Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 29th

• Morgan Stanley fund marks down Flipkart stake value by 27%: A mutual fund investor in Flipkart Ltd, India’s largest e-commerce firm, has slashed the value of its holdings by as much as 27%, the latest indication that the investor rush of the past two years into Indian startups has led to unsustainable valuations.Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust valued its stake in Flipkart at $58.9 million as of 31 December, down from $80.6 million in June 2015. The company reported the number late Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US stock markets regulator. Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust also cut the value of its stake in other high flying startups including file storage company Dropbox Inc. and data analytics company Palantir.Flipkart was valued at $15 billion when it received $700 million from Tiger Global Management, Qatar Investment Authority and other investors in June. That was its fourth round of fund raising in a year. Its valuation shot up roughly 5 times from $2.5-3 billion in May 2014. Morgan Stanley’s latest estimate implies that the mutual fund currently values Flipkart at $11 billion. Mint reported on 4 February that China’s Alibaba Group is in early talks to buy a stake in Flipkart and increase its holding in Flipkart rival, Snapdeal. The talks are at a very initial stage and the likelihood of a deal is a function of Flipkart’s willingness to offer a discount on its current valuation of $15 billion, Mint had reported then. There are not too many takers for India’s top e-commerce firms at their current valuations, prompting both Flipkart and Snapdeal  to approach Alibaba Group for cash. Early last year, Flipkart set a target of generating annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) of $8 billion by December. However, the company’s current average monthly annualized GMV is roughly $5 billion, Mint reported on 17 February. This number, which includes sales at Flipkart’s unit Myntra, indicates Flipkart missed its internal sales target.

• In ‘Strategic Refocus,’ Troubled Zenefits Lets 250 Employees Go: Zenefits, the troubled benefits software company that three weeks ago fired its founding CEO, said today that it has laid off 250 employees, mostly in its sales recruiting organization. In a memo to employees, CEO David Sacks said the move signals an intention to “rebuild in line with our new company values.” Zenefits, which sells employee health insurance plans alongside free software to administer those plans, was been rocked by disclosures that many of its employees are not properly licensed to sell insurance. The job cuts amount to about 17 percent of the Zenefits workforce. The company has until recently been considered a Silicon Valley high-flyer, having raised $500 million from investors at a valuation of $4.5 billion. From an email from new CEO David Sacks: "We are reducing our headcount by roughly 250 employees, or about 17 percent of total employees. These changes are almost entirely in the Sales organization, with about a dozen employees in Recruiting. Within the Sales organization, we are eliminating the Enterprise team (although some members will be offered other roles). We are also making a large reduction in Sales Development Representatives (SDR), the organization that prospected for the largest accounts.I want to make clear that this is a reduction in force (RIF), meaning that we are not cutting these jobs for performance reasons. We are letting go of many great people today, and it is not their fault. It is no secret that Zenefits grew too fast, stretching both our culture and our controls. This reduction enables us to refocus our strategy, rebuild in line with our new company values, and grow in a controlled way that will be strategic for our business and beneficial for our customers."

• IHOP Is Releasing Special Snapchat Geolocation Filters, but You Have to Visit the Restaurant to Use Them - The Geo-fencing feature is all about engagement: IHOP today announced a Snapchat campaign that targets patrons inside its restaurants. To push its Double-Dipped French Toast, the all-day breakfast brand is essentially using the same custom geo-filters Snapchat introduced to the masses on Monday. But it's working directly with the Los Angeles social app to serve the ad just to IHOP customers. IHOP and Snapchat developed what they are calling "chain geo-filters," location-based dynamic art that can be added to photo and video snaps. When using the app at a restaurant, customers who take a snap will be able to swipe to reveal IHOP-themed creative overlays. Kirk Thompson, IHOP's vp of marketing, told Adweek that his team quietly released its custom Snapchat filter a few days ago, and it's already garnered 3 million views. On why the new promotion is only zeroing in on people already in stores, he explained, "IHOP receives Snapchats from users every day, a lot of them taken while in our restaurant. Introducing customized filters was a great way to further engage with our guests and at the same time extend our brand message when they share that content with their friends."

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 29

• Google launches ad format linked to Gmail: During a presentation on Monday, Google announced a product that will let marketers target ad campaigns to consumers using their email addresses. The program, called Customer Match, lets companies upload a list of customers’ email addresses gleaned, for example, from its loyalty membership program. The company can show specific ads to these customers when they are signed into Google.

• Exclusive: Airbnb to double bookings to 80 million this year - investors: Airbnb is expected to double its nightly bookings this year, investors familiar with the company's performance said, a sign that the home and room renting site's battles with regulators have yet to dent its rapid global growth. The website is expected to have about 80 million nights booked this year, up from about 40 million in 2014, according to the investors, who declined to be named. This pace of growth is expected to continue or accelerate, the investors said. The company says it has more than 1.5 million listings - homes, apartments, guest rooms, even houseboats and tree houses - in more than 34,000 cities in 190 countries. "It's a global phenom," said Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures who made an early personal investment in Airbnb in 2010. "(It) is going to continue to grow at a substantially higher rate than other businesses."

• Uber’s Chinese rival Didi Kuaidi invests in Ola: Didi Kuaidi, which competes with Uber  for a slice of China’s taxi-hailing market, has invested an undisclosed amount in India’s largest cab aggregator Ola. The investment is said to be part of the recent $225 million funding round led by Ola’s existing investors Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global Management and Japan’s SoftBank.  Ola claims to complete more than 750,000 daily rides in the country while Uber claims to offer around 200,000 rides. Ola has set an ambitious target of reaching one million drivers on its platform in three years. Currently, it has over 100,000 drivers, a number that has grown from 10,000 a year ago. Didi Kuaidi was formed after China’s largest taxi-hailing firms – Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache – merged in February this year. Till date Didi Kuaidi has raised $4.4 billion in seven rounds of funding from marquee investors such as Alibaba, Temasek Holdings, Tencent Holdings and others.

• Yahoo to spin off Alibaba stake despite no U.S. tax ruling: Yahoo said on Monday it would proceed with the planned spinoff of its stake in Alibaba even though the IRS has declined to rule on whether the transaction would be tax free. Yahoo's shares rose 4 percent to $28.71 in extended trading. The Web search company said earlier this month the IRS had denied its request for a private letter ruling on whether the spinoff of its stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant would be considered tax free. Based on Alibaba's Monday close of $59.24, Yahoo's 384 million shares of Alibaba are worth $22.75 billion. The value of the stake is slightly less than Yahoo's market capitalization of about $25.98 billion based on 941 million shares outstanding on July 31 and Monday's close. Many analysts say Yahoo's core business is worth close to nothing without its Asian assets. As of Monday's close, Yahoo's shares have declined a little more than 45 percent this year. Alibaba's shares have fallen nearly 45 percent over the same period.

• Apple iPhone 6s Breaks First-Weekend Sales Record: On Monday, Apple said it had sold more than 13 million new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus devices since they became available for sale on Friday, a record for first-weekend sales. That was up from the 10 million iPhones sold last year during the first weekend that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were sold. Any increase in sales was most likely helped by the geography of the markets where the new iPhones became available. This year, the iPhones went on sale in a dozen countries and territories, including China, which is one of Apple’s biggest markets. Last year, China was not among the countries that sold the iPhone on the first weekend, apparently because the devices had not received approval from Chinese regulators. Adding China to the product introduction more than doubled the initial market size, according to Walter Piecyk, an analyst at BTIG Research. Jan Dawson, the chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, said he also expected first-weekend sales to be higher than last year because the period for ordering the new iPhones before their sale date was longer than that for the previous generation of the device. The sales numbers slightly outpaced some Wall Street estimates. Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital, projected that Apple would sell 13 million phones on the opening weekend, and he said that Wall Street had expected that Apple would sell about 12 million. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray had predicted sales of 12 million to 13 million. First-weekend sales help indicate overall iPhone demand, an important measure given that the device accounts for the majority of Apple’s revenue. The initial sales also are a marker for how well the new smartphones may do during the end-of-year holiday season, which is typically the most significant sales period for consumer product companies. This year, UBS estimates that Apple will sell 78.4 million iPhones in the December quarter, up four million from last year, while FBR predicts the sale of 77 million iPhones.

