Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, 5th December 2016

I had drifted into a routine of waking up later and later, and putting this together had fallen by the wayside as a result, but I'm trying to reset that habit now:-)

• Meitu of China, Built on the Selfie, Could Be Worth $5.23 Billion in I.P.O.: For users of Meitu’s signature app, a beautiful touch-up at the press of a button is free. But Meitu is hoping that investors in the company, which wants to “make the world a more beautiful place,” will value it somewhere between $4.6 billion and $5.23 billion. Meitu plans to offer shares at between 8.5 Hong Kong dollars and 9.6 Hong Kong dollars, raising $629 million to $710 million. The company is known for its eponymous selfie app, which allows users to digitally alter their photos, as well as its livestreaming app, Meipai. It also makes smartphones, designed to improve selfie-taking, which are endorsed by the Chinese actress Angelababy. The share listing will offer a rare gauge of whether global investors agree with the sky-high valuations often found in China’s tech start-up scene. Venture capitalists and private investors have leapt into the field, which has given rise to successful app- and gadget-makers amid an e-commerce and financial technology boom.

• There’s a powerful new way to dig up dead websites: It can be hard to find sites that have disappeared from the Internet. But the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is on the verge of rolling out a feature that will make tracking down dead websites much easier, according to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. The Wayback Machine has been helping people see past Internet sites over the past 15 years, but searchers always needed to know the URL of a website to find the archived copies. Soon, however, you'll be able to use keyword searches to find old websites -- in fact, you can already test it out through a public beta.The new search feature is not quite like Google, where all the text on each page on a website is indexed to help with searches. The Wayback Machine feature lets you search for an archived website's main page, although it does not have the capacity to enable searches for specific web pages on that site. But once you're there, you're able to navigate around the old websites.

• Psst.. Sony Has a Hit That's as Big as Pokemon Go in Japan: Nintendo Co. might have scored a hit with the explosive debut of Pokemon Go this year. On its home turf, however, Sony Corp. has quietly dispatched its rival with a popular mobile game called Fate/Grand Order. The game, based on an anime TV series called Fate, allows players to travel back in time and team up with historical figures like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci and Joan of Arc to rescue humanity from looming disaster. While the basic version is free to play, people can pay for tokens that make it easier to add characters and speed up gameplay. Fate/Grand Order has been at or near the top of Japan's app revenue rankings all year and has been downloaded more than 7 million times since its July 2015 debut. It has made more money than Pokemon Go among Android users 104 out of 133 days this year, and 51 days on iOS devices, in the same period, according to researcher App Annie. The game's success is a sign of how important Sony's gaming and entertainment businesses are as the company struggles with razor-thin margins and competition in televisions, cameras and other hardware. The company plans to expand its mobile games effort with more titles in more markets in the coming months.

• Microsoft’s AI will describe images in Word and PowerPoint for blind users: Artificial intelligence may be making small and steady advances in general-purpose situations like digital assistants. But it’s the more subtle AI accessibility features that have a more substantial impact today, especially for users with disabilities. For instance, an upcoming feature for Office apps like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint will automatically suggest image and slide deck captions, called alt-text, using AI algorithms. That way, when those files are presented to blind users, computer tools designed to translate the information onscreen into audio have text descriptions to work with.Microsoft is accomplishing this feat with its Computer Vision Cognitive Service, which uses neural networks trained with deep learning techniques to better understand and describe the contents of images. “We will offer you automatic suggestions for alt-text when you insert a photographic image that can be recognized with high confidence,” writes the Office 365 team in a blog post. “Through machine learning, this service will keep improving as more people use it, saving you significant time to make media-rich presentations accessible.” Facebook too announced a similar feature for photo captions back in April, and much of the tech industry is using these AI techniques to both improve accessibility and better parse images and videos for valuable data. The feature will be available in Office and PowerPoint on PC starting next year for Office 365 subscribers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, September 21

• Researchers remotely hack Tesla Model S: Chinese researchers announced Monday that they had discovered security vulnerabilities in the Tesla Model S that allowed them to take over the vehicle’s brakes and more without laying a finger on the car. While other researchers have hacked into Tesla vehicles, this appears to be the first time researchers were able to do so remotely — highlighting the security risks of the sophisticated software and online features now being built into vehicles. A video posted by the researchers from Tencent’s Keen Security Lab appears to show them controlling the vehicle's brakes, as well as manipulating its side mirrors, running the windshield wipers and popping the trunk while the car is in motion. The researchers were also able to manipulate some other features while the vehicle was parked, including opening the sunroof, controlling some of the vehicle’s lights and unlocking the doors, according to the video. In a blog post, the researchers wrote that they reported the vulnerabilities to Tesla, and the company confirmed the hack. The researchers only tested out their method on “multiple varieties of Tesla Model S,” but said that it’s “reasonable to assume that other Tesla models are affected." Tesla said in an emailed statement that it "deployed an over-the-air software update" to fix the problem within 10 days of being informed about the bug. The company said the vulnerabilities that Keen Security Lab uncovered would only be accessible under a very specific circumstance: when the vehicle’s Web browser was in use and the car was connected to a malicious WiFi hotspot. Tesla plans to reward the researchers under its bug bounty program, according to the statement. Tesla was the first automaker to roll out such a program, which offers cash rewards to independent researchers who help the company uncover problems in its software. The company pays up to $10,000 per bug.

• iPhone 7 Teardown Shows Margins Slimming on Storage, Displays: Apple Inc.’s iPhone margins have narrowed with the release of its latest smartphone line, the iPhone 7, with higher costs to provide greater storage options, a glossy black cover and more advanced displays, according to an analysis by IHS Inc. The component analysis firm estimates that the total manufacturing cost of an entry-level iPhone 7, a model with a 4.7-inch screen and 32 GB of storage, is $224.80. This compares with an updated IHS estimate of $200 for an entry-level iPhone 6S in 2015. IHS didn’t perform an analysis of the larger iPhone 7 Plus but said the costs are likely higher than last year’s iPhone 6S Plus due to the presence of additional components. Based on the IHS breakdown, the margins on the 4.7-inch iPhones have narrowed as Apple maintained the $649 starting price, but the company seems to have offset this by raising the price of the iPhone 7 Plus. The iPhone 7 Plus costs $769 for a model with 32 GB of storage compared with last year’s $749 entry-level price. Apple is also holding up its overall margins by reserving the more costly glossy black manufacturing process for the 128 GB and 256 GB models. While Apple hasn’t released sales numbers for the iPhone 7 line’s opening weekend, the company indicated its initial supply sold out. Despite early knocks against the device for its lack of a headphone jack, reviews have been positive and the company’s stock has gained 5.4 percent since the new phone was introduced about two weeks ago. The iPhone represented about 66 percent of Apple’s revenue last year, and the product’s unit sales, margins, and average-sales-price are critical to the company’s quarterly earnings results.

