuan ($129,000) by the price bureau in eastern Zhejiang province for violations by third-party sellers during promotions on its e-commerce platforms. Since Alibaba turned "Singles' Day", a November 11 Chinese response to Valentine's Day, into an online shopping festival in 2009, the event has grown to similar proportions as Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the United States. Sales of more than $9 billion were achieved at last year's event, and the company has copyrighted the phrase "Double 11", a reference to the date (11/11), which in turn, refers to the status of single people. "The company has been fined 500,000 yuan ($81,000) for matters related to Singles' Day pricing by third-party sellers on our Tmall marketplace in 2013 and 2014 and 300,000 yuan($48,000) for pricing in other promotions in 2013 and 2015," Alibaba Group said in a statement on Friday. While pricing is handled by third parties, not directly by Alibaba, the group said, it would nevertheless reinforce pricing rules and regulations with sellers to protect consumers. The 27,000 vendors featured on Alibaba's Singles' Day shopping sites hope to boost sales and gain customers, but some have complained that discounts and cut-throat corporate rivalry undercut the benefits. Alibaba has had occasional difficulties regulating its sprawling e-commerce empire, which now includes online markets such as Taobao; Tmall, a platform for larger retailers linked to Taobao; group-buying site Juhuasuan and the original flagship platform Alibaba.com, which links exporters with foreign buyers. Alibaba shares have lost more than a fifth this year, with analysts citing concern about counterfeits along with lackluster third-quarter earnings and waning investor excitement after last September's record-setting $25-billion IPO.

• Offline to Online: Indonesian conglomerate Lippo prepares for a drive into e-Commerce: Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group has appointed Credit Suisse and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to lead its first round of funding, worth $200 million, for its e-commerce push. Lippo, controlled by the Riady family, has also chosen Rothschild as its financial adviser for the transaction. The funding will be used to "dominate e-commerce in Indonesia," it said in a statement on Monday. Lippo plans to launch payment, chat and other online services early next year as it expands in the nascent e-commerce industry of the world's fourth most populous country, director John Riady told Reuters last month. Lippo has already earmarked $500 million for a new online department store, and investment in services planned for the first quarter of 2016 will be on top of that, Riady said.

• Rakuten Ventures invests in push notification platform startup: Rakuten Ventures, the investment arm of the Japan-based ecommerce titan, announced today that it has made an undisclosed seed investment in a US startup that’s made a push notification platform aimed at mobile app and game developers. That startup is OneSignal, which today rebrands from GameThrive. “If the opportunity arises, Rakuten Ventures would love to see the [OneSignal] team partner up with Rakuten Group to utilize the company’s capabilities,” he adds. Viber, which Rakuten acquired in February 2014, has 236 million monthly active users at the last count, surpassing the much-hyped Line app. While most people are coming to hate spammy push notifications as much as banner ads, they’re still considered by many mobile app developers as a great tool for engagement – to give people a little nudge and some kind of enticement to get back into their app or game. The simple fact is that monetization is a lot harder if people don’t open your app all that often. “Push notifications are a key part of every single mobile application since they are easy to use, have low barriers for user opt-in, and have significantly higher visibility than email messages,” explains George Deglin, the CEO of OneSignal. “Most of our clients use our service to send occasional messages to their users to re-engage users by encouraging them to complete an action or to tell them about new features. We also have many clients using our service for transactional notifications, such as telling users when it’s their turn in a multiplayer game.” The team has recently been working on HTML5 push notification support in Google Chrome and Firefox. “With this, our developer audience will soon expand outside of mobile to include anyone with a website,” adds Deglin.