• As Online Data Theft Escalates, Banks Look to Retailers to Bear the Losses On Sept. 1 last year, the website Rescator, known as the “Amazon.com of the black market,” alerted its customers that huge quantities of stolen debit and credit card data would go on sale the next day. “Load your accounts and prepare for an avalanche of cash!” the website urged. The next day, two batches of cardholder data were reportedly sold, according to legal documents. The website claimed the cards were 100 percent valid and working. Demand was so high that the website temporarily crashed. Over the next few days, several more batches of card data were sold. On Sept. 8, Home Depot issued a news release admitting its data systems had been breached. By then, the damage had been done. Approximately 56 million sets of card data had been stolen, some of which were sold on the black market and remained valid for several days. At a small credit union in California, fraudulent charges of more than $100,000 were posted in just three minutes after the card information was sold on the black market. A bank reported $300,000 in suspicious charges in two hours to the security blog Krebs on Security, which connected Home Depot with the stolen cards before the retailer did. A year later, the full tally of the Home Depot data breach remains unknown. Some estimate the fraudulent charges total well into the billions of dollars. Over the last couple of years, retailing has been a rich hunting ground for online criminals. They hacked into numerous companies, including Neiman Marcus, Sally Beauty and the crafts store Michaels. But the orchestrated theft at Target in late 2013, followed a few months later by the Home Depot data breach, eclipsed all of the others. So far, there have been no arrests in the Target and Home Depot breaches. As the size and scope of such attacks at retailers has grown, so have the losses, which have been largely shouldered by financial institutions. Now some small banks and others want Home Depot and those companies that suffer data breaches to pay.

• Google Virtual-Reality System Aims to Enliven As Tech Majors Eye Education: As part of a class last year on “Romeo and Juliet,” Jennie Choi, an English teacher at Mariano Azuela Elementary School in Chicago, took her sixth-grade students on a tour of Verona, the Italian city where Shakespeare’s play transpires. During the excursion, Ms. Choi asked her class to examine the variegated facade of a centuries-old building, known on tourist maps as “Juliet’s House,” where the family that may have been the inspiration for the fictional heroine once lived. She also encouraged her sixth graders to scrutinize the deteriorated tomb where they could imagine the Juliet character had died. But the students did not have to leave their Chicago classroom to take in the play’s Italian backdrop. Instead, as part of a pilot project for a new Google virtual field trip system for schools, Ms. Choi’s students tried out virtual-reality viewers — composed of cardboard and a cellphone — while their teacher used an app to guide them through stereoscopic vistas of the Italian town. The introduction of Google’s virtual-reality kits for classrooms highlights the growing importance of the education sector to major technology companies — and the mounting competition among them. In 2006, for instance, Google introduced Apps for Education, a bundle of cloud-based email, calendar and document-sharing products available free to schools. Now, 45 million students and teachers around the world use the apps, the company said. Microsoft has also developed a substantial school audience for its email, search, calendar, Skype and other software. This month, Microsoft introduced several new products for education customers, including a note-taking app called OneNote Class Notebook. But the advent of Google Expeditions is also indicative of an industry strategy shift. Some leading tech companies have recently made a decision to focus on designing products specifically for classroom use, rather than simply modifying their existing consumer or enterprise products and then marketing them to schools. Last year, Google introduced Classroom, a free app that teachers can use to create, collect and comment on student assignments. This month, Facebook announced that company engineers were working with Summit Public Schools in California on software to customize learning to individual students. Google engineers similarly worked with teachers to develop virtual-reality field trips based on course curriculums

• Academia Pushes A New Kind of Peer Review For Research With ‘Sessions’: For several years, Richard Price has had a quixotic dream to make cutting-edge academic research universally available to everyone. “I want a world where a 19-year-old kid in China can access a paper he’s interested in about lithium ion batteries on his phone on the subway and it’s validated by others and it’s in his own language,” Price said. Price has amassed 25 million users on his platform, Academia, which disseminates and validates research papers. Now he’s trying to take it to the next level with a feature called Sessions, which is a form of peer review that exists entirely online on Academia. “If you speak to academics, they will complain about the publishing system,” he said. “It can take 12 months to get the peer review done. Our grand vision for the publishing experience is that an academic should be able to get work published in 24 hours that is already peer reviewed by two people.” Academia has been trialling ‘Sessions’ with a select number of members but now it’s fully rolled out, with as many as 6,000 sessions going on simultaneously every day. Sessions allows select groups of academics to privately discuss a working paper for 20 days. It tries to mimic the dynamics of a conference where a researcher discusses their work with a select peer group in a question-and-answer session. Price said that there were a couple of features that were absolutely necessary to make this work. One is that it’s private, so that comments are not searchable on Google and academics have the ability to respond to critics personally before they revise their work. The other is that it’s not just a comment box at the bottom of PDF. Sessions’ comments are on the right-hand bar of the page and they are annotations that refer to specific sentences of paragraphs (kind of like Medium’s commenting format). There is also a time limit of 20 days so that there’s pressure for other academics to respond quickly. Lastly, Academia is its own distribution network and it can pull in other relevant researchers to comment on a person’s paper. Instead of cold-calling or e-mailing dozens of people, an academic can reach out to other researchers who have high author or paper rankings. Conceptually, Academia’s Paper Rank is comparable to Google’s Page Rank with citations and linking built in as a form of validation. The company, which has 26 employees, has raised around $18 million from investors including Khosla, Spark Capital and True Ventures.

• Are Marketers Finally Getting the Hang of Location-Based Mobile Ads? Essence talks up lessons from Google work: Until recently, location-based advertising has remained a small part of mobile ad budgets, primarily because it's difficult to pinpoint the exact person with the right type of ad on the fly. So, it was interesting that during an Advertising Week panel this morning about programmatic advertising, Essence digital agency and mobile advertising company xAd talked about their recent work for Google's search app (which also won Adweek's Media Plan of the Year award) as an example of how some initial hiccups led to successful place-based mobile ads. To promote Google's search app, Essence ran a campaign that pulled in 23 bits of custom data—including weather, time, location and photos—for each ad impression to show how Google search results are personalized to particular users. According to Essence, the campaign generated a 53 percent engagement rate and boosted brand awareness by 9 percent. That said, it was also the first time Essence ran a campaign pulling in multiple pieces of data in real time, causing plenty of logistical problems early on. For example, just because the campaign was targeted toward cities including London, it didn't mean the ads were actually served to people in London. With those learnings under the agency's belt, Christina Yoo, associate programmatic media director at Essence, talked about how a new version of the location-based campaign is now using better targeting tactics alongside programmatic buying. "In the beginning, one of our biggest problems was getting accuracy at scale," Yoo said. "We want to have these perfect [location-based] experiences for the individual, but we also want to make sure that the information that we're getting is accurate." After blanketing Google's ads based on a phone's latitude-longitude, the Essence and xAd teams drilled down into specific groups of consumers, targeting the ads by polygons—mapped plots of land—and mini data profiles about consumers. The mobile promos were also bought through programmatic private marketplaces.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 17