• Microsoft Plans Another $40 Billion Buyback, Boosts Dividend: Microsoft Corp.’s board authorized the buyback of an additional $40 billion of stock on top of an existing $40 billion repurchase program it will finish by year’s end, keeping up a strategy of returning money to shareholders as its cash pile grows. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker also raised its quarterly dividend by 8.3 percent to 39 cents a share, according to a statement Tuesday. The company’s stock has jumped 31 percent in the past year, giving Microsoft a market capitalization of $442.7 billion -- the third-largest in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has been working to jump-start revenue growth -- which analysts project will be 2 percent this fiscal year after a decline of 2 percent the previous year -- amid continued restructuring efforts related to the failed acquisition of Nokia Oyj’s phone business. Since Nadella took the helm in 2014, the company’s cloud and internet-based Office software businesses have fueled growth and boosted investor optimism. The stock this year has been hovering close to a 1999 record high.Microsoft shares rose about 1 percent in extended trading after the announcement. They slipped less than 1 percent to $56.81 at the close in New York.The company had $113.2 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June 30. Microsoft is spending about $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn Corp., a deal that will be largely funded by debt sales.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 16

• Xiaomi Phone Shipments Fall 38% in China as Huawei Takes Lead; Apple Falls Behind: Xiaomi Corp., the once-hot Chinese smartphone maker, saw shipments tumble 38 percent in China in the second quarter as Huawei Technologies Co. took over the top spot in the world’s largest market. Xiaomi shipped 10.5 million smartphones in the quarter, down from 17.1 million in the same period a year earlier, according to research from International Data Corp. That made the company the fourth-largest competitor in the market behind Huawei, OPPO and Vivo. Xiaomi was once valued at $46 billion, according to CB Insights. The Chinese market has grown increasingly competitive as domestic manufacturers have improved their quality, design and marketing, putting pressure on global leaders Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Apple saw shipments in China drop 32 percent in the second quarter and the iPhone maker fell to fifth in the market, according to IDC. The research firm said that Huawei and OPPO gained ground by concentrating on one or two key attributes in their marketing messages. Huawei emphasized the Leica lens now available on its phones, while OPPO pitched fast-charging technology. Apple’s global shipments are set to decline in 2016 as it continues to lose ground in its largest overseas market, Canalys said in a separate report. “The iPhones lack features such as waterproofing and wireless charging. Apple needs to catch up with the competition if it wants to compete,” Canalys research analyst Jessie Ding wrote.

• Microsoft’s HoloLens Technology Adopted by Israeli Military: If Pokemon Go achieved one thing, it was showing the world that augmented realitytechnologies are ready for the mainstream. Israel’s military thinks AR is ready for another use: battlefield training. The Israeli army’s C2 Systems Department recently purchased two HoloLens glasses from Microsoft Corp. The commander of the head programming department, Major Rotem Bashi, intends to develop the technology to improve battlefield strategy and train field personnel. And quickly: He intends for HoloLens to be used on active duty within months. At the army base outside Tel Aviv, a handful of developers in Bashi’s team created a software program in less than a month that allows commanders to manipulate military terrain models and intelligence data to monitor troop positioning from enemy vantage points. Battlefield maps are superimposed on top of the real terrain, streamed in via satellite, to create a blend that can be interacted with via sight, voice and hand gestures. The unit is now finding ways to allow HoloLens-wearing medics to operate on wounded with simultaneous instruction from trained surgeons, and combat soldiers to fix equipment malfunctions. It’s far removed from hurling Pokeballs at Pidgeys and Rattatas in Pokemon Go, but based on similar principles. Besides adapting the HoloLens to military life, Bashi’s unit is working on a product that will give headquarters an online report about a combatant’s physiological state in the field.

• LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers: LinkedIn is trying to lock down its exclusive relationship with its users. The professional networking company filed suit against 100 unnamed individuals last week for using bots to harvest user profiles from its website. The lawsuit is a preliminary step to revealing the identities of the scrapers — LinkedIn intends to ask the court to reveal the true identities behind the scrapers’ IP addresses — and a way to maintain its exclusive hold on users’ resumes. But LinkedIn’s lawsuit also raises questions about how to police bot use. The company, which was recently snapped up by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, has invoked the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in its suit against the unidentified scrapers, claiming that collecting user profiles from the site amounts to hacking. LinkedIn’s case accuses the anonymous scrapers of building a massive botnet and circumventing the restrictions LinkedIn uses to prevent profile collection by undesirable third parties. The lawsuit details several of LinkedIn’s automated tools that prevent data harvesting. Dubbed FUSE, Quicksand and Sentinel, these tools monitor the web traffic of LinkedIn users and limit how many other profiles a user can view, and how quickly a user can view those profiles. This tracking is intended to prevent scrapers from signing up for fake LinkedIn profiles and then vacuuming up vast amounts of data. The company also uses a tool called Org Block to block IP addresses it suspects of scraping and uses Member and Guest Request Scoring to track page requests. But paradoxically, LinkedIn doesn’t want to prohibit scraping altogether. Search engines like Google use bots to index websites and turn up relevant results — and LinkedIn wants to allow this type of scraping to occur. “LinkedIn ‘whitelists’ a number of popular and reputable service providers, search engines, and other platforms so as to permit them to query and index the LinkedIn website, without being subject to all of LinkedIn’s security measures,” the company explains in its suit. The scrapers targeted in the lawsuit circumvented LinkedIn’s bot-blocking tools by sending their requests through one of these ‘whitelisted’ entities, a third-party cloud service provider.

• Peter Thiel says journalism will be just fine, since he’ll decide what’s good journalism: Peter Thiel is a billionaire who decided he didn’t like Gawker Media after it outed him as gay. So he funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, and they won. Now Gawker is selling itself in a bankruptcy auction. Today, the same day that bids for Gawker are due, Thiel published an op-ed in the New York Timesas a sort of victory lap, but also to muster votes for a bill currently wending its way through Congress, the Intimate Privacy Protection Act. It's more commonly known as the revenge-porn bill, which would make it illegal to transmit private images and messages, but Thiel has co-opted it for his own purposes, referring to it by a lesser-known nickname, the Gawker Bill. But the most interesting part of Thiel’s editorial is what he says about the need for a free press: It’s telling that despite the fact he felt Gawker had invaded his privacy, Thiel himself never filed a lawsuit — he’s fighting via proxies. In trying to determine what should and shouldn’t qualify as journalism, Thiel is exercising the classic Silicon Valley pretension to attempt to own the definition, to write its own narrative, devoid of context or skepticism. But smart publishers will react to Thiel’s call to arms in a similar vein to the closing words of his editorial: He can’t do it, if we don’t let him.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 12

• Alibaba passes earnings milestones, silent on SEC probe: China's Alibaba Group Holding posted its best revenue growth since before the e-commerce titan's listing in late 2014, lifting its shares to their highest level in a year. But Alibaba was silent on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into its accounting practices, which have long been the subject of criticism. In the three months to June 30, Alibaba also made more money from mobile shopping than from PCs for the first time, helping to send its shares up by more than 5 percent to $92.10 in New York, its highest level in more than a year."This is a decoupling of revenue from GMV (gross merchandise volume)," he said, referring to a measure of the total value of goods transacted on Alibaba's online shopping platforms. Despite GMV growth remaining low compared to previous years, rising 24 percent to 837 billion yuan, Alibaba is squeezing more money out of its e-commerce business, chiefly from advertising. That translated to quarterly revenues of 32.15 billion yuan ($4.84 billion), a 59 percent leap from the previous year and the highest growth rate since late 2013. While China e-commerce was strong for Alibaba in its first quarter, the company is also investing in other businesses including cloud computing arm Aliyun, driverless vehicles and online shopping in Southeast Asia. It hopes these can become an eventual source of growth as Alibaba faces the prospect of a saturated online retail market in China. Although some are showing promise - Aliyun sales rose 156 percent, though only contributed 4 percent of total revenue - most are still loss-making.

