Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 29

• U.S. Says It Has Unlocked iPhone Without Apple: The Justice Department said on Monday that it had found a way to unlock an iPhone without help from Apple, allowing the agency to withdraw its legal effort to compel the tech company to assist in a mass-shooting investigation. The decision to drop the case — which involved demanding Apple’s help to open an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the Decembershooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people — ends a legal standoff between the government and the world’s most valuable public company. The case had become increasingly contentious as Apple refused to help the authorities, inciting a debate about whether privacy or security was more important. Yet law enforcement’s ability to now unlock an iPhone through an alternative method raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of security in Apple devices. The development also creates potential for new conflicts between the government and Apple about the method used to open the device and whether that technique will be disclosed. Lawyers for Apple have previously said the company would want to know the procedure used to crack open the smartphone, yet the government might classify the method. A second law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reporters in a conference call said that a company outside the government provided the F.B.I. with the means to get into the phone used by Mr. Farook, which is an iPhone 5C running Apple’s iOS 9 mobile operating system. The official would not name the company or discuss how it was accomplished, nor would officials say whether the process would ultimately be shared with Apple.

• Oculus Rift Review: A Clunky Portal to a Promising Virtual Reality: Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion two years ago, released its much-hyped Oculus Rift system on Monday. With a headset, camera and game controller, the system, which costs $1,500 when bundled with a powerful computer, is the first virtual reality product of its kind to reach consumers, before similar ones coming this year from HTC and Sony. Over the last week, I tested the Rift and many pieces of content for the system to see how true Mr. Zuckerberg’s words might ring. I can report that while the Rift is a well-built hardware system brimming with potential, the first wave of apps and games available for it narrows the device’s likely users to hard-core gamers. It is also rougher to set up and get accustomed to than products like smartphones and tablets. The Setup: The Rift works with technology that some might find anachronistic: a Windows PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse. With many people shifting away from desktop computers toward laptops, tablets and smartphones, finding a place to install the Rift and those other components may be a challenge. If you purchase the Rift, you had better have thick skin. The aesthetic of the headgear — it looks like a pair of black ski goggles with air traffic controller headphones built into the sides — is not designed to get you a date. And since wearing the Rift makes users less aware of the outside world, videos and photos of them donning the contraption — and taken without their knowledge — may end up on Instagram or Facebook. I became a subject of ridicule when my partner was watching TV and I crouched in the middle of the living room while playing the dead space pilot game. The Rift has other consequences for the mind and body. I felt mentally drained after 20-minute sessions. My eyes felt strained after half an hour, and over a week I developed a nervous eye twitch. Oculus recommends Rift owners ease into the headset: Use it a few minutes at a time initially, then gradually increase the amount of time. All Rift users should take short breaks after every 30 minutes of use, the company said. The headset may also leave lasting impressions, or what I call “nerd paint,” on your face. After a long session, the Rift left two sets of parallel horizontal lines under my eyes. When it comes down to it, I don’t disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is just the beginning of virtual reality. With about 30 games and a few apps available at Rift’s introduction, there isn’t much to do with the system yet. Oculus will eventually need a larger, more diverse set of content to transcend its initial audience of gamer geeks.

• Pandora Media's founder returns as CEO; shares fall: Online music streaming service Pandora Media Inc (P.N) appointed founder Tim Westergren as its chief executive to replace Brian McAndrews, who left the company on Monday, sending its shares down 10 percent. Pandora, whose shares had fallen 32.5 percent in the last 12 months, faces stiff competition from Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. "I'm sure the stock performance was a factor in McAndrews' departure," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told Reuters. Pandora last month reported disappointing fourth-quarter results with active listeners of 81.1 million at the end of December, a slight fall from a year earlier. The company had said it planned to invest $345 million in 2016 to expand its paid subscription service and enter new markets, with an aim to achieve $4 billion in revenue by 2020. It reported revenue of $1.16 billion for 2015. "McAndrews was pretty ambitious, and my guess is that Westergren will be a bit more deliberate, so we will likely see a slower roll out of their international expansion," Pachter said.

Daily Tech Snippet: 12 February 2016

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 17

• Chip-Only, or Chip-And-Pin? Credit Cards Give Retailers Another Grievance Against Banks: The employee perched on a stepstool by the checkout at Trader Joe’s in Union Square in Manhattan is like an air traffic controller: Register 6 for one customer. Register 9 for the next. The routine helps move traffic quickly through the store, where the lines can often snake around the aisles of whole grain cereal, mixed nuts and Fair Trade coffee. Trader Joe’s, like many retailers around the country, recently upgraded its payment terminals around the Oct. 1 deadline to accept debit and credit cards with a new security chip. The timing, retailers say, could not be worse. The new terminals are often slower, meaning that the long lines during the busy year-end holiday season will grow longer. The new chip cards are also at the center of a growing dispute that has pitted two of America’s most prominent industries — banking and retailing — against each other, and pulled in attorneys general and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the process. But the debate involves more than whether consumers will be adequately protected during a season that has been rife with