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• Google Shares Rise 11% as CFO Porat Signals She’ll Rein In Spending: In the first earnings report for Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer Google lured from Morgan Stanley, Ms. Porat said the company was keeping a closer eye on costs. “People are realizing it’s a new era,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial LP. “She’s coming in and she’s expressing what investors wanted -- that’s there’s going to be cost rationalization, a degree of discipline.” The numbers backed her up, with revenue and profits outpacing the expectations of Wall Street. The company reported that revenue rose 11 percent to $17.7 billion from a year earlier, with net revenue — a figure that excludes payments to advertising partners — increasing to $14.35 billion. That was above the $14.28 billion projected by analysts, according to Bloomberg. Google said that absent currency fluctuations, overall revenue would have risen 18 percent from a year ago. Google’s cash pile swelled to $70 billion in the second quarter. In the recent quarter, the number of clicks on ads rose 18 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase in the first quarter, while the average cost per click fell 11 percent after dropping 7 percent in the prior period. Google’s mobile cost-per-click is climbing, helping to close the gap with desktop ads, Porat said on the call. Watch time on YouTube, the company’s video-sharing site, was up 60 percent, with mobile watch time more than doubling, she said. The slower growth in costs, along with suggestions from Ms. Porat that Google will try to be more forthcoming with investors — and may be open to redistributing some of the company’s cash pile down the line — suggested a new era of cooperation from a company that has historically had an antagonistic relationship with Wall Street. She confirmed that they are more open to focusing on expense controls, more open to providing new disclosures and more open to potentially returning cash,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities. “Those are the three things people wanted, and she came through.” Analysts like Mr. Schachter were impressed by her investor-friendly tone, and Google shares jumped nearly 11 percent in after-hours trading.


• The surprising way smartphones are changing the way we shop: Smartphones and tablets now account for up to 68 percent of the traffic to the videogame chain’s Web site, where customers are frequently browsing products and looking up trade-in values for their old games. One thing they’re not doing much of on mobile devices? Buying stuff. In fact, “purchasing through that phone probably wouldn’t even make the top ten list of engagement activities that they do,” said Jason Allen, the retailer’s vice president of multichannel. “We’re not overly focused on conversion on mobile, we really see it as a tool to drive traffic in our stores” This reflects a trend seen throughout the industry: While there has been a surge in traffic to retailers' Web sites from smartphones, a proportionately big boom in sales on these gadgets have yet to appear. In other words, for all the time we spend swiping and tapping on our phones, we still aren’t especially willing to make purchases on them. At Kohl’s, executives say they have spent the last year and a half updating their app, in part to accommodate an in-store shopper who is more frequently searching for product reviews, watching video content about merchandise and sharing their finds on social media. When customers are in Kohl’s stores and on the retailer’s Wifi network, customers spend more time on the app than when they’re not in the store, company officials said. These behaviors have led Kohl’s to develop a new “in-store mode” for its app, in which users who walk into a Kohl’s store will be asked if they want to use a special version that is tailored for wandering the store. Kohl’s declined to say how the in-store mode will be different from its regular app experience, but said it would be available in September. Big-box behemoth Target is also catering to shoppers who are using their phone to guide them through stores with a relaunched app that has a stronger emphasis on a tool that helps them building their weekly shopping list and an interactive map of each store in its fleet. It’s easy to see why the company has moved in this direction: Since it installed free WiFi in its stores a few years ago, Target has found that the most-visited site, by far, is the retailer’s own Web site. This enthusiastic embrace of in-store phone use might have seemed unthinkable in corners of the retail industry only a few years ago, when many brick-and-mortar chains were panicking about showrooming, the industry term for when shoppers would go to a store to check out merchandise, only to ultimately buy it online for a better price. But that fear has largely dissipated as study after study has shown showrooming is not a huge threat. In fact, several studies have found that the opposite behavior -- browsing online before buying in a physical store -- is more common.



• As Google and Microsoft push app developers to reveal their content, coders balk at making apps searchable: The giants of the Web have been pressing developers of mobile apps to index their content so it can be parsed by search engines or linked to from other sites. That’s already possible with most Web pages, thanks to pieces of embedded code known as deep links. Imagine a future in which a Google search for a “tulle mini” would call up results from Wish, a fashion app, along with links to e-commerce sites. A Facebook user who wanted to share a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies from the Yummly app would be able to post a link that would take viewers to the relevant page instead of forcing them to download the app first. So far, the effort has been a bit like herding cats: Only a few thousand apps—a tiny fraction of the millions out there—have adopted the competing tech protocols that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are pushing. Google’s pitch to developers is that deep links benefit them by driving more traffic to their apps. The company says traffic on the Yellow Pages and Etsy apps increased by 8 percent and 12 percent, respectively, after they began using Google’s indexing. Rajan Patel, a principal engineer at Google, says more than 1,000 apps—mainly those designed for its Android mobile operating system but also some for Apple’s iOS—use its deep linking. “To us, the main advantage that we see coming from this is removing friction—not having to find the app on your phone and fire it up,” says Atul Kakkar, principal product manager at Eventbrite, a website that helps people publicize and sell tickets to yoga classes, tech conferences, and other happenings. The company plans to start indexing its app to enable Google searches. Some developers have resisted using deep links because it’s costly and laborious to create separate code for each mobile platform. (Android and iOS are the predominant ones.) Inserting the links eats up as much as 5 percent of the time it takes developers to build an app, says Alex Matjanec, managing partner at AD:60, a New York-based ad agency that creates apps for clients.


• YouTube's Top Advertisers Increased Their Spending by 60% in Q2: Google's second quarter earnings report today, the tech giant revealed that YouTube viewership is growing faster than it has in two years, and advertiser money is following. YouTube's mobile users averaged 40 minutes per session during Q2, which represents a 50 percent increase year over year while ultimately helping the Mountain View, Calif.-based player beat Wall Street expectations. The number of advertisers rose 40 percent year over year on the video platform, while the average spend of YouTube's top 100 advertisers rose 60 percent. Google does not break out how much revenue YouTube generates, but executives were clearly satisfied with the performance. There are more 18- to-49-year-olds on YouTube than there are consumers who watch cable TV, Porat said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 15

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• Foxconn Starts Manufacturing Smartphones in India Amid Modi Push: Foxconn Technology Group started making its first smartphones in India as part of the Taiwanese company’s plan to expand in the South Asian nation. Production has started in Andhra Pradesh state in the nation’s south east, Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo said, declining to comment further. Models for clients Xiaomi Corp. and InFocus Inc. have started shipping from a facility in Sri City according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because it’s not been officially announced. Foxconn is looking to expand in India amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to boost manufacturing in Asia’s third-largest economy. Billionaire chairman Terry Gou, whose business empire gets half its revenue from Apple expects to open as many as 12 factories and create one million jobs in India by 2020, Foxconn said in a statement citing Gou. FIH Mobile, Foxconn’s phone manufacturing unit, expects to have multiple manufacturing sites in India, with none employing more than 10,000 people, the company said in May.