• Microsoft is buying a company that lets viewers control video game live streams: Today, Microsoft announced its plans to acquire live streaming service Beam, a Seattle-based company that lets users influence and interact with a video game being streamed by another player. Beam launched in January to compete against well-established game streaming services from Twitch and YouTube. It set itself apart by taking a core concept made popular by streamers — the notion of letting players control a game from afar — and turning into a unique streaming platform. For instance, Beam lets viewers suggest challenges for streamers and even alter in-game aspects like weapon loadout and quest selection. It also lets developers create special button layouts for viewers to interact with games being streamed through Beam. To maintain quality, the company's technology drastically reduces the lag between a player's actions and what the viewers see on the stream, whereas competitors like Twitch have a roughly 10 to 15 second delay. It's unclear how Microsoft plans to incorporate Beam's technology into its own online gaming platform. But the company points to Minecraft, now a Microsoft property, as the type of game well-suited to Beam's technology. Microsoft did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 2nd

• Uber to Sell to Rival Didi Chuxing and Create New Business in China: In a stark signal of how difficult it is for American technology companies to thrive in China, Uber China said it was selling itself to Didi Chuxing, its fiercest rival there. The sale, which would create a new company worth about $35 billion, would end the great ride-hailing battle of China. A person with knowledge of the deal said Uber investors had been pushing for such a transaction. The companies have been fighting relentlessly for market share in mainland China for two years, spending tens of millions of dollars every month to attract riders and drivers. The merger would end that competition and create significant scale, but it would also be a repudiation of Uber’s ambitions to take on local Chinese competitors in their huge home market.Still, it is by no means a financial catastrophe for Uber, which for about $2 billion of investment in the Chinese market gets a $7 billion share in a company that is likely to grow. It also saves the cash it may have spent competing in China for other projects.Under the terms of the deal, the new company’s estimated worth is a combination of Didi Chuxing’s $28 billion valuation and Uber China’s $7 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information had not yet been made public. Uber shareholders would receive a 20 percent stake in the new company. Didi Chuxing would also make a $1 billion investment in the company’s operations in the rest of the world, called Uber Global, which was lastvalued at $62.5 billion, according to the two people with knowledge of the sale. Bloomberg first reported news of the deal.

• Didi Schools Uber on Doing Business in Cut-Throat Chinese Market: The deal is the culmination of more than a year of take-no-prisoners war between the world’s two largest ride-sharing companies, a series of clashes played out in the media and on the dusty streets of hundreds of cities. That battle, waged through massive subsidies on rides, wound up costing Uber $2 billion, the people said. Alarmed, its investors clamored for a ceasefire.In the end, Didi proved too resourceful -- and too well-connected -- for the ride-sharing giant to dethrone. Uber threw in the towel just days after China banned the practice of charging less than the cost of a ride, depriving the U.S. company of a tried-and-true engagement tactic. In a blogpost obtained by Bloomberg before an official announcement, Kalanick portrayed the deal as a merger that strengthens both parties; others, including Grab CEO Anthony Tan, saw it as a humbled Uber taking its ball elsewhere.But Didi proved more creative, and local connections came through. The conflict took an unusual turn as third parties began to get drawn into the mix. In August, Uber complained it had been blocked from WeChat, the popular messaging service run by Didi-backer Tencent. Then Didi recruited allies, forging a four-way alliance with ride-sharing services that compete with Uber, including Lyft Inc. in the U.S., Grab and India’s Ola. Didi gained confidence as it entered the new year. From President Jean Liu on down, its executives were determined to deal a knockout blow. Didi began raising more money and its emboldened executives openly declared victory. “We will be the last one standing,” Stephen Zhu, vice president of strategy, said in what proved to be a prescient April address.Recent funding saw Uber’s valuation swell to $68 billion and the company said it had access to more than $11 billion on its balance sheet. Didi, said to be valued at close to $28 billion, had more than $10 billion at its disposal. In the end, Didi proved too large an opponent, with backers including some of China’s largest government institutions and even Apple Inc. The four-year-old company now handles more than 11 million rides a day and serves about 300 million users across some 400 cities, offering taxis, private cars, ride sharing and test driving.

• Didi’s acquisition of Uber China throws the global anti-Uber alliance in doubt: Didi Chuxing, China’s homegrown ride-hailing startup, was the glue that held together the global anti-Uber alliance that included Lyft, Grab and Ola. But now that Didi has acquired Uber’s China operations, that partnership has been thrown into doubt. In addition to a $1 billion investment Didi is making into Uber, the deal also brings Uber CEO Travis Kalanick onto Didi Chuxing’s board and Didi Chairman Cheng Wei onto Uber’s board. Both Kalanick and Wei are non-voting members of the board. That means, as of last night, Didi Chuxing is more invested in Uber’s success than it is in the alliance. Didi, so far, had invested about $100 million in Lyft, $350 million in Grab and $30 million in Ola, altogether about $480 million, less than half of what it just invested in Uber.

• More news on this: Uber’s surrender in China puts more pressure on big tech companies to thrive in India

• Delphi, Singapore launch test of self-driving taxis: Delphi Automotive Plc will launch a small test fleet of automated taxis in Singapore next year, aiming to ferry passengers around a city district in one of the first real-world tests of automated rides on demand, the company said on Monday. The project, run in partnership with the Singapore Land Transport Authority, will road test a concept that many companies investing in automated driving believe offers the fastest path to making such technology commercially viable. A cab ride in a dense urban area can cost $3 to 4 a mile, Delphi vice president of engineering Glen DeVos said in an interview. “We think we can get to 90 cents a mile” with an automated vehicle. That drops the price of transporting goods and people, and allows for the costs of automated driving systems to be spread over hours of operation and multiple users. Initially, the cars will have drivers ready to take over if the piloting systems fail, DeVos said. But by 2019 or 2020, “we’ll have removed drivers from the car,” Glen DeVos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering said in an interview.

• Microsoft Sells $19.75 Billion of Bonds in Its Biggest Ever Sale: Microsoft Corp. raised $19.75 billion in the third-largest U.S. corporate bond sale of the year to help finance its planned purchase of LinkedIn Corp. Investors put in more than $50 billion of orders for the deal in the software maker’s biggest ever sale. The strong demand helped Microsoft to borrow at lower rates than it paid for the $13 billion of bonds it raised in October. It also saved about $40 million in annual interest payments compared with what it was offering to pay initially, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors have been clamoring for U.S. corporate debt in recent months. Yields are turning negative on a growing number of bonds globally as central banks in Japan and Europe ramp up stimulus packages, spurring money managers to seek higher returns in the U.S.S&P Global Ratings assigned the bonds the top AAA grade in a note reviewing the sale on Monday. Moody’s Investors Service also gave the bonds its top grade. The longest portion of the debt is a 40-year bond that yields 1.8 percentage points above Treasuries. On Thursday, Apple Inc. sold $7 billion of bonds. Investors opened their wallets for the iPhone maker, allowing the company to lower yields on all portions of the offering, which was funding shareholder buybacks. Like Apple, Microsoft’s debt issuance is tied to avoiding an increase in its tax bill. Companies with cash holdings from overseas profits have to pay a 35 percent tax to repatriate those funds to the U.S. Rather than use that cash to fund its acquisition and pay the hefty taxes that result, it is far cheaper for large multinationals like Microsoft to borrow the funds.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 20

• Microsoft Earnings Are Up, Cushioned by Its Cloud Business: On Tuesday, in its quarterly earnings results, Microsoft offered strong signs that its cloud business was growing quickly. Revenue from Azure, a business Microsoft started to compete in cloud computing with Amazon, the market leader, rose more than 100 percent in the quarter. Revenue from Office 365, a subscription version of the old Office software, rose 54 percent from commercial customers and 19 percent from consumers.Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has made cloud computing a priority for the company since becoming chief executive two years ago. Many believed it was a move that Microsoft had long needed to make but was held back by the reluctance of its previous boss, Steven A. Ballmer. There is risk in this transition. The profit margins from renting software in the cloud are not as high as selling a license to customers, and Microsoft investors have always counted on the company to generate exceptional profits. But the cloud business model tends to be more stable — a trade-off for slimmer margins. After Microsoft’s misadventures in the smartphone market, it is a necessary trade-off. Last week, the company said it would fail to meet a goal of getting its Windows 10 operating system running on one billion devices before June 2018, largely because of its retrenchment in the mobile phone business.Now the company has laid off most of the thousands of people who joined Microsoft through the deal, written off the value of nearly all of the acquisition and whittled back the number of smartphones it sells. On Tuesday, Microsoft said that its phone revenue had declined 71 percent from a year ago. For years, people have put off purchases of new machines or avoided them entirely in favor of smartphones and tablets. Last week, IDC, the technology research firm, said worldwide PC shipments fell 4.5 percent in the most recent quarter compared with a year earlier.For the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft reported net income of $3.12 billion, or 39 cents a share, compared with a loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents a share, during the same period a year earlier. Revenue fell to $20.61 billion, from $22.18 billion a year ago. The decline was partly the result of a $2 billion deferral of revenue related to Windows 10, its latest operating system. Accounting rules require Microsoft to recognize revenue from the software to be recognized in pieces over time. Without the deferral, Microsoft’s revenue rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $22.64 billion. The company’s shares jumped about 4 percent in after-hours trading following the release of its results.