• Facebook Seeks to Edge Out YouTube - Pushes Publishers for Exclusive, Optimized Content: Hosting exclusive programming appears to be Facebook's latest move toward becoming a dominant player in streaming video. BuzzFeed and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live also recently struck a deal with Facebook, while a number of other publishers say they have projects in the works. There is a strong push to provide exclusive content to Facebook, which the social network is "aggressively" asking for, say several publishers contacted by Adweek. One publisher who requested anonymity noted that while posting a YouTube link to his video on Facebook produced weak results, the same content posted directly to Facebook led to millions of views. Facebook, he said, had "no desire" to see YouTube's preroll ads on its platform as it affected the user experience. "Most companies know that a best practice on Facebook is that an image of a video performs better than a direct link [to a third-party player]," noted Paul Kontonis, executive director of the Global Online Video Association. "But Facebook native video performs better than everything." While Facebook has done a limited number of video ad deals, publishers have been told traditional ads are on the way. In the meantime, sources said the social network will announce the expansion of branded-content program Facebook Anthology at a meeting with publishers, brands and agencies in New York on April 22. Anthology connects advertisers with publishers to create Facebook-native content—Budweiser's 2013 Made in America partnership with Vice, for example. Other Anthology participants include Vox, The Onion and Funny or Die. The finely tuned targeting capabilities around Facebook video are grabbing the attention of marketers. And no wonder. Facebook targeting by age, gender and location boasts up to 94 percent accuracy while its video player can derive deeper insights and metrics than other competitors, including YouTube, per Universal McCann. Still, said Kevin Cronin, partner, search and social at UM, YouTube remains the leading platform for driving views overall. He cautions that if Facebook is asking publishers for exclusive content, marketers creating branded content might balk at having to limit that content to a single platform. James Crolley, media director at Starcom MediaVest, noted that while Facebook has an autoplay feature, videos can easily be passed over in a feed. The challenge, he said, is "it does require creative to be far more impactful."

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 23

• Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, all giant US money managers, are adding Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and other private tech investments to mainstream portfolios: Tech Money Sends Funds on the Hunt for Unicorns: The retirement accounts of millions of Americans have long contained shares of stalwart companies like General Electric, Ford and Coca-Cola. Today, they are likely to include riskier private stocks from Silicon Valley start-ups like Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest. Big money managers including Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price and BlackRock have all struck deals worth billions of dollars to acquire shares of these private companies that are then pooled into mutual funds that go into the 401(k)’s and individual retirement accounts of many Americans. With private tech companies growing faster than companies on the stock market, the money managers are aiming to get a piece of the action. Fidelity’s Contrafund includes $204 million in Pinterest shares, $162 million in Uber shares, and $24 million in Airbnb shares. Over all, there were 29 deals last year in which a mutual fund bought into a private company, and they were worth a collective $4.7 billion, according to CB Insights. That was up from six such deals, worth a combined $296 million, in 2012. T. Rowe Price was the most active big investor, making 17 investments in private tech companies. Because these tech companies are not required to issue financial reports and are not traded on traditional exchanges, they are the sort of speculative investments not normally found in retirement accounts. Increasingly, however, investors are betting that these companies will be bought or go public at prices that exceed their latest funding rounds, a prospect that is anything but guaranteed. “I think it goes beyond what mutual funds were set up to do,” said Leonard Rosenthal, a professor of finance at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass. “It’s great for the portfolio manager, but it’s not necessarily in the interest of the shareholders of the fund. If investors are looking for a portfolio of risky securities, there are plenty of stocks to trade in the public market.” The dilemma for big fund managers is that fast-growing technology companies are so reluctant to sell private stock to the public that there is now a term — “unicorns,” reflecting just how wonderful and magical they are considered to be — for the dozens of private firms worth $1 billion or more. Several, including the ride-hailing company Uber, the room rental site Airbnb and the digital scrapbook Pinterest are worth more than $10 billion. Those lofty valuations, combined with the eagerness investors show in bidding them up, have created a shadowy market for private stock issued to tech companies’ early investors and employees. For the last few years, mutual funds have sat on the sidelines. Now, they are racing to get in. “More and more, the big lopsided growth is happening away from the public markets,” said Andrew Boyd, head of global capital equity markets at Fidelity. Take Uber, which was valued around $40 billion in its latest round of financing, up from $3.5 billion in mid-2013. That is more than 1,000 percent growth, compared with 28 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the same time period.

• China’s Internet Boom seems to fade: Half of the 14 Chinese dot-coms that debuted in the U.S. last year are now trading below their initial sale prices. Even Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., one of those still up in price, has dropped 28 percent from its record high in November. On average, the 14 Chinese shares are down 3.1 percent this year, compared with a 6.1 percent advance in the Nasdaq. Investor confidence, so high when Alibaba brought its record $25 billion initial public offering to market last September, is being undermined now by a wave of poor earnings at Chinese technology companies. Those that went public last year including Weibo Corp., the microblogging service, and mobile dating app developer Momo Inc. have failed to deliver the revenue investors were expecting. Sixteen of 28 Internet and technology firms in Bloomberg’s China benchmark reported fourth-quarter earnings below analysts’ forecasts, including search engine Baidu Inc. and video website Youku Tudou Inc. The percentage of stocks that slid below their IPO levels this year was the highest since 2011, when a series of corporate scandals eroded investor confidence, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