• Elaborate Hoax Sends Twitter Shares up 8% on Takeover Rumors - Until Story Confirmed False: A report claiming that Twitter received an offer to be acquired for $31 billion attributed to Bloomberg LP is fake, Twitter and a spokesman for the news and financial data provider said on Tuesday. Twitter shares jumped on the report, which was distributed on the Internet and closely resembled Bloomberg's news website. Its origins could not be immediately established. Cybersecurity experts said the fake website and report did not require a high level of skill. The domain name was registered anonymously and it may take months for authorities to determine who created the site. The report appeared on a site named bloomberg.market, rather than bloomberg.com. The bloomberg.market account was suspended at mid-afternoon Tuesday. The website carrying the false report was registered on July 10, according to a domain search on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The domain was registered in Panama to WhoIsGuard, a company which puts its own information as a web site registrant to mask the identity of the actual owner. Twitter options were heavily traded on Tuesday with overall options activity surging to 330,000 contracts, or more than twice normal volume, according to Trade Alert data. A large buyer appears to have bought 12,000 near-dated call options across multiple strikes at 11:37 am ET as the fake report went out and the shares started rising. Calls betting on shares rising above $37 by Friday were bought across multiple exchanges. "If I am an attorney at the SEC, I want to contact that person to ask about the reasoning behind the large positioning in the short-dated contracts,” said Steven Spencer, partner at proprietary trading firm SMB Capital in New York. Twitter ended the session up 0.9 percent at $36.72. Earlier, it jumped as much as 8.5 percent.


• Uber having trouble raising China fund, expects to lose $3B over next 3 years, says report in rival-backed tech site: On Tuesday, a report emerged on Chinese tech news site Sina Tech citing a “source close to Uber” as saying that the company has had trouble finding first-tier Chinese investors. Uber has reportedly asked Goldman Sachs for help with finding Chinese investors (a technique it has used before) but the company has thusfar been met with mostly rejections from top-tier Chinese and Asian investors. According to Sina Tech’s anonymous source, when Uber first started looking for investors, it wasn’t giving out detailed financial information about its China business beyond the somewhat questionable one-million-rides-a-day number it “leaked” earlier this summer. But when investors balked at the lack of information, Uber was forced to cough up more, and those numbers apparently don’t look great. Uber reportedly expects to do US$1.1 billion in total sales in China in 2015, but it also expects to post losses of US$1.1 billion there this year. Over the next three years, Uber apparently expects its China business to lose $3 billion. Any report in the Chinese tech press that cites only anonymous sources is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. And Sina Tech’s parent company Sina, through its Sina Weibo subsidiary, does own a share in Uber rival Didi Kuaidi, so “black PR” certainly can’t be ruled out. But it does seem odd that Uber still hasn’t announced its funding round despite having reportedly nabbed one of Didi Kuaidi’s top investors weeks ago.


• Google Takes on Apple With Smartphone Location Tracking Tools: Google is stepping up efforts against Apple’s location technology with new tools to link smartphones to nearby objects. The search giant on Tuesday introduced a new format called Eddystone that lets electronic beacons provide more specific locations and other information within applications, the company said in a blog post. The tools, which compete with Apple’s iBeacon technology, will enable smartphone users at a museum, for example, to get more information on a painting they’re looking at or to gain easy access to electronic bus tickets when they’re near a bus stop. Apple rolled out iBeacon in 2013. Using a low-energy Bluetooth signal, the software makes an iPhone’s proximity to certain items easier to track with the help of $10 signaling device beacons mounted on shelves and ceilings, each no bigger than a hockey puck. Other providers also have introduced location technology. Google’s Eddystone will be open to other platforms and has features that work on Android and the iPhone, the company said. Also, the company wants to integrate the system in its Google Now service, which gives users contextual information around them before they need to search for it.


• Meet Miip, the Ad Monkey in Your App, From InMobi: Naveen Tewari, chief executive of InMobi, thinks the 1.2 billion people who see ads served by his company’s mobile ad network are tired of being bombarded with generally irrelevant marketing messages. He says advertising should be friendly, more tour guide than tout, and help people discover new products and services that they actually want to buy. To test that proposition, InMobi has developed Miip, an animated monkey character that follows you from app to app, watches what you’re doing and suggests products that you might want to buy. The Indian company unveiled the technology at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday evening. The idea is that instead of seeing a regular ad in your app, Miip would appear, with a text bubble inviting you to check out products from advertisers that it thinks are relevant. If you’re playing classic rock on an app like Spotify, for example, Miip might suggest a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd T-shirt and offer you the option to buy it right from the app. Over time, if the monkey makes smart suggestions, the company hopes, you will be more inclined to click on it when you see it pop up in other apps and perhaps even take the time to tell it what kinds of things you most want to see. InMobi has been quietly testing Miip (pronounced Meep) for six months, trying it with about 5 million users. Early advertisers include the streaming music service Spotify, the travel agents Expedia and Orbitz, niche retailers like Joyus and TheRealReal, and several major American retailers that weren’t willing to publicly disclose their involvement. The Miip ads will begin appearing in 40,000 apps on Wednesday, and InMobi hopes to eventually convert most of the 200 million ads served by its network each month to the format.


• As tech firms track your location, advertisers zero in for the sale: In recent years, major retailers have restricted mobile to 10 percent or less of their ad budgets because of difficulty gauging their effectiveness and a limited ability to target shoppers by location. Targeting is now much easier, to the extent that a consumer walking past a given retail outlet can receive ads in his or her Facebook or Google app showcasing some particular product available at that store - perhaps offering a discount coupon to lure them inside. That is a tantalizing prospect for companies if it leads to actual sales. For Facebook and Google there are early signs the new technology is already paying off. Six advertising firm executives representing more than 50 clients combined, told Reuters in interviews that clients have invested significantly more since the holiday season in mobile ads as a result of this new technology. In some cases, these advertisers, including major retailers they declined to name, are investing up to 40 percent of their advertising budgets on mobile ads, four times as much as at the end of last year. Facebook and Google are widely considered to be at the forefront of this shift. Google claimed 37 percent of U.S. mobile ad revenue share in 2014 and Facebook had 18.5 percent, according to data from research firm eMarketer. Twitter, which had the third-largest share, was far behind with 3.6 percent of the share.


• Product developers are preparing to offer a variety of items to consumers that will allow scent to become a part of digital messaging.: This fall, the start-up Vapor Communications, for example, will introduce several devices to include subtle scents with books, movies and clothing. And the company will start mass production of its oPhone Duo, a tabletop device that can emit scents based on how an iPhone photo is labeled. Another company, Scentee, already has a scent product on the market. The product, also called Scentee, is a cartridge that plugs into a smartphone’s headphone jack. It can be set up with an app to emit a puff of fragrance when a text message or email arrives. Smells tended to linger and become muddled with other smells, but Vapor Communications says it has overcome that problem with a system that includes small plastic pellets with scents that are activated when air flows over them. The scent is not dispersed widely; users have to lean in close, as if sniffing a flower, to smell anything at all. All of the products depend on a small pellet called an oChip — the “o” in the product names is for olfactory. In the oPhone, each chip contains from one to four aromas. The chips are sold in packets of eight, grouped into “families” of similar smells, called Coffee, Foodie and Memory. A person who wants to describe the smell of a pasta sauce, for example, could choose notes of tomato, rosemary and parsley, which would then command the player to position those chips so the air would flow over them, combining the scents.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 25

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• 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: Thursday, June 18

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• Profitable and Growing Fast, Fitbit Prices I.P.O. at $4.1 Billion Valuation, Above Top of Its Range: Fitbit begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the symbol FIT. The company, which sells popular wearable fitness-tracking devices like the Fitbit Surge bracelet, priced its initial public offering at $20 a share on Wednesday, a dollar above its already heightened price range of $17 to $19 a share. At that level, the company will raise $732 million for itself and its selling stockholders after increasing the number of shares to be sold to 36.6 million from 34.5 million. The price values Fitbit at $4.1 billion. Its debut is a bet that consumers will continue to buy fitness bands as other, more complex smartwatches like the Apple Watch and various Android competitors hit stores. In addition to tracking users’ heart rates and steps, the newer devices offer access to email, text messages and other applications. Fitbit faces another challenge in the form of legal fights from a rival, Jawbone, which filed two lawsuits over the last month. One accuses the company of patent infringement, which could lead to a ban on importing Fitbit devices or important parts. The other accuses Fitbit of poaching employees who then illicitly stole confidential information from their former employer. Fitbit has denied those accusations. Investors for now appear undaunted by those challenges. Last year, Fitbit earned $131.8 million, reversing a nearly $52 million loss in the previous year. Its sales more than tripled during that same period, to $745.4 million.