• Google has found a business model for its most advanced artificial intelligence: Two years ago, Google spent over half a billion dollars for the tiny artificial intelligence startup DeepMind. Since then, the unit has walloped Atari video games and beaten an impossible board game. Impressive stuff, that. But those AI demonstrations have yet to spell actual revenue. Until now — although the efforts are helping Google save money on its most expensive part. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis told Bloomberg that his unit recently began applying its advanced AI to Google’s data centers, finding ways to reduce the company’s sizable energy bill. Google started using machine learning for its data centers two years ago, searching for ways to reduce costs for one of the company’s top expenses. A month ago, it aimed the more specialized AI tools from DeepMind at the problem of cooling these server farms. That cut the energy needed for cooling by 40 percent, the company said. It didn’t offer a dollar figure for that, but it’s safe to assume that it means hundreds of millions in savings over the long haul.DeepMind technically sits outside of Google in Alphabet. (I’ve heard people describe it as in the “Alphaverse,” whatever that means.) But a rep said that Google was not paying DeepMind for its cost-cutting research here.

• Facebook Pilots Offline Video for India in Duel With YouTube: Facebook Inc. is piloting a feature in India allowing users to save videos to watch offline, chasing a similar program from Google’s YouTube, as the companies attempt to crack a market ridden with poor internet connectivity. The move followed feedback from users in the country citing poor video experiences because of limited mobile coverage, Facebook said in a statement. “We’re testing an option for people to download videos to Facebook while they’re online on good internet connections, to view the video at anytime, online or offline, without using extra mobile data,” the company said. YouTube introduced offline video in 2014 to cater to Indians crazy about watching Bollywood song sequences, cricket snippets and comedy sketches. Despite the cost of downloads, an estimated 40 percent of data consumption on phone networks is video, said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of the New Delhi-based Medianama.com, which monitors news on the digital industry.Facebook, which has 142 million users in India, said the new feature helps users get through the lag between downloading and playing a video by saving it for later, similar to the YouTube feature. Only original videos posted on personal Facebook accounts and on the social network’s pages can be downloaded. The program is being tested on a small percentage of Indian users, the company said without providing details on broader rollout.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, 4th July

• How AWS came to be: There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago,Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it’s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion run rate. What you may not know is that the roots for the idea of AWS go back to the 2000 timeframe when Amazon was a far different company than it is today — simply an e-commerce company struggling with scale problems. Those issues forced the company to build some solid internal systems to deal with the hyper growth it was experiencing — and that laid the foundation for what would become AWS. Speaking recently at an event in Washington, DC, AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who has been there from the beginning, explained how these core systems developed out of need over a three-year period beginning in 2000, and, before they knew it, without any real planning, they had the makings of a business that would become AWS. It began way back in the 2000 timeframe when the company wanted to launch an e-commerce service called Merchant.com to help third-party merchants like Target or Marks & Spencer build online shopping sites on top of Amazon’s e-commerce engine. It turned out to be a lot harder than they thought to build an external development platform, because, like many startups, when it launched in 1994, it didn’t really plan well for future requirements. Instead of an organized development environment, they had unknowingly created a jumbled mess. That made it a huge challenge to separate the various services to make a centralized development platform that would be useful for third parties.At that point, the company took its first step toward building the AWS business by untangling that mess into a set of well-documented APIs. While it drove the smoother development of Merchant.com, it also served the internal developer audience well, too, and it set the stage for a much more organized and disciplined way of developing tools internally going forward.

• Salesforce Pushed Microsoft to Up LinkedIn Bid Before Deal: Salesforce.com Inc. battled Microsoft Corp. for LinkedIn Corp. deep into the negotiating process, forcing the world’s largest software maker to boost its offer to buy the professional-networking service just days before the $26 billion deal was announced. Three other companies were involved in the discussions, which lasted almost four months, according to a regulatory filing Friday. One of those was Facebook Inc., which passed on an acquisition, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Microsoft increased its offer to $196 a share June 11, from $182 a share earlier, after the other main bidder offered "approximately $200" a share for the company, the filing said. The board ultimately decided the Microsoft offer was stronger in part because it was an all-cash deal, while the other bidder was offering to pay with its stock and cash, the filing said.There were other companies that expressed interest in acquiring LinkedIn, or were involved in the process. Those were referred to as Parties B, C and D in the filing. Recode reported Friday that Party B was Google, the internet search business of Alphabet Inc., and Party D was Facebook, operator of the largest social network.

• Tesla crash raises concerns about autonomous vehicle regulation: The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S in Autopilot mode has turned up pressure on auto industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology is deployed safely. The first such known accident, which occurred in Florida in May, has highlighted tensions surrounding efforts to turn over responsibility for braking, steering and driving judgments to machines. It may delay the U.S. government's plan to outline guidelines for self-driving cars this month. The cause of the Model S crash is still under investigation by federal and Florida state authorities, which are looking into whether the driver was distracted before his 2015 Model S went under a truck trailer. Shares of Tesla and Mobileye NV, the maker of the camera vision system used in the Model S, rose on Friday as analysts said the accident was likely a short-term setback. The stocks fell in after-hours trading on Thursday after an investigation of the crash was made known.

• Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable: “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service,” Mr. Robbins said. “Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you’re hearing messages like, ‘If you’d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately.’” The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support.Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple’s customer support service, AppleCare, and theAmazon Prime subscription service.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 14

• Microsoft, Reasserting Its Muscle, Buys LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion:  Microsoft has made its most ambitious move in years to reassert itself in a technology market it once dominated. The software giant said Monday morning that it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion cash deal. The acquisition, by far the largest in Microsoft’s history, unites two companies in different businesses: one a big maker of software tools, the other the largest business-oriented social networking site, with more than 400 million members globally. The deal is Microsoft’s biggest bet yet that the traditional software business is shifting quickly to cloud computing, a model in which customers rent software and other services delivered over the internet. While LinkedIn does not have the household name of Facebook, a much larger and more lucrative social network, it is the most widely used site for people to advertise their professional skills and work history.Though they operate in different businesses, Microsoft and LinkedIn make most of their money by catering to professionals. Executives involved in the deal said that the common thread prompted the acquisition. “They know the interconnections of the business world,” said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm. “That could really benefit Microsoft from a sales standpoint.”

• How generous is Microsoft’s takeover bid? It puts LinkedIn’s enterprise value at 79 times the social network’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, for the 12 months that ended on March 31. On the basis of that multiple, the transaction is more expensive than any big internet deal paid with cash, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Microsoft is paying $220 for each of LinkedIn’s monthly active users. By comparison, when Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion two years ago, it spent $40 for every user. For LinkedIn, the attractions of the deal are obvious: Its shares fell nearly 42 percent from the beginning of the year through last week, as investors expressed disappointment over a weak earnings forecast for 2016. Finding a buyer with deep pockets dulls the pain of being a publicly traded company.