• Shoppers on Lazada last year spent $350 million as ecommerce booms in Southeast Asia: Rocket Internet’s Amazon-esque Lazada saw more than US$350 million in consumer purchases in 2014, group CEO Maximillian Bittner tells Tech in Asia. US$70 million of that spending (termed gross merchandise volume, or GMV) happened in December alone, due to Christmas and special promotions like the 12/12 sales day. The 2014 spending tally represents strong growth for Lazada from US$89 million in 2013. Lazada is this week celebrating its third anniversary. It operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Lazada started out doing only direct sales to consumers from its own warehouses, but that changed in the fall of 2013 as the company launched a marketplace for third-party merchants. Those merchants now take in 70 to 75 percent of the consumer spending on the estore, Bittner reveals. They’re a “core driver of growth” on Lazada, he adds. There are now 15,000 merchants using the site as an online storefront. “It’s not a target to be a 100 percent marketplace,” Bittner emphasizes. “It depends on the best price for consumers” and other factors such as whether Lazada itself or third-party merchants have better purchasing power. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest single market, and Bittner says the archipelago is the top market for Lazada. Indonesia’s shoppers made up over 30 percent of Lazada’s 2014 spending tally. While Indonesia has an array of homegrown rivals to Lazada – from well-funded Tokopedia to the new Matahari Mall – Bittner says the nation is not necessarily a tougher market than the other Southeast Asian countries. “There’s a growing dynamic of excitement” about Indonesia’s ecommerce scene right now, adds Bittner. He adds that exclusive online gadget sales for brands like Xiaomi and Motorola have helped Lazada greatly in Indonesia. Xiaomi uses Lazada as its sole sales channel in both Indonesia and the Philippines.

• Touted by some as the next Facebook, Meerkat is living the dream of every app creator. Three weeks after launching, it is enjoying viral growth. It’s been the talk of SXSW. Presidential candidates and celebrities are using it. It’s been called the new technology that will affect the 2016 presidential election. Prominent investors want to help fund it. 1. Its numbers are multiplying. Meerkat told me Thursday that its user base is growing 30 to 40 percent a day since SXSW started March 13. It signed up 120,000 users in its first two weeks, so should be closing in on the one million user mark. (Thirty-five percent daily growth compounded over a week would put it just short of one million) 2. Its founder is a genuinely likable guy. In a recent interview with Re/code, chief executive Ben Rubin corrected an interviewer who credited him as “the man behind the app Meerkat,” saying “We’re the team behind the app Meerkat.” 3. Meerkat is obsessed with making its user comfortable. If you talk with anyone on the Meerkat team, they’ll almost certainly use the word “comfortable.” It’s a value that’s guided their decisions, including embracing the trend toward vertical video on smartphones. “We wanted to lower the barrier to entry and make the behavior as comfortable and as familiar as possible given that the medium is still pretty unfamiliar to a lot of people within the context of social media,” community director Ryan Cooley told me at SXSW. Rubin made a really interesting parallel between smartphone live-streaming and the first photographs, during a recent interview with host Ryan Hoover on Product Hunt Radio. “When the first cameras arrived, people weren’t smiling. It was weird to smile in a picture. People don’t have that habit of taking a picture or being in a picture. It evolved,” Rubin said. “With live video, we don’t have this habit. My mother didn’t live stream, I didn’t live stream when I was a kid.” The challenge for Meerkat is to make everyone — especially people who aren’t early adopters– comfortable with live streaming. Because Meerkat videos aren’t stored and can’t be rewatched later, it’s a less intimidating experience. You don’t have to worry about slipping up, and having that mistake be re-lived forever. You simply hit a button on your phone, and suddenly people are digitally right there with you.

• Google launches Retail Search Ad with local inventory offering: Early success as Sears Hometown store visits jumped 122 percent: Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores, a retailer fighting for every sale, has evidently found a weapon in Google's Local Inventory Ads that it says works to drive consumers to its stores. The digital marketing product is still fairly new from the search giant, launched last year, and holds the promise of finally helping brick-and-mortar brands take advantage of the online world rather than always getting beaten by it. With that in mind, the Sears spinoff company has been running Google's shopping ads that target by location and reveal whether a product is actually in a location. As part of a Google report today, the retail company claimed that such information has worked to generate 122 percent more visits to its 1,240 shops under the Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores brand. The Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based chain's click-through rate was 16 percent higher on inventory ads when compared to other ad products. "The ad unit is terrific for a mobile experience," said David Buckley, CMO of Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores. "It's highly relevant to where you are, and it's served with an image, price attributes, and how far you're standing from that product. It's the ultimate search ad product for mobile. You can't ask for more than that."