• GitHub to Seek $2 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round: GitHub, a startup that helps companies and developers build software, is seeking to raise about $200 million in a new Series B round that may value San Francisco-based GitHub about $2 billion. The company works as a social coding platform, where a software developer can display a project and others can contribute. The company says more than 8 million people use the service, and it charges monthly subscriptions to store programming source code.


• Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, California regulators say: California's Labor commission has ruled that an Uber driver was an employee, not a contractor, a potentially costly precedent for the ride-sharing company. Uber unsuccessfully argued to the commission that drivers on its ride-hailing smartphone platform aren't employees, because it doesn't set their hours or force them to pick up riders. The commission ruled that Uber was more than a passive platform connecting drivers and riders. Instead, the commission said in its ruling, Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation,” vetting drivers, setting standards and establishing non-negotiable rates. The company can also kick drivers off the service if customers give them a low rating. Currently, Uber drivers take an 80 percent cut of fares, but they cover their own costs and pay their own taxes. The ruling could set a broad precedent if it is upheld. For Uber, the implications of counting its drivers as employees rather than contractors are substantial. It would suddenly have to pay for employees' health care benefits, worker’s compensation and payroll taxes, and be on the hook for costs like gas and car maintenance.


• Oracle sales, profit miss estimates; shares fall: Shares of Oracle, often seen as a barometer for the technology sector, fell 6 percent to $42.15 in extended trading after the company's earnings report.Revenue fell 5.4 percent to $10.71 billion. Revenue rose 3 percent on a constant currency basis. Net income fell to $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $3.65 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales from Oracle's cloud-computing software and platform service, an area keenly watched by investors, rose 29 percent to $416 million.


• Location Intelligence firm AdNear expands into Europe: Bangalore and Singapore-based AdNear Pte Ltd, which helps brands reach out to audiences by analysing time-bound location data, has ventured into Europe by establishing a beachhead in London. The company has appointed Ken Parnham, former managing director of data privacy management company TrustE, as general manager of Europe. AdNear was founded by Anil Mathews, who is also the company’s CEO, back in 2009. The company’s advertising platform is built on a proprietary hybrid geo-location platform, which helps to provide location awareness on mobile phones without GPS or operator assistance. It serves clients in India, Singapore, Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. AdNear leverages real geo-location, combined with consumer behaviour, to target relevant users within a geo-fence. All ads are displayed within mobile apps and they ensure further engagement as users can find their way to the advertised stores and use coupons among other things. Recently, the company had raised Series B funding of $19 million from Telstra Ventures, Global Brain, Sequoia Capital and JPM Private Equity Group. In November 2012, Adnear had raised $6.3 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners.


• 4 Microsoft Executives to Leave in Top-Level Shake-Up: Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under Satya Nadella, its chief executive. Mr. Nadella said that three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into fewer groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, former chief executive of Nokia, who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, head of its business solutions group. While Microsoft has a long history of bureaucratic reshufflings, they do not typically involve the departure of so many executives at once. Mr. Nadella’s decision to merge several groups into others effectively left a handful of Microsoft executives without clear roles. By far, the most significant of the changes is the merging of devices, which includes Xbox, Surface tablets, smartphones and other hardware products, with the Windows organization under Mr. Myerson. By grouping hardware and operating systems under one leader, the move undoes part of the reorganization by Mr. Ballmer.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 15

• Amazon's smart speaker Echo now can be used to place orders: Amazon Echo Can Now Do Some Of Your Shopping For You, Prime Members: Amazon’s Echo speaker/intelligent tube/listening pal revealed a bit more of its true nature today: It can now field voice-powered buying requests, translating your spoken desire for more paper towels into more actual paper towels, for instance. The catch is that it’s restricted to Prime members, it only works with Prime-eligible goods, and you need both a U.S. billing address and a U.S.-based payment method. To command your smart cylinder to conduct commerce on your behalf, all you need do is use your Wake word, then tell it to reorder whatever item you’re after. This is designed to be an easy way to order again things you’re often already buying rep eats of anyway, so ostensibly Amazon is positioning it as a convenience feature, not a full-fledged shopping alternative.

• Alibaba to invest more abroad as globalization top priority: CEO Zhang Alibaba Group Holding Ltd will invest heavily in existing and new ventures abroad, making its push beyond the China market a top priority, the Chinese e-commerce leader's new CEO, Daniel Zhang, said. Zhang's comments come at a time when Alibaba aims to maintain its rapid growth even as the prospect of e-commerce saturation at home looms over the company. "We must absolutely globalize," Zhang said in his first speech since taking up his new post this week, according to a report on Thursday on Alibaba's news and commentary website, Alizila. The vast bulk of Alibaba's revenue comes from its dominant domestic online marketplaces, but the company has been investing in a range of sectors abroad. Just this week it announced it would set up a cloud computing base in Dubai, and boosted its stake in U.S. e-retailer Zulily Inc. Zhang said if Alibaba does not globalize it won't be able to last 100 years - a goal set out by Executive Chairman Jack Ma. In the three months ended March, Alibaba's revenue from China commerce grew 39 percent to $2.2 billion. International commerce grew 27 percent to $264 million and only accounted for 9 percent of revenue, compared to 11 percent in the same period a year earlier. Alibaba says some of its larger overseas markets include Brazil and Russia. The company and its affiliates are also making overtures in India, where it is in talks with phone maker Micromax Informatics to buy a $1.2 billion stake, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter.

• PayPal to Trade Under Old Symbol PYPL After Split From EBay: PayPal, the payments division that’s separating from EBay Inc., will trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market as PYPL, its original ticker symbol before being acquired by the online marketplace in 2002. EBay announced the split last year after activist investor Carl Icahn said PayPal was being held back by its parent company’s slower-growing Web marketplace business. All of EBay Inc.’s 15 board members will remain with the company or become new board members of PayPal when it spins off from EBay in the third quarter. EBay Chairman Pierre Omidyar, who founded the online marketplace in 1995, will be a director for both companies, EBay said Thursday in a statement.