• One Unspoken Reason Behind the LinkedIn Sale: “Let me explain why.” Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, wrote a lengthy memorandum to his employees Monday morning, ticking off a list of reasons behind the surprise decision to sell the company to Microsoft for $26.2 billion: Most important, he said, was the heft that Microsoft gives LinkedIn “to control our own destiny.” But there may have been another reason that he left unspoken. That would be the company’s struggling stock price and its reliance — some might say overreliance — on stock-based compensation.On one grim day in early February, LinkedIn’s stock price plummeted more than 40 percent after it forecast weaker-than-expected growth for the year. The share price had hovered at $225 at the beginning of 2016; a month later it briefly got close to $100. The rapid devaluation has posed more than just a problem for investors. LinkedIn’s employees are paid largely in stock, and therein lies the rub: Around the company’s new 26-story skyscraper that opened in downtown San Francisco in March, as well as the corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., there have been persistent whispers about whether LinkedIn could retain its top talent as the marketplace clobbered their incomes.Mr. Weiner — who took over as LinkedIn’s chief in 2009, succeeding Reid Hoffman, the founder — has done a tremendous job in the past years building the company’s business, which is primarily about helping people connect to one another for employment and conduct business-oriented social networking. But despite all the headlines about growth and profits, LinkedIn has been a money-losing operation for the last two years. You wouldn’t know that if you only glanced at LinkedIn’s news releases. That’s because LinkedIn steers investors to focus on what’s known as its adjusted Ebitda, or non-GAAP earnings. The company purposely strips out the cost of stock-based compensation, which has the effect of turning losses into gains. LinkedIn paid out $510 million in stock-based compensation last year; over the last two years, that stock-based compensation represented a whopping 96 percent of operating income, or 16 percent of revenue, according to Mr. Mahaney. Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook paid out about 15 percent of operating income, or well under 10 percent of revenue.

• Baidu Reduces Revenue Forecast on Ad Restrictions: Baidu, China’s biggest internet search engine, cut its revenue forecast for the second quarter, saying regulatory restrictions cut advertising from drug companies and other health-care groups. Shares declined as much as 8.9 percent in extended trading after the announcement. The company said it projects sales of 18.1 billion yuan ($2.81 billion) to 18.2 billion yuan compared with its previous forecast of 20.1 billion to 20.6 billion yuan. The new regulations on online marketing by health-care companies have caused a reduction or delay in advertising “from a significant portion” of medical customers, Baidu said in a statement Monday. The company said the lower revenue also is a result of the cut in the number of sponsored links, which Baidu announced last month. While these actions will have a negative impact in the short term, Baidu said it expects users to become accustomed to the changes and health-care advertising will eventually recover. Last month, Baidu announced that it will restrict the number of sponsored posts to 30 percent of a results page, and establish a 1 billion yuan fund to fight fraud after the death of Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old computer science student who sought out a controversial treatment advertised among search results.

• Does the LinkedIn sale put Twitter in play? Yes, it does: LinkedIn just gave Twitter investors something they haven’t felt in a long time: Hope. News that LinkedIn sold to Microsoft on Monday for more than $26 billion has pushed Twitter stock up more than 8 percent in early-morning trading. The reason? If Microsoft is willing to break the bank for LinkedIn, maybe there’s a savior out there for Twitter, too! There have long been talks that a big tech company like Google or Facebook or even Microsoft might swoop in for Twitter. Now that feels almost inevitable, especially given that Twitter’s stock is down nearly 60 percent from where it was a year ago when then-CEO Dick Costolo announced he was stepping down. Simply put, that means the LinkedIn acquisition has done more to boost Twitter’s value than CEO Jack Dorsey has. Of course, the stock move is typical investor arbitrage, but if Twitter’s shares stay up, it's a clear signal investors would rather see it in someone else’s hands. Who might save Twitter? It could still be Google, or perhaps a bigger media player like Comcast*. We talk all the time with smart people close to Twitter, and the growing feeling is that Twitter’s best option is to finally sell to someone with deep pockets. With LinkedIn now off the market, those deep pockets may come take a closer look.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 1

• Why you should delete the online accounts you don’t use anymore — right now: Despite falling out of vogue years ago, MySpace — that old precursor to Facebook — still has details on more user accounts than the United States has people. And now a hefty chunk of those account credentials has been leaked to the entire Internet, in a humbling reminder that the Matchbox Twenty-inspired username you probably made in high school is still worth a heck of a lot to companies and criminals. As many as 360 million MySpace accounts turned up for sale Friday in a 33-gigabyte dump online, according to reports that were confirmed Monday by MySpace's parent, Time Inc. The massive leak includes passwords, email addresses and usernames that were swiped from MySpace in a hack dating back to June 2013, before MySpace made a site redesign that closed some security gaps. It's unclear how many of the accounts in the MySpace hack were still "active," in the sense that they belong to people who continue to log into the service today. But chances are at least some of these accounts hadn't been touched for years. The reason this makes you vulnerable is the same reason experts say you shouldn't use the same username and password for every online service — it makes it easy to take one set of stolen credentials and plug them into others, giving hackers potential access to large swaths of your digital life. Personal data from the MySpace breach was going for sale to the tune of thousands of dollars, highlighting how even outdated information can still carry significant value. But whether your old data gets used for marketing, fraud or some other nefarious purpose is still at least partly within your control.

• Inside Uber’s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car: In its relentless pursuit for growth, Uber needs new drivers, and many of those drivers need cars. To help them get started, Uber has been offering short-term leases since July through a wholly owned Delaware-based subsidiary called Xchange Leasing, LLC. It partners with auto dealerships, advertises to drivers, manages risk, and even pays repo men to chase down cars whose drivers aren't making their payments. Xchange may be key to Uber's continued expansion as it tangles with Lyft in the U.S. and a bevy of competitors abroad. Uber announced a partnership with Toyota last week to finance even more cars. This year, Uber said its financing and discount programs, which include Xchange, will put more than 100,000 drivers on the road. That requires dipping into the vast pool of people with bad or no credit. In a deal led by Goldman Sachs, Xchange received a $1 billion credit facility to fund new car leases, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal will help Uber grow its U.S. subprime auto leasing business and it will give many of the world's biggest financial institutions exposure to the company's auto leases.  The credit facility is basically a line of credit that Xchange can use to lease out cars to Uber drivers.

• Instagram Adds Business Profiles in Advertising Growth Push: Facebook’s photo-sharing application Instagram is unveiling tools to help businesses differentiate themselves from regular users in a bid to help drive advertising revenue. Instagram, which has been heralded by analysts as a key source of growth for Facebook, will now let businesses create special profiles that will allow customers to contact them directly rather than posting public comments. Instagram will also offer business users new data on which posts are getting the most engagement and give them the ability to turn posts into advertisements. Facebook is working to leverage Instagram’s 400 million monthly users to keep up its pace of revenue growth. Instagram ads are expected to bring in $1.53 billion in revenue in 2016, or 15 percent of Facebook’s total ad sales, according to eMarketer. Instagram has 8.5 million users in Canada, Levine said.