• Ola diversifies to add a mobile-only food ordering option: Online cab booking service Ola (formerly Olacabs), run by Mumbai-based ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, has expanded its business area by adding a location-based online food delivery option under Ola Cafe. Unlike its core business, where one can book a cab ride through the web or through the mobile app, the food ordering option is restricted to its app, making it a mobile-only feature. The new feature is available on the latest update of the Ola app. The firm said this is currently in beta stage. The company plans to go pan-India but, to begin with, it has started the service in four cities — Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Moreover this is not for ordering from restaurants across the city but only from those located near to the user and in some identified areas. The service can be availed from 12 pm to 11 pm. The company did not disclose the number of restaurants it has tied up so far. It did not say if it proposes to use cabs in the vicinity, which do no have a passenger on board yet, to make the deliveries. Users can pay by either Ola money (it’s closed online wallet) or cash on delivery. The delivery person will call customers to confirm the address, just the way a driver of cab or auto currently calls to confirm addresses for pick-ups. Users can also track the person handling the food delivery via the app, like one can do a cab approaching the user.

• Hackers Attack GreatFire.org, a Workaround for Websites Censored in China: For years, a group of anonymous activists known as GreatFire.org has monitored online censorship in China, provided access to blocked websites and collected messages deleted by censors. This week, unidentified hackers have tried to put an end to those activists’ efforts with an unprecedented attack. In a post to its blog Thursday, GreatFire.org said it has experienced a massive so-called denial of service attack. The method is one that hackers frequently use to foil websites by flooding them with multiple requests — so many that they go offline and viewers see a blank page. GreatFire.org creates encrypted versions of 12 websites that are blocked in China. These are known as mirrored websites and grant users within China access to the content. On Thursday, GreatFire.org said it was receiving 2.6 billion requests an hour for its mirrored websites. On Friday, access to the mirrored websites was inconsistent in China. GreatFire.org’s name is inspired by the Great Firewall, the term often used to describe China’s Internet censorship. About two million people in China access GreatFire’s websites each month, a co-founder of the group who uses the pseudonym Charlie Smith, wrote in an email exchange. It was unclear who was responsible for the attack, which began Tuesday from inside and outside China, Mr. Smith wrote. GreatFire.org noted in its blog post that its tactics were the recent subject of a report in The Wall Street Journal, which appeared online Monday. The timing for the attack was a mystery. “Maybe that WSJ story,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Maybe because there have been some excellent Chinese-language news pieces and perhaps somebody who supports the authorities took issue with them. In the past there has rarely been rhyme or reason on the timing of such attacks.” GreatFire.org’s mirroring services provide unrestricted access within China to a range of websites, including itself and the Chinese language version of The New York Times, which has been regularly blocked in China. Some of the others are Deutsche Welle, BBC News, China Digital Times, Google.com, and Boxun, a Chinese-language news website. GreatFire.org says it does not mirror The Wall Street Journal. GreatFire.org works directly with some, but not all, of the websites it mirrors. GreatFire.org is partly funded by Open Technology Fund, a United States government-financed initiative under Radio Free Asia. Last year it provided $114,000 in funding, according to its website. Mr. Smith declined to comment on any financial backing. The Chinese government has in the last year ramped up efforts to prevent its citizens from accessing critical news coverage from abroad and from communicating on social media platforms that the government cannot directly censor. China has long disrupted many of Google’s services. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain blocked. LinkedIn agreed to censor its content to operate in the Chinese market last year. GreatFire’s mirroring websites circumvent the Great Firewall by channeling Internet traffic through cloud services, such as one available from Amazon. The difficulty for the Chinese government is that it can’t just shut off Amazon’s service, because it is used broadly by many major Chinese corporations. Emails to the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese embassy in Washington went unanswered as of Friday evening.