• Deal Talks for 'Here' Mapping Service Brings Spotlight to the Lucrative B2B Location Data Market: When people look up a company’s Facebook page on their smartphones, the address is overlaid on a digital map provided by Here, Nokia’s mapping unit, which is for sale. The same goes for the mapping services offered by Amazon and Yahoo. The tech giants are just three of the many companies, including SAP, Verizon Wireless and Baidu, the Chinese search engine,​ that rely heavily on Nokia’s geospatial data. Companies are grappling to stay relevant in a world where smartphones — and people’s geographical information — are at the heart of nearly every tech leader’s plans. That is why companies like Uber, the ride-booking service, and an alliance of German automakers have submitted rival bids of up to $3 billion to acquire the Nokia division. A deal is widely expected by the end of the month. If one happens, there is likely to be a lot of angst to go around in the tech industry. Nokia’s mapping service is the main global competitor to Google Maps. But if a new owner decides to restrict access to Here’s vast, 30-year-old trove of mapping data, some of the largest tech companies could find themselves relying on Google’s mapping services once more. That could put companies like Amazon and Yahoo in a difficult position, potentially requiring them to share valuable location and routing data with one of their most powerful rivals in Silicon Valley. “There are too many businesses out there that want an independent service,” ​said Harold ​Goddijn, chief executive of TomTom, the Dutch digital mapping company that licenses data to Apple for its mapping service. ​“They don​’​t want to share customer data with ​Googl​e. ​They want users to stay within their domain.” As part of the German automakers’ bid, the companies, which include BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, want to give access to Nokia’s mapping service, under licensing agreements, so others can still use its global geospatial data, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It remains unclear whether Uber would follow suit if it acquired the unit. “Mapping is an extremely hard thing to do and takes years to replicate,” said Shyam Kumar, a senior analyst whose firm, TT Focus Fund, is an investor in both TomTom and Nokia. “If you cannot get access to another independent map, you might end up having to license from one of your major competitors. There’s obviously an inherent tension here.” The sudden interest in Here belies its often overlooked position in the technology world. While Google Maps is used in more than one billion smartphones worldwide, the Nokia unit, which until recently was somewhat hampered by the Finnish company’s close relationship with Microsoft, has instead focused primarily on offering mapping services to other companies, instead of directly to consumers. FedEx, for example, has used Here’s mapping data to manage its fleet of delivery trucks worldwide. Deutsche Telekom, the German carrier that owns T-Mobile, has built smartphone apps with Nokia’s services that allows people to share their locations with friends and family through their cellphones. But it’s the automotive industry, where Here holds up to an 80 percent global market share for built-in car navigation systems, that has become a main focus. The mapping service has becoming a crucial component for the automakers pursuing driverless car projects. In 2013, for instance, Mercedes-Benz teamed up with Here to test an autonomous car around 60 miles of German roads. The trial included instant 3-D modeling of nearby cars and constant corrections from the car’s computer. So far, many automakers have preferred to use Nokia’s services over those provided by Google because of the search giant’s own ambitions in the nascent driverless car industry. Yet Nokia’s mapping technology may become unavailable if a new owner of the mapping unit decides to limit what other companies can do with the data.

• Uber Lures Top Google Executive and Shifts David Plouffe’s Duties: Continuing its quest for top Silicon Valley talent, Uber said on Wednesday that it had hired Rachel Whetstone, Google’s longtime head of communications, to be its senior vice president for policy and communications. While Ms. Whetstone’s appointment is a prominent talent grab for Uber, the ride-hailing start-up, it also shuffles the highest ranks of the company. She will take over the role of David Plouffe, the political strategist and former campaign manager for President Obama. Uber simultaneously confirmed that Mr. Plouffe will move to a position as chief adviser to the company and to Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, as well as take a seat on Uber’s board. It is an abrupt change to the six-year-old start-up’s communications team, as Mr. Plouffe was hired less than a year ago to run the company’s communications strategy. At the time of his appointment, the company described his role as similar to that of running a political campaign, with Uber as “the candidate.” His abilities were even praised by executives outside Uber. “David is uniquely suited to scale and lead the same kind of insurgent campaign he did in 2008 for a Silicon Valley tech company, bridging the worlds of business and politics,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, said at the time. Since Mr. Plouffe joined Uber, the company has been more aggressive about polishing its image, engaging in fewer public skirmishes and offering a gentler public tone. Uber has tried mending fences with European regulators who are wary of the service, and has undertaken numerous charitable efforts, including pickups for clothing donations and food-drive charity efforts. Over time, it has reduced the number of headlines about its pugnacious tendency to play rough with competitors. Ms. Whetstone, who will join Uber in June, has been at Google 10 years, helping lead it through antitrust battles across two continents and investigations by the Federal Trade Commission, as well as numerous consumer privacy inquiries. Her move to Uber was first reported by the tech news site Recode. She is another in a string of Google communications employees who have left the company to join hot start-ups. Last fall, Jill Hazelbaker left for Snapchat, while others have left for companies like Square, Pinterest and Tesla. But Ms. Whetstone’s departure is different. Uber and Google have long been partners in certain areas — Uber relies on Google’s mapping technology and has taken hundreds of millions from Google’s venture capital arm — but both companies have started to distance themselves from one another. Uber has made a bid for Nokia’s mapping unit, Here, which could lessen the company’s reliance on Google.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 29

• Twitter Q1 earnings: $436M, +74% Y/Y, net loss $162M; shares crash 18% on weakness in both engagement and monetization: Twitter posted weaker-than-expected financial results for the first quarter on Tuesday and told investors to reduce their expectations for the rest of the year. The quarterly report, which was supposed to be published after the stock market closed, was obtained early and posted on Twitter by the financial analytics firm Selerity. The release sent Twitter shares plunging. Trading was briefly halted so the company could disseminate its results. That steepened the drop, and the stock ended the day down about 18 percent. Twitter’s revenue grew 74 percent in the quarter, but that was less than the 97 percent growth seen in the fourth quarter and below the company’s own forecasts. Executives attributed the slowdown to a transition to a new advertising model that priced certain ads based on the result, such as whether the viewer downloaded an app, instead of whether the person simply clicked on it. Analysts said, however, that the shortfall suggested that the real-time network might be less useful than competitors for what are called direct-response ads. “Do people want to leave what they are doing on Twitter and do something else like buy something?” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer. “Direct-response advertisers haven’t figured out the best way to use Twitter, and Twitter hasn’t figured out the best way to market to them.” The quarterly results may renew calls for the resignation of Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, who has been under fire from some investors ever since the company’s initial public offering in the fall of 2013. “User growth doesn’t appear to be notably improving, and now monetization is failing to live up to expectations,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG Research. “That’s why the stock is selling off so hard. The question is, How much of this is Twitter’s own missteps versus how much of this is peers such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat eating into their advertising?” Twitter said that 302 million people used its service at least once a month during the first quarter. That is up from 288 million in December and in line with recent trends. But the figure failed to impress investors, who have been eager to see results from recent changes Twitter has made to help newcomers better understand how to use its service. Twitter’s revenue, most of which derives from advertising, came in at $436 million in the first quarter, up from $250 million in the same quarter a year ago. That was well below the $457 million that Wall Street analysts had expected, according to estimates collected by S&P Capital IQ. The company also continued to lose money in the first quarter: $162 million, or 25 cents a share. Excluding stock-based compensation and certain other expenses, however, the company reported a profit of $46.5 million, or 7 cents a share. On that basis, Wall Street had expected Twitter to earn 4 cents a share.

• Twitter CEO faces a crisis of confidence: Twitter Inc.’s chief executive officer failed to foresee a slowdown that forced the social-media company to miss analysts’ first-quarter revenue estimates and cut its 2015 sales forecast, and the stock slumped 18 percent. While this isn’t the first time Twitter has fallen short on promised results, investors had been told that new features and services, as well as a management overhaul, were starting to pay off. Now, with results missing projections and executives warning of a “slow start” to April user additions, analysts are asking whether Twitter’s potential market is limited and about management’s ability to lure more users and advertisers“Management will again have to address credibility concerns,” Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a note to investors. The quarter’s performance “raises the question of how much visibility into advertiser and consumer demand for its offerings Twitter really has,” he said. As Twitter has evolved, Costolo has also sought to explain changes in how the company’s performance should be measured. He usually has a positive business reason for why a number went down. For example, after a slump in timeline views, a metric that Twitter touted as a key figure before its November 2013 initial public offering, Costolo said product improvements had made clicks less necessary, deflating the importance of a number that was supposed to measure user interest. That figure no longer appears on earnings releases, and Twitter hasn’t replaced it with a new metric to track engagement. As Twitter’s monthly active user growth slowed, Costolo responded by saying that it didn’t show the whole picture because 500 million people also visit Twitter’s website each month without logging in. Now, Twitter has decided to tweak the metric, it said on the conference call, making historical comparisons more difficult. The company is adding to the total user count people who access Twitter and send tweets via SMS, or text messaging, in emerging markets, reasoning that they will one day become regular users when upgrading their phones. The change, which will start this quarter, would have added 6 million more people to the prior period’s total count.