• Microsoft sells patents to Xiaomi, builds 'long-term partnership': Software maker Microsoft  is selling about 1,500 of its patents to Chinese device maker Xiaomi [XTC.UL], a rare departure for the U.S. company and part of what the two companies say is the start of a long-term partnership. The deal, announced on Wednesday, also includes a patent cross-licensing arrangement and a commitment by Xiaomi to install copies of Microsoft software, including Office and Skype, on its phones and tablets. Both companies declined to discuss financial terms of the deal.  Jonathan Tinter, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said the company was keen to tap into Xiaomi's young, affluent and educated users by having its products pre-installed on their devices. He declined to go into detail about the patent deals, but said the overall deal was something "we do only with a few strategic partners." Microsoft has cut licensing deals with many Android device makers over the years, but has had less luck with Chinese manufacturers. Florian Mueller, a patents expert who consulted for Microsoft in the past, said it was rare for Microsoft to actually sell its patents, adding "it's possible Microsoft found it easier to impose its Android patent tax on Xiaomi as part of a broader deal that also involved a transfer of patents." 

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 26

• Alibaba Facing SEC Investigation Over Accounting Practices: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell the most in four months after the e-commerce giant said it’s being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices and whether they violate federal laws. The company is providing documents and cooperating with the probe, according to the Hangzhou, China-based company’s annual report. The investigation is looking into consolidation practices, related party transactions and data reported from its Singles’ Day promotion. Singles’ Day is Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, attracting more than 90 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) of sales on its e-commerce platforms in a 24-hour period last year. Alibaba fell 6.8 percent to $75.59, the biggest drop since January. It was down less than 1 percent this year through Tuesday.

• In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge: Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about. Valleywag declined to play the game. It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised but were off the table. It said Google co-founder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That the Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker’s wedding was seriously over the top. Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay. This was gossip with an attitude, and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Mr. Thiel’s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag’s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in $140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing. The revelation of Mr. Thiel’s involvement in the suit this week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media once again to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone’s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies are less transparent about what they do.

• HP Inc profit beats Street amid weak market for PCs, printers: HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday. HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday.The company's revenue fell about 11 percent to $11.59 billion.Revenue in the personal systems business, the company's biggest, fell 9.9 percent in the second quarter, while revenue declined 15.8 percent in the printing division.Total costs and expenses fell by 10.3 percent to $10.75 billion in the second quarter ended April 30, from a year earlier.

• Salesforce inks deal with AWS to expand international presence: AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com, with Salesforce naming the cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increase its international presence without having to build its own data centers in countries that have data sovereignty laws, which require that data stays in-country. It’s expensive to build their own, so they are turning to a public cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon to do the heavy lifting for them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke glowingly of AWS. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” he said in a statement. It’s worth keeping in mind, however that Salesforce also has a deep relationship with Microsoft — and CEO Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference last fall. But the relationship has a flip side and the companies also compete with one another. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research, points out that this announcement should help Salesforce compete with Oracle and Microsoft overseas.

• Terrapattern is reverse image search for maps, powered by a neural network: Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn’t Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout — and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It’s remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. How does that work? And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it — and for under $35,000? The secret, as with so many other interesting visual computing projects these days, is a convolutional neural network. It’s essentially an AI-like program that extracts every little detail from an image and looks for patterns at various levels of organization — similar to how our own visual system works, though the brain is infinitely more subtle and flexible. In Terrapattern’s case, the neural network was trained to look at small squares of the landscape and, comparing those patterns to a huge database of tagged map features from OpenStreetMap, it learned to associate them with certain concepts. Think of how a camera recognizes a face and knows when it is blinking or smiling. It doesn’t actually “know” what faces, smiles and eyes are, but it associates them with certain patterns of pixels, and can reliably pick them out. Once Terrapattern had been trained to recognize and categorize all manner of geographical features, from boats to water towers, its creators set it free on detailed maps of the greater New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Francisco areas. It scoured the landscape and built a huge database of features and similarities — which can be quickly queried and the results returned immediately (the neural network isn’t doing any “thinking” when you click on a feature — its work is done for this dataset). Of course, you could just search for “tennis fields in Oakland” or the like and get perfectly good results, but this allows one to search for things that may not be listed so formally. What if you were looking for houses in the middle of fields, or cul de sacs, or dead lawns, or circular parking lots? Terrapattern knows where those are just as much as it knows where the airports and ferry terminals are. They’re all just assemblages of features to the neural network.

• Facebook will shut down FBX, its desktop ad exchange: Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we’ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this is part of Facebook’s shift to mobile (in its most recent earnings report, mobile accounted for 82 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue). He said: "Mobile is now a necessary component of effective marketing campaigns, and Facebook is helping millions of businesses understand their customers’ purchase path across devices. Dynamic Ads and Custom Audiences have mobile at their core and are delivering excellent results for businesses, so Facebook Exchange spending has shifted towards those solutions. This is about giving people more relevant ads and marketers more effective formats, especially in an increasingly mobile world. Our ads API is open to all developers so they can innovate on our platform and build great ad experiences for brands and their customers." Facebook launched FBX back in 2012, but its focus seemed to have shifted away from the exchange in recent years.

• Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too: The company is taking a $950 million charge to unwind the last vestiges of the Nokia deal. Microsoft is further scaling back its flagging phone business, exiting the consumer market and cutting another 1,850 jobs. As part of the move announced Wednesday, Microsoft will take a $950 million charge and cut what little remained of its Finland-based phone hardware business, unwinding the last of its disastrous $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's phone unit. Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end"feature phone" business.  The company has been scaling back its phone ambitions ever since the Nokia deal closed, with CEO Satya Nadella quickly shifting to a strategy focused on bringing Microsoft's software and services to Android and iOS rather than trying to convince phone buyers to shift to Windows. Despite all the cuts — and having already seen its market share dip below 1 percent — Microsoft says it isn't totally out of the phone-making business. The company insists it will continue to serve phones aimed at the business market and license Windows 10 to any other hardware makers that want to give Windows Phone a try.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 22

• Alphabet’s Earnings Miss Forecasts: European regulators brought the hammer down on Google this week, and investors barely blinked. But when the company’s first-quarter numbers came in a little light on Thursday afternoon, its stock immediately plummeted. Both revenue and profit rose sharply from 2015 but missed analysts’ forecasts. Revenue, at $20.26 billion, was about $120 million less than expected. Earnings per share, excluding certain items, were $7.50 when the consensus estimate was $7.96. The result: The stock fell about $46, or about 6 percent, in after-hours trading. Shares of Google were priced for perfection, and the first quarter was a little less than perfect. Whether that means anything substantive is more doubtful.Revenue from what the company calls “Other Bets” — including its fiber business and the Nest thermostat — was $166 million, more than double what it was in the first quarter of 2015. Losses for Other Bets rose to $802 million from $633 million. The number of employees jumped to 64,000 from 55,000 last year. “The vast majority” of them, the company stressed, were engineers and product managers. A question hanging over Google is its ventures in cloud computing. This is the growth market where Amazon is far ahead of everyone. Amazon Web Services is more exciting to investors than the retailer’s core business. Microsoft, meanwhile, is mounting an aggressive challenge. Google is far behind at No. 3, or perhaps even No. 4 after IBM, said John R. Rymer, an analyst at Forrester Research. Last fall, Google hired Diane Greene, an industry veteran, to run all of its cloud businesses.

• Microsoft’s Cloud Business, Seen as a Salvation, Falls Short of Investors’ Hopes: Cloud computing is seen by many investors as Microsoft’s salvation, the growing business that has convinced many there’s a bright future for the company beyond the troubled PC market. But Microsoft’s cloud business didn’t grow quite fast enough during its last quarter to keep investors happy. The company missed Wall Street estimates, though Microsoft executives said it would have beaten them without the impact of unexpectedly high taxes. For its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, Microsoft reported net income of $3.76 billion, or 47 cents a share, down from $4.99 billion, or 61 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue fell to $20.53 billion, from $21.73 billion. Microsoft’s traditional profit engines, like Windows, have weakened considerably as sales in the PC market have remained in a multiyear slump. Last week, the research firm Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments in the first quarter fell 9.6 percent from a year ago. Yet Microsoft has convinced many investors that it has found a way to adapt to technology changes, in part by vigorously embracing cloud computing. Shares of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., are still trading near their price in 1999, their high, even with a 5 percent drop in value Thursday evening. The optimism stems from its success in transitioning legacy software businesses like Office to a cloud business model in which customers subscribe to the applications. There are now 22.2 million subscribers to Office 365, the subscription version of its Office business, up from 12.4 million a year ago.