• Web-hosting giant GoDaddy files for $481M IPO, seeking $2.87B valuation: US-based GoDaddy.Inc, an internet domain registrar and web hosting solutions provider, has fixed the price band for its initial public offer (IPO) which may raise $480.7 million, including the portion allocated to the underwriters. It proposes to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), as per a disclosure this week. The firm is offering shares at $17-19 a unit which would value the company as much as $2.87 billion. GoDaddy first attempted to go public in 2006 but ultimately withdrew. It had refiled for an IPO in June 2014. The IPO proceeds will primarily be used for repaying some of the debt the company. took on as part of a 2011 buyout by private-equity firms Silver Lake, KKR & Co. and TCV Investments. GoDaddy currently manages 57 million domains which accounts for around 21 per cent of the world’s registered domains. Since its buyout, it has acquired other services, including Mad Mimi, which helps small businesses promote themselves by email, and Locu, which makes software that manages business-contact information across sites like Yelp and OpenTable. Services made up 8 per cent of its revenue in 2014. The company’s revenue last year was $1.4 billion, up from $1.1 billion in 2013. Its 2014 net loss, which included $85 million in interest costs to service debt, narrowed to $143 million from $200 million a year earlier. As of December 31, 2014, it had approximately 12.7 million customers, and in 2014, it added more than 1.1 million customers. In 2014, the firm generated $1.7 billion in total bookings up from $939 million in 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of 16 per cent.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday February 11

• Facebook edges towards eCommerce; ad giant makes it easier for members to sell: Facebook on Tuesday announced the addition of a new feature for Facebook Groups designed to make it easier for members of a “For Sale” group to list their items. The new “Sell” feature, which is now starting to roll out globally to more groups, will allow members to create a post where you can add a description of the item for sale, set a price and set a pick-up or delivery location. The social network today already hosts tens of millions of groups based around a variety of interests, and “For Sale” groups are one of the most popular categories. In these groups, members use Facebook as an alternative to something like Craigslist for local selling, or as an alternative to eBay for selling collectibles or other items of broad interest, like books or electronics. Currently, members in these “For Sale” groups generally post photos and text descriptions of their items, but the addition of the “Sell” feature will make filling out the necessary information a bit more structured than before.

• ICICI Bank has launched a digital wallet that will allow its users to instantly send money to any e-mail id, mobile number, or Facebook friend, besides a bank account. Called ‘Pockets’, the wallet also enables users to pay bills, recharge mobiles numbers, book movie tickets, order food, send physical and e-gifts, as well as split and share expenses with friends. How it works? After downloading the wallet from Google Play store, users will need to tap on ‘create an account’, and enter basic details like their name, mobile number, gender, email id, date of birth and address. Post that, users will receive a one time password (OTP) on their mobile numbers to create a user id and password, after which they can get started by loading funds into ‘Pockets’ using any bank’s net banking or debit card details. In comparison, existing ICICI bank savings account customers can register for the e-wallet by simply using their internet banking login credentials and authenticating the OTP sent to their registered mobile number. How is it different? The e- wallet uses a virtual VISA card with which users can shop online on any website or mobile application in India. Customers can also request for a physical card to use it at any retail outlet. Users can set up ‘favourites’ from their contacts, thereby allowing them to make payments quickly. From the app, users can also request for a savings account to be added to the e-wallet, and an ICICI bank official will visit them to open the savings account using ‘Tab Banking’. The users can view their account statement and track expenses by clubbing them under a hashtag. Off late, ICICI bank has been launching a number of technology-led services that include the launch of the Windows version of iMobile; fully automated 24X7 ‘Touch Banking’ branches; Tab Banking; and contactless debit and credit cards. Last month, the bank had launched ‘icicibankpay’, which it claims is India’s first service that allows users to send money over micro-blogging site Twitter.

• Top tech firms, already sitting on mountains of cash, are borrowing record amounts. Why? Because they can. Microsoft, one of a handful of U.S. companies with top AAA credit ratings, sold a record $10.8 billion of bonds Monday. The 40-year portion of the offering pays an annual interest rate of 4 percent. The Redmond, Washington-based company had $6.4 billion of cash and cash-like securities on its books as of year end. And Apple, which had a whopping $19.5 billion of cash stashed away at the end of December, is back in the bond market for the second time this month. The iPhone creator raised $6.5 billion in an offering last week and is now heading to Switzerland to sell at least 1 billion Swiss francs ($1.1 billion) in its debut offering in that nation. The party in bonds seems like a win-win for everyone -- for now, at least. Buyers of Microsoft’s $10.8 billion bond sale Monday reaped a $32.7 million reward just in the first few hours after the sale as the debt’s market value climbed. So, what’s the problem? Well, it’s always a little scary when everyone piles into a trade that already seemed crowded. Yields on U.S. investment-grade corporate bonds have fallen to 3.1 percent, compared with 4.7 percent on average over the past decade, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data. Buying top-rated bonds isn’t a guaranteed payday either. These notes are more sensitive to moves in benchmark government yields, a potential liability as the Federal Reserve debates raising interest rates this year. Why should having billions of dollars in cash stop you from borrowing more? That appears to be the logic at top-rated companies like Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. They’re selling bonds at an accelerating clip, locking in cheap interest rates for as long as 40 years. “The cost of capital that you’re paying is so obscenely low that there’s no reason not to” borrow, said Jody Lurie, a corporate credit analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia. Corporate treasurers are wondering: “When is this wonderful market situation for these higher-rated credits going to end?”