• Oracle raises $10B in debt as tech majors borrow to sweeten equity with dividends, buybacks: Oracle sold $10 billion of notes on Tuesday, including the software maker’s first bond that will mature in 40 years, at yields that were lower than originally offered, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Amgen, the world’s second-biggest biotech company, issued $1.25 billion in 30-year securities at its lowest coupon for that maturity as a part of a $3.5 billion debt sale, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Both borrowers raised debt to return capital to their equity investors. The highest-rated companies that have been building up their balance sheets after the financial crisis are showing willingness to borrow to satisfy stock investors pushing them to lift share prices. And even as the Federal Reserve moves closer to raising interest rates, forecasts that the U.S. central bank will wait until September, is encouraging borrowers to embrace yields on corporate bonds that are hovering near record lows. Apple Inc. said Monday it may tap debt markets to fund share buybacks. Investors are rewarding companies that have hoarded cash and tightened spending. The ratio of net debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index is near the lowest levels on record. Oracle last month boosted its dividend for the first time since 2013 by 25 percent to 15 cents a share, up from the prior payout of 12 cents. Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, last sold bonds in June, when it issued $10 billion. The company sold the new debt in six parts, with the $1.25 billion 40-year portion yielding 170 basis points more than similar-maturity Treasuries, 10 basis points less than where the deal was initially marketed. Apple unveiled a plan Monday to boost its share-buyback authorization by $50 billion to $140 billion, and increasing the company’s dividend by 11 percent. Cupertino, California-based Apple has issued the equivalent of $40.35 billion of bonds since April 2013, when it sold $17 billion in what at the time was the biggest corporate-bond offering ever.

• Microsoft might be approaching a substantial goodwill impairment from the Nokia purchase: Microsoft made waves recently by disclosing in its quarterly 10-Q document that its Phone business, which generates billions in yearly revenue, isn’t performing as well as it expected. As Microsoft is carrying billions of dollars of goodwill related to the Nokia purchase on its books, the warning landed like a brick in a puddle of lukewarm slop. History as prelude in this case is the aQuantive boondoggle, during which Microsoft wrote of billions of dollars of value relating to that purchase. As Business Insider’s Matt Weinberger recently wrote: “[T]he last time Microsoft used language like this in an earnings report was back in 2012, three months before it took a $6.2 billion charge to its bottom line for its aQuantive acquisition.” Microsoft currently counts quite a lot of goodwill as an intangible asset on its books. In its most recent quarters, the dollar amount of goodwill sourced from the Nokia deal, in which Microsoft bought the majority of the Finnish company’s hardware assets, sat around the $5.4 billion mark. That’s about a quarter of the company’s total goodwill, which it reports as just over $21.7 billion. Microsoft may not be forced to write down any goodwill relating to the Nokia deal. Or it may have to write down quite a lot. In terms of scale, how bad could the damage be? A massive write down could tank a quarter of the company’s profit, using normal accounting methods (GAAP). Using adjusted metrics, Microsoft could take the non-cash charge in stride, more shamefaced than materially castigated. On a GAAP basis, things get more interesting. The $5.4 billion in goodwill that the company currently counts as an asset is more than the company’s last-quarter GAAP profit. So, in theory, a massive write down could erase a full quarter’s profits both per-share and in aggregate. We can look back to the aQuantive write down to see the potential impact. Here’s Microsoft, from the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012. In short, the write down essentially erased the company’s profit for the quarter.

• In sharp reversal, US retailer Best Buy will start accepting Apple Pay in all stores: Best Buy announced on Monday that it now accepts Apple Pay payments for purchases made inside its smartphone app, and by the end of the year will accept payments made in its brick-and-mortar stores using the Apple Pay mobile wallet. A Best Buy spokesman said in a statement that the electronics retailer wanted to give customers as many options as possible in how they pay for goods and services. The company also plans to open a technology innovation office in the Seattle area to work on mobile technology issues, the spokesman said. That is a sharp reversal from just a few months ago, when major retailers like Rite-Aid and CVS abruptly shut off the ability to accept Apple Pay payments in their retail stores. Best Buy has not accepted Apple Pay payments in the past. The issue was not whether these companies want a mobile wallet to catch on. More than 50 retailers, including Walmart, Best Buy and Gap, started working together years ago to develop CurrentC, a smartphone-based payments product still in development. The hope was that for members of the consortium, also called the Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX, accepting mobile payments through their CurrentC app could be a way to help retailers understand more about their customers’ shopping habits and, potentially, let merchants avoid the high fees they pay when processing credit card transactions. However, when Apple Pay made its debut, MCX retail partners were contractually bound not to accept alternative mobile wallet payments, according to two retailers involved in MCX, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the partnership are private. That meant that even though the CurrentC product is still unreleased, partner retailers would not be able to take Apple Pay or Google Wallet transactions. Some of those exclusivity agreements will expire soon, people close to the coalition said, which could explain why Best Buy will accept Apple Pay in stores this year.

• PremjiInvest may lead $50M fresh investment in grocery e-tailer BigBasket. PremjiInvest, the private investment arm of Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, is in discussions to lead a $50 million (Rs 312 crore) Series C investment round in Bangalore-based SuperMarket Grocery Supplies, which owns and operates online groceries marketplace – BigBasket.com, sources told Techcircle.in. According to senior investment bankers who are aware of the discussions, this fresh round of funding is expected to be wrapped within three months. Request for views on the development from the management of BigBasket and PremjiInvest did not elicit any response. This comes within seven months of BigBasket raising Rs 200 crore ($32.9 million) in its Series B round of funding from a clutch of investors including Helion Venture Partners and Mumbai-based Zodius Capital. After establishing its presence in its home market Bangalore, it has expanded into Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. It is expected to enter Delhi soon. The firm still has cash from the last round but would need a larger stash not just to enter new markets but to create a war-chest to fight fresh competitors, including some which follow an asset-light hyper-local grocery delivery marketplace. In the grocery e-commerce space ZopNow raised $10 million from Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from the existing investors Accel Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Times Internet. ZopNow, which earlier competed head on with BigBasket, has pivoted to become an asset-light business and partners with offline hypermarket chain HyperCity to pick products and deliver to consumers who order online. Then there are a bunch of delivery startups which essentially connects users to local grocers. Grofers raised $45 million across two rounds since January this year; PepperTap raised $10 million while LocalBanya also got fresh funding. BigBasket is understood to have closed FY15 with a top-line of Rs 250 crore, with a run-rate of 6,000 orders a day with average billing of Rs 1,500 per customer. It had generated sales of around Rs 70 crore in the year ended March 31, 2014, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