• Ev Williams’s Medium raised $57 million in September — now it’s raised another $50 million: You may have heard there’s a tech funding crunch, especially for companies that have yet to generate significant revenue. Not for Medium: The publishing platform says it raised another $50 million — just a few months after it raised $57 million. Update: Investors valued the company at $600 million in the current round, said a person familiar with the financing. This round was led by Spark Capital and includes previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. CEO Ev Williams, whose stake in Twitter has made him a billionaire, is also putting money into his own company

• Amazon is shutting down its Gilt Groupe competitor MyHabit: Another unhappy ending for a flash-sale shopping site. Three months after Gilt Groupe sold for a fraction of its valuation, Amazon has decided to shut down its fashion discount competitor MyHabit, according to a person familiar with the move. Amazon launched the website five years ago near the height of the flash-sale craze, but MyHabit has struggled in recent years as the one-time popular fashion niche has become less popular and Amazon has prioritized other fashion initiatives. Women’s Wear Daily reported employees have been told that the site will shutter at the end of May (subscription). In January, the CEO of MyHabit took on a new role at Amazon as general manager of its new private-label fashion business, according to his LinkedIn profile.Flash sales, on the other hand, has become an increasingly difficult business in recent years. The model exploded in popularity following the last recession, as designer brands were desperate to sell excess inventory in any way they could. But as the economy rebounded, there was less excess inventory to go around and some brands got smarter about how much inventory they produced.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 5

• Amazon Plans Big Push to Expand Prime Now Fast Delivery: Amazon.com Inc. plans to broaden the reach of its fast delivery service Prime Now, and is selling major brands promotional deals connected to the expansion, a sign the world’s largest Internet retailer is satisfied with early results from the nascent offering. The service -- now only available through the Prime Now app on smartphones -- will be run on Amazon’s website starting in May, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Getting Prime Now on the Web puts the service in front of a larger audience, many of whom may not have downloaded the app on their phones. While shopping on mobile devices is expected to reach $96.2 billion in the U.S. this year, that represents a quarter of all e-commerce, according to the research firm EMarketer. Amazon is trying to sell advertising space to major brands for the Web launch, promising them visibility with tens of millions of Amazon shoppers. The premium "Launch Hero Package" would cost $500,000 for about two weeks of placement on Amazon’s website associated with the rollout. That price includes e-mail promotions sent to Amazon customers, which Amazon said have a stand-alone value of $100,000, according to the documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

• Salesforce.com Acquires Deep Learning Startup MetaMind: Cloud business software company Salesforce.com has acquired MetaMind, a startup focused on artificial learning that had been funded by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. Terms were not disclosed, but it has all the markings of an “acqhire” sort of deal. Founder and CTO Richard Socher announced the deal in a post on the MetaMind website. Socher says on his personal website that his new title is Chief Scientist at Salesforce. MetaMind’s area of expertise is deep learning, the subset of artificial intelligence focused on data processing that is en vogue with Google, Facebook and other tech companies. The startup’s specialty is natural language processing — allowing computers to analyze relationships between words. Some of its capabilities disclosed in published researchdescribe advancements in the field that outrank those of some of the larger tech giants. Socher, a Stanford PhD, has said MetaMind’s plan was to sell this technology as a service to other companies. At MetaMind, he led a tiny group of researchers who gained a reputation for some rapid breakthroughs in the area of artificial intelligence. A Re/codereport from 2014 described how after only four months, the team came in only slightly behind Google in the ImageNet competition, in which companies compete to build systems that can recognize images.

• Toyota expands Microsoft partnership in connected vehicle services: Toyota Motor Corp is expanding a five-year-old partnership with Microsoft Corp to develop new internet-connected vehicle services for owners and dealers, Toyota said on Monday. The automaker has established Toyota Connected at its U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas, to consolidate its existing connectivity services and serve as the company's "data science" hub. Microsoft has a 5 percent stake in the venture. Among the services to be developed or expanded under Toyota Connected are insurance coverage and rates based on owners' actual driving patterns; connected vehicle networks that can share information on traffic and weather conditions, such as icy roads; and information services tailored to a driver's habits and preferences, including monitoring heart rate, glucose level and other personal health data. The new wireless services will use Microsoft's cloud-based Azure platform. Toyota launched its initial partnership with Microsoft in 2011. Ford Motor Co introduced a similar program with Microsoft a year ago, and BMW AG and Nissan Motor Co announced Azure-based services earlier this year. Toyota Connected will use Microsoft's cloud technology to develop "predictive, contextual and intuitive services" to "humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background," Toyota said. Toyota Connected also will consolidate the automaker's current initiatives in data analytics, data management and data services for dealers and fleet customers. In addition, the new organization will provide support for Toyota's ongoing research in robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as development of self-driving cars.

• Microsoft’s mobile problem may not be a problem at all: When Microsoft announced its Windows 10 strategy last year, the thinking was that the unified platform would drive Windows Mobile and finally bring the Windows phone out of the doldrums where it’s been virtually forever. The idea was you could develop once for Windows 10 desktop and easily share that code on any device, making it impossibly attractive for developers, which would finally drive Windows Mobile popularity in a beautiful virtuous development cycle. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, and Microsoft finds itself in an unusual position, developing software for iOS and Android because it simply doesn’t have a viable Windows mobile ecosystem. The question remains; can Microsoft succeed without a strong Windows mobile position? From the looks of things, they don’t seem to have much choice. Nadella appears to be staking his position in the cloud, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it, while opening up his company’s tools to iOS and Android in the absence of any meaningful Windows phone adoption. When you look at the beauty of the mobile-cloud connection, it’s understandable Microsoft would want to be there with Windows, but perhaps Nadella is beginning to understand that Windows is not necessarily the future of the company — Azure and Office 365 are — and that could explain why the company stayed firmly focused on these two areas at Build. When you combine that with the idea of bots created by Microsoft, including Cortana (Microsoft’s talking virtual assistant), that can run in Microsoft’s tools or external platforms like Slack and LINE, you start to see a vision where Microsoft thrives even without an in-house mobile platform. As the world moves swiftly to that mobile-cloud intersection, perhaps the underlying OS becomes less important. If that’s the case — if Microsoft can have a piece of the underlying cloud-mobile plumbing and have apps and bots created in its ecosystem, run anywhere on any device — it renders the Windows phone gap irrelevant.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 28

• In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage: It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares? Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them.  Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more. But a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage. Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average. But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually. Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years. Yahoo is not alone. Mr. Colby conducted a cost-benefit analysis of 26 companies buying back stock versus using that money to invest in a business. He found that McDonald’s was another problematic example. Since 2008, McDonald’s has allocated almost $18 billion to buybacks. This has helped produce 4.4 percent increases in annual earnings per share over the period. To equal that growth in overall earnings, the company would have had to generate just a 2.3 percent return on the money it spent buying back stock, Mr. Colby estimated. Last November, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded McDonald’s unsecured debt rating, citing its plans to increase its borrowings in part to fund future buybacks.