• Flush with cash, Apple is expected to expand its share buyback programs, CEO asserts that Apple isn’t a cash hoarder. That’s the message Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook delivered to investors on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. “By and large, my view is for cash that we don’t need -- with some level of buffer -- we want to give back,” Cook said. “It may come across that we are, but we’re not hoarders.” The Cupertino, California-based company is reviewing its capital-return program and will announce changes in April, he said. Apple has completed $103 billion of its $130 billion dividend and stock-repurchase plan, which has been increased several times before. “We started with dividends and buybacks and we’ve tweaked that model every year,” Cook said. “We’ve been sort of on a cadence of once a year we look at it very deeply, very thoughtfully, and we change the program accordingly.” The iPhone maker ended December with $178 billion in cash and marketable securities, according to a company statement on Jan. 27. Of that, $157.8 billion was held by foreign subsidiaries, where the money is shielded from U.S. taxes unless it’s repatriated. The company has raised the equivalent of more than $40 billion in debt in less than two years to help finance dividends and buybacks, including the sale of $6.5 billion in bonds last week and 1.25 billion Swiss francs ($1.35 billion) of bonds in that currency this week. Apple is boosting its borrowing as it seeks to return more capital to investors without incurring U.S. taxes on foreign profits. The company’s cash hoard grew by about $23 billion in the December quarter from the previous period as the introduction of more expensive, larger-screened iPhones helped boost Apple’s profit to a record. China in particular was a bright spot, with sales rising 70 percent. Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn has been pressuring Apple to increase its buybacks, arguing that the stock is undervalued and should be trading at a price that would give the company a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion. The shares rose 1.9 percent to $122.02 on Tuesday in New York trading, boosting the company’s market value to more than $710 billion. “In April, we believe Apple is set to announce a new 3-year total capital return program in the $150 billion to $200 billion range when it refreshes its goals this spring,” Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays Plc, wrote in a note to investors. “We believe management will want to give itself some flexibility to raise this forecast later down the road (its usual practice) and also have some flexibility to re-evaluate the targets should it get more certainty on tax policies.”

• Several of the best-funded startups in Singapore are struggling; rocket startup Lazada is the one unicorn on the list: 1. Lazada, US$686 million: The fashion ecommerce retailer is one of Rocket Internet’s greatest successes so far, and is the only unicorn on this list with a valuation of US$1.25 billion. Thanks to its recent shift to a marketplace model for third-party merchants, Lazada’s sales – or gross merchandise volume (GMV) – doubled in the second half of 2014 as compared to the former half, bringing its total GMV for that year to roughly US$274.2 million. 2. Zalora, US$238 million: The other Rocket Internet-backed startup on the list, Zalora’s last-seen numbers aren’t exactly rosy. According to leaked documents, it had a net negative income of US$91 million in 2012, expecting to reach profitability by 2015. 3. iCarsClub, US$70.5 million: A peer-to-peer car rental platform is a great idea in Singapore, given the high costs of car ownership here. Nailing the execution, however, is a whole different ballgame, and iCarsClub has received some negative publicity in 2014 regarding just that. Still, having a war chest at its disposal will certainly help if it is directed in the right direction. iCarsClub and its Beijing-based spinoff PPzuche now have over 120,000 private cars available in their databases. 4. PropertyGuru, US$53 million: Online property classifieds are a hotly-contested industry in Southeast Asia, but somehow PropertyGuru have managed to stay ahead of the pack. In Singapore, 99.co is the latest challenger. CEO Steve Melhuish had revealed a couple of years ago that the company might go public, but nothing has happened since then. 5. Reebonz, US$40 million, 6. Bubbly, US$39 million, 7. MyRepublic, US$37.5 million, 8. Migme, US$34.6 million , 9. Wego, US$34.5 million, 10. Viki, US$24.3 million