• Indonesian startup Cubeacon aims to be pioneer in iBeacon technology: Cubeacon wants to be Indonesia’s pioneer in iBeacon technology: It’s a rare thing to hear about software-as-a-service (SaaS) ventures from Indonesia, and even more rare to hear about hardware innovation. But Cubeacon combines both. It focuses on customer loyalty management with a hardware component based on Apple’s iBeacon technology. The startup may be so far ahead of the curve in Indonesia that its CEO Tiyo Avianto is focusing Cubeacon’s distribution in the Japanese market for the time being. Cubeacon uses a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) sensor that was introduced by Apple under the name of iBeacon in 2013. iBeacon sensors are made to be placed indoors, for instance inside a shop. These sensors can detect a customer’s position within the shop very precisely, and they can send offers or information relevant to that location directly to a customer’s phone (so long as they have Bluetooth turned on). Potentially, hundreds of sensor units can be installed across one location. Along with its sensor units, which Cubeacon calls a Cubeacon Box, the company delivers customizable software which shop owners can configure depending on their context and requirements, for example to receive analytics and maps, and to deliver custom ads, or push notifications. “At this time we can produce about 2,500 Cubeacon units per month,” Avianto says. Cubeacon hopes to tap into the big budgets that major companies have at hand for their customer loyalty programs. “Cubeacon exists to bring a different experience to customer loyalty,” he says. Cubeacon’s revenue is based on hardware unit sales, but it also charges for its software on a subscription-based model. For large companies, Cubeacon’s software can be white labelled, meaning that it can be branded and adapted to suit the firm’s needs. It even allows the integration of other iBeacon-based devices, which makes the software attractive for developer companies who are already experts in the technology.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 31

• Alibaba Signs Distribution Deal With BMG, Its First Music Partner Outside Of Asia: (more here) In a bid to increase its online entertainment offerings, Alibaba has struck an agreement with music publisher BMG, which gives it access to over 2.5 million tracks. The partnership is notable because it represents the first time Alibaba’s digital entertainment unit has signed with a music partner outside of Asia. The business already has agreements with Taiwanese music companies Rock Records and HIM International Music. The deal gives Alibaba access to BMG’s catalog, which includes tracks from Bruno Mars, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Kylie Minogue. Music will be made available to consumers through streaming apps Xiami and TTPod, both of which are operated by Alibaba’s digital entertainment business. It’s important to remember that Alibaba is more than just an e-commerce company. It is also one of China’s biggest mobile Internet players, competing head-to-head with Tencent, which has already struck similar arrangements with Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Alibaba’s growth plans include selling other online services to the huge user base it has grown by operating China’s top e-commerce platforms and online payment service Alipay. Streaming music is a potential growth market for Chinese Internet companies, but only if they succeed in dealing with piracy. According to the Financial Times, China accounted for less than one percent of the $15 billion in global revenues made in 2013 by record companies, in part because pirated tracks are easy to obtain. The government, however, has begun to crackdown on copyright infringement, and deals like the ones Alibaba and Tencent have struck with BMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment give music publishers more power over their IP in China. In a statement, Alibaba said “the agreement will not only significantly boost earnings by BMG artists and writers from the world’s most populous nation, but also give them a powerful ally in hleping grow the legitimate music market in China.” This means that Alibaba will help BMG keep an eye on pirated music and work with them to take legal action against services that are using tracks that violate BMG’s copyright.

• US Health Regulator FDA 'Taking a Very Light Touch' on Regulating the Apple Watch: Bakul Patel, who oversees the new wave of consumer-focused health products at the Food and Drug Administration, said most wearable gadgets such as the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch and health-focused applications for smartphones have a way to go before warranting close scrutiny from the agency. "We are taking a very light touch, an almost hands-off approach," Patel, the FDA's associate director for digital health, said in an interview. "If you have technology that's going to motivate a person to stay healthy, that's not something we want to be engaged in." The FDA is mapping out its role at a time when health care and consumer technology are blending. Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. and other companies are building products loaded with sensors that have the potential to eventually gather all sorts of information about blood pressure, body temperature, glucose levels, hydration, oxygen levels and outside air conditions. Software algorithms are being developed that gather different information about a person's health to provide a diagnosis of potential illness that backers say may eventually be more accurate than a doctor. Some products raised flags with regulators after they've reached the market. In February, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on some smartphone apps for dubiously claiming to diagnose melanoma based on an uploaded picture. Meanwhile, the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights is responsible for oversight of the security of patient-health data collected by electronic devices, a separate issue that is being closely watched by privacy advocates. "I worry that there are going to be companies that are skirting the rules," Gandhi said. "We have to see the enforcement, otherwise it creates a very uneven playing field between companies that are acting ethically and those that aren't." Patel said Apple and Google Inc. and other corporations should play a role in screening applications to be sure health-software developers aren't over-promising the benefits of their products. Both companies have visited FDA headquarters in Maryland to discuss their health initiatives, he said.

• India Startup Action: 5 startups pass out of Target’s accelerator in India; include a visual search engine, in-store location targeting plays: Five startups have just completed a four-month incubation program at US-based retailer Target’s accelerator in Bangalore. This is the second batch to graduate from the accelerator, which focuses on new ideas in retail. This batch of startups had innovators in omnichannel, data, digital marketing, mobile, and supply chain. Here’s a quick look at the five fresh Target graduates: Wazzat: Wazzat is a visual search engine. Its widget has both mobile and web APIs which ecommerce sites can easily integrate. The widget helps find visually similar products. During the incubation, it tested its “find similar” tool with apparel and shoes on the Target site. Whodat: Whodat makes mobile augmented reality apps for brands to help customers visualize their products. For example, it piloted an app at the accelerator for people to see how Target’s dinnerware would look in their homes. Visarity: Visarity enables interactive 3D experiences on both mobile and web, for apps as well as ads. It has wide applications in product demos, navigation maps, and gaming. Target used the Visarity platform to build a game experience for its media network. Torch: Torch is a wireless sensor built by Antarix Labs to monitor smartphone activity inside a store. In this way, it aims to provide offline retailers with the kind of analytics on customers that online retailers now take for granted. Synapse: This is another offline play. The Synapse app recognizes customers when they walk into a store and sends context-aware notifications to the lockscreens of their mobile phones. At Target, it piloted relevant push offers for customers on Android lockscreens.

• Snapchat's ad offerings present a conundrum for marketers: enormous engagement, but little data, targeting: Brands salivating over Snapchat as an engaging influencer marketing tool are all too often put off by costly campaigns and inconclusive results. But given the messaging app is insanely popular with millennials, agencies and brands are creating workarounds, or at the very least complementing Snapchat campaigns much as they did in the early days of Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. Snapchat hosts compilation videos shared from special events and locations via its Our, Live and Local Stories channels. There also are Discover channels with media companies like Vice and Comedy Central posting content. The app splits revenue with the media companies for ads on Discover channels, and those sponsorships can cost as much as $75,000 a day, say marketing execs. In other cases, brands like McDonald's cough up as much as $750,000 for daily official sponsorships. The content and ads disappear within 24 hours, ready for fresh material. That element vexes a number of marketers. Moreover, marketers remain skeptical of Snapchat given there's no way to accurately direct ads to specific audiences and no easy way to figure out whether they actually worked. One digital ad executive who recently saw Snapchat's sales pitch said, "It was not impressive because there's no way to target ads." "Snapchat is very limited as far as the data it makes available," said Justin Rezvani, CEO of theAmplify, an Instagram-focused shop that recently branched out with Snapchat. "Our focus is to track sentiment and conversations on alternative platforms, like Instagram." Rezvani said it's hard to measure basics like whether users are watching Snapchat videos all the way through. However, most signs point to Snapchat users being super engaged with the content. The Stories channels have attracted more than 1 billion views on active days, according to social shops contacted and figures reported by Snapchat. The content is so transitive that consumers cherish it more, Cicero said. "There's nothing to compare it to, so in general advertisers are hesitant," he said. "But the ones that take advantage now obviously will be more successful. They understand the mindset shift."