• Microsoft Apologizes After Twitter Chat Bot Experiment Goes Awry: Microsoft apologized after Twitter users exploited its artificial-intelligence chat bot Tay, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks in what the company called a “coordinated attack” that took advantage of a “critical oversight.” The company will bring Tay back online once it’s confident it can better anticipate malicious activities, he said. “A coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack,” Lee said, without elaborating. The company introduced Tay Wednesday to chat with humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. Some users quickly tried to see how far they could push Tay.   In less than a day, Twitter’s denizens realized Tay didn’t really know what it was talking about and that it was easy to get the bot to make inappropriate comments on any taboo subject. People got Tay to deny the Holocaust, call for genocide and lynching, equate feminism to cancer and stump for Adolf Hitler. The worst tweets quickly disappeared from Twitter, and Tay itself also went offline “to absorb it all.” Some Twitter users appeared to think that Microsoft had also manually banned people from interacting with the bot. Others are asking why the company didn’t build filters to prevent Tay from discussing certain topics, such as the Holocaust. The bot was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and meant to entertain and engage people through casual and playful conversation, according to Microsoft’swebsite. Tay was built with public data and content from improvisational comedians. It’s supposed to improve with more interactions, so should be able to better understand context and nuances over time. The bot’s developers at Microsoft also collect the nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status of anyone who chats with Tay.

• Uber profits elsewhere support 'sustainable' spending in China: CEO: Ride hailing app company Uber Technologies Inc is generating more than $1 billion in profit a year in its top 30 cities globally, and partly using that money to bankroll its expansion in China, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in an interview. The company said in February it was losing more than $1 billion a year in China's red-hot ride hailing market, where it is battling large local incumbents to win customers. Kalanick said China was the company's most intense market, but also a crucible for new ideas that it has exported to other markets, and that its investment here was sustainable. "If you took our top 30 cities today, today they're generating over $1 billion in profit a year, just our top 30 cities. And that profit multiplies every year because we're growing," he said on the sidelines of the Boao Forum in the Chinese island province of Hainan. Other cities among the 400 where Uber operates were also profitable, he added.

• Snapchat Is Buying Bitstrips, the Company That Turns You Into an Emoji: Snapchat is buying Bitstrips, the company behind the Bitmoji app that lets you create an avatar of yourself to share on social media and over text, according to a source familiar with the deal. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who first reported the news, said Snapchat is paying “in the ballpark of $100 million” for the company, which was founded in 2012. It quickly became popular on Facebook, as users created and shared cartoon versions of themselves in a bunch of different settings. It’s not entirely clear why Snapchat wants Bitmoji, but it feels like a good fit for the company, which has a number of other fun features to help users spruce up their photos and videos. Snapchat allows users to put emojis on photos and videos they send, and has generated a lot of buzz for facial filters that let people distort their faces into different animals or characters. (Facebook just bought a similar company two weeks ago.) Personal emojis are a logical fit in that regard.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 11th

• TechCrunch Sources: India’s Flipkart in talks to raise up to $1b, likely in a down round: After years of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to tap into the burgeoning e-commerce market in India, one of the country’s biggest tech companies is facing a markdown in its valuation as it aims to pick up yet more investment. TechCrunch has learned from sources that Flipkart is looking to raise up to $1 billion in funding to grow its business and shore up against competition from local rival Snapdeal and global giant Amazon. “The funding is now delayed and should take another 3-4 months. A downround is certain,” said a source. According to our sources, one potential investor is Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The company — already a backer of rival Snapdeal — reportedly met with Flipkart management in Hong Kong to discuss investing at less than $10 billion. Other sources say a round would not be this low, and more likely in the range of $11 billion to $14 billion. Alibaba’s alleged interest in Flipkart has been reported previously. Another investor that has been eyeing up a stake in Flipkart is the Fosun Group, sometimes referred to as the Berkshire Hathaway of China. It’s not clear what valuation Fosun has discussed with Flipkart.

• Box Shares Soar as Sales Rise 36 Percent on Shrinking Losses: Shares of cloud storage and collaboration company Box rose by 11 percent in after-hours trading as the company posted fourth quarter results that were better than what analysts expected. Box shares rose $1.38 to $13.90 after posting a per-share loss of 26 cents on revenue of $87 million. Analysts had forecast a loss of 29 cents a share and sales of $81.8 million. The company also finished its fiscal year with revenue of $303 million, up 40 percent year-on-year, and an operating loss of $201 million which ballooned from a $166.6 million operating loss in 2015. The company said Q1 will come in between $88 million and $89 million with a loss of between 23 and 24 cents, both of which were in line with analysts’ estimates. For the year it expects revenue in the range of $390 million to $394 million, with a loss ranging from 83 to 85 cents. It also said it expects a positive free cash flow from operations — a key milestone toward profitability — in the fourth quarter.

• Pre-Roll Ads For Virtual Reality Are Here: Virtual reality is in its “early days” — ask anyone involved in the field and that’s usually their chosen term. And as with the genesis of social media, there’s a coming mad dash of people eager for ways to cash in. On Facebook, gaming companies figured out they could spend fistfuls advertising mobile games and get paying users in return. A handful of ad veterans who rode that social media wave are now trying to replicate the success on VR. A new startup called Immserv is launching a “first-of-a-kind platform” that lets developers creating VR content promote that content with ads. Their product is essentially a YouTube pre-roll ad, just inside VR devices. Immserv is starting with Google’s Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR. Say you’re playing a game in your virtual headpiece (maybe this Firefly Rescue one, designed by Immserv partner Archiact Interactive). A video ad pops up at the onset or in the middle of the game, promoting another game; users are invited to download that app by using the head tracking feature in the VR device. The ads are sold on a cost-per-view basis ranging from three to five cents, said Shah. The company has been testing the ads since December and is going live with at least a dozen apps, launching in advance of the Game Developers Conference next week. Ads in VR are tricky, partly because of formatting challenges, but more critically because they risk upsetting users coming to the incipient form. “You can absolutely turn off customers if you’re not careful,” said Eric Hine, an executive producer for Archiact Interactive. But he stressed that Immserv ads in his games won’t, because they play like thrilling trailers and only run if consumers opt in. The launch also comes at the onset of a pivotal year for VR, as big tech companies hope that consumer enthusiasm for the field approaches the fervor for it inside the big tech companies. Neither Google nor Facebook, massive digital ad sellers, have announced plans to bring ads to their VR efforts. Google is testing in-app purchases and pushing the media industry to build VR content for YouTube. These may be indicators of a coming ad model, although the search giant is also pondering a subscription model across several of its products.

• Salesforce Expands Machine-Learning Service to Microsoft Outlook: Salesforce.com Inc. is taking another step forward in its partnership with Microsoft Corp., expanding integration with the Outlook e-mail program to help sales representatives streamline tasks such as scheduling meetings and responding to messages. With the new SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook application, Salesforce is folding its predictive technology into an e-mail service that has more than 400 million users. The app will let executives work directly from within Outlook on their desktop computers, boosting productivity by automating key steps while interacting with their customers. E-mail continues to be a crucial tool used by sales representatives when they’re trying to land a deal, said Steve Loughlin, chief executive officer of the SalesforceIQ unit. “There are all these data sources that sales reps are trying to access -- they’re drowning in the information," Loughlin said. "This is a way to pull it all together into a single place and deliver it where they are working." Salesforce is extending the reach of machine-learning technology after acquiring RelateIQ for $390 million in 2014. With Inbox, predictive tools are folded into Outlook to erase manual steps. For example, the program can juggle potential meeting times inside e-mails -- automatically adjusting open calendar spots as they fill up before e-mails are returned. The cooperation between San Francisco-based Salesforce and Microsoft broadens the companies’ growing partnership. About two years ago, the two agreed to make some of their business-software products work better together, signaling a thaw in relations between the longtime rivals. “A large number of Salesforce’s large customers are on Outlook,” Loughlin said. "This is going to be a huge opportunity."