• [Indian startup action] StoreKing, an e-com enabler for offline stores in small towns gets funding from Mangrove Capital: Mangrove Capital Partners, a Luxembourg-based venture capital firm which has backed Skype and Nimbuzz, has invested in LocalCube Commerce Pvt Ltd, an e-com enabler for offline stores in small towns under the brand StoreKing, as per its website. Although the investment amount stands undisclosed, the VC firm typically puts in $5-10 million in a company initially. It is learnt that the transaction was completed a few weeks ago. We have contacted Sridhar Gundaiah, founder of LocalCube, and will update the post as and when we hear from him. StoreKing is essentially an enabler for offline stores to expand their reach. It installs digital kiosks with screens at stores in small towns providing a self-service shopping experience to consumers. It claims it is present in over 600 stores in 22 districts of Karnataka and covers over 190 towns in the state According to its site, its kiosk-enabled stores sees over 50,000 walk-ins everyday and over 200,000 people have registered on its platform and it has sold over 30,000 SKUs to date. The Bangalore-based startup was founded in 2011 by Gundaiah, a computer science engineer who was previously with online travel agency Via.com. He had also founded a location based startup Yulop and in the past worked at Yellow Tag and EDS. Meanwhile, Mangrove Capital’s partner Michael Jackson told The Economic Times that the VC firm has earmarked a corpus of $200-250 million to invest in India’s e-commerce, internet and telecom startups. It has an investment horizon of 5-10 years.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 26

Its a slow day, with not a lot going on, so here are 2 shallow-dives, one into Alibaba's M&A in 2014, and the other on Indonesia's eCommerce market, both courtesy of TechInAsia. 

• Indonesian ecommerce: 
• Online share of retail: This year, of the nation’s US$411.29 billion in retail spending, Indonesia saw an uptick to US$2.6 billion spent in ecommerce. 
• eCommerce Leaders: Lazada Indonesia, Rocket Internet’s answer to Amazon, made the jump to the top spot in 2014. SingPost reasons that Lazada took the lead because it made a shift away from consumer electronics and focused more on lifestyle goods. Lazada’s marketing campaigns in Bahasa Indonesia were also key wins for Rocket. 
• Market Potential: Last year, Indonesia clocked in at 74.8 million internet users. Last year, Indonesia had 4.6 million online shoppers. This year, it has 5.9 million. 20 percent of Indonesian online shoppers prefer conventional shopping sites like Lazada or Zalora, while 26.4 percent prefer social media like Facebook or Instagram. 26.6 percent prefer online forums or classified sites like Kaskus or OLX. 
• User Habits - social media: SingPost says that between January and March 2014, Twitter users in Jakarta posted 2.4 percent of the global total of 10.6 billion tweets during that time period, maintaining the city’s reign as the Twitter capital of the world. However, the nation’s most popular social media channel continues to be Facebook, with 69 million active users. As of September, Indonesia has 30 million Line users. Remarkably, nearly 27 percent of all the country’s ecommerce transactions occurred via social media in 2014. 
• User Habits - messaging: Surprisingly, the highest percentage of online shoppers in Indonesia would rather buy from messaging apps like Blackberry Messenger or Line. 
• Category Preferences: While Indonesians shop across multiple categories, the most popular one is by far clothing and apparel, with 61.7 percent of the nation’s online shoppers making a purchase in that category last year. Females reign supreme in the archipelago’s ecommerce space, with women having higher purchase rates, and the highest spending amount on clothing, mobile devices, travel items, laptops, and accessories. 
• Means of Payment: Bank transfers are the most popular way to pay for online transactions, followed by cash on delivery, and finally credit cards. Less than five percent of Indonesia’s population own credit cards, and credit card payments still account for less than 10 percent of all online transactions in the archipelago.

• Alibaba’s 2014 investments and acquisitions: List below - 33 transactions, known investments of about $5.3B (could be a lot higher, since about half these transactions are of unknown sizes)

Monday, December 1, 2014

• Thanksgiving sales shocker: fewer shoppers, lower spend-per-shopper send Thanksgiving weekend sales (online + offline) down 11% Y/Y to $50.9 billion, from $57.4 billion last year, according to preliminary survey results released Sunday by the National Retail Federation. Sales fell despite many stores’ opening earlier than ever on Thanksgiving Day. And though many retailers offered the same aggressive discounts online as they did in their stores, the web failed to attract more shoppers or spending over the four-day holiday weekend than it did last year, the group said. The average person who shopped over the weekend spent $159.55 at online retailers, down 10.2 percent from last year. Over all, 133.7 million people shopped or planned to shop at stores or online over the four-day weekend, 5.2 percent fewer than last year, the federation said. And shoppers spent an average of $380.95 over the four days, 6.4 percent less than the $407.02 they spent last year. Executives at the retail federation, which had predicted strong growth in sales this holiday season, appeared at a loss to fully explain the drop-off. Black Friday itself may be waning in importance, as retailers increasingly offer deep discounts days, and even weeks, before the traditional year-end sales period. That means many people may have simply done their shopping earlier and stayed home during the Thanksgiving weekend. But even there, the picture was not clear: Mr. Shay said that people also might be holding out for even better deals as the season progressed. He said that the continuous sales had conditioned consumers to expect better deals the longer they waited. “Holiday sales are now a marathon, not a sprint.”

• Amazon's play in after-sale services - among the highest profit margin revenue streams for retailers: Amazon publicly introduced an early release of Selling Services, which we had previously mentioned the company was working on a few months ago. Amazon is developing a marketplace that offers after-sale services such as car alarm installation, iPhone repair, and computer hardware setup to consumers buying relevant products. Today, the marketplace is available in 15 early rollout cities, including New York City and Lexington, Kentucky. For each product, Amazon will list the available services next to the listing, guaranteeing visibility and even potentially increasing sales among customers who are unsure if they can install or use a product. Geek Squad, which was founded by Robert Stephens in 1994 and sold to Best Buy in 2002, is perhaps the most prominent example of a success in this domain. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote last year about the hometown retailer, “Over the past decade, Geek Squad has been a cash cow for Best Buy. […A]nalysts estimate Geek Squad generates a gross profit margin of 40 to 50 percent based on a minimum annual revenue of $2 billion, or about 4 percent of Best Buy’s total revenue of $50 billion.” Amazon will share with Geek Squad has one critical advantage that many other startups in the domain lack: point-of-sale access.

• How Facebook plans to become one of the most powerful tools in politics: The end goal for the company seems clear: Replace, as much as possible, expensive, blanketed television advertising with much more immediate, much more specific ads appearing in users' feeds -- and then cash a whole lot of checks. Assuming you have a Facebook account, which you do, Facebook knows your email address. It probably knows your name, your birthday, where you work, where you worked, and who you're friends with. It knows far more than that, of course, both directly and indirectly. Facebook's partner in the effort Acxiom, also provides a wide swath of other data to Facebook, beyond what you've entered on the site or "liked." This allows campaigns (as it does other advertisers) to target very, very specific groups of people linked tightly to the campaign's voter file. One of the best practices for campaign communication is to sandwich messages, layering a communication (like a piece of mail or a TV spot) with some other spur (like an email or a Facebook ad) both before and after.

• Lazada raises $250M Led By Temasek; valuation at $1.25B; H1 2014 GMV $91M (+202% Y/Y): The round is lead by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, which manages a $100-billion-plus portfolio and this year invested in another Amazon rival: Snapdeal in India. Lazada operates in six countries in Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — largely in tandem with Zalora, another well-backed e-commerce service started by Rocket Internet. This new funding round takes Lazada to more than $700 million in money from investors. Its most recent round was also $250 million back in December 2013, which included an interesting strategic investment from UK retail giant Tesco. Together, Zalora and Lazada have probably raised around $1 billion in funding, although the value of some rounds were left undisclosed.  Raw figures about its business did reach the public domain this summer, however, as part of Rocket Internet’s IPO in Germany. According to a filing reported by Tech In Asia, Lazada brought in $91.4 million in the first six months of 2014, generating 1.8 million orders from 1.4 million active users. Those modest returns perhaps explain why it has been placing more emphasis on its marketplace. Lazada says its marketplace now accounts for 70 percent of its revenue.

• An interesting linguistic analysis of online reviews: In general, the length of a review corresponded with an item’s price. The most frequent interjections were “wow,” “yeah,” “yuck,” “yikes,” “sheesh,” “yum” and “yippee.” Slang terms that showed up most often were “meh,” “whatever” and “the bomb.” And adjectives were not always what they seemed. Wherever it appeared, the word “delicious” was always unambiguously positive, but not so with “good.” On all five sites, “good” often appeared very close to the words “but” and “not,” indicating ambivalence. Reviewers often wrote statements like “It’s good, but I’m not in love with it,” or “It’s good but not fall on the floor dance a jig good.” Among the most frequent three-word phrases, or three-grams, were “in the room” and “the front desk.” From these patterns, she surmised that consumers who stayed in hotels were about equally focused on the room’s quality as they were on customer service. Frequent four-grams included “in the middle of,” “the rest of the” and “at the end of.” That fits with Dr. Vásquez’s observation that when people write about hotels, recipes or diaper bags, they like to tell stories. Narratives, she found, are more likely to appear in negative reviews than in positive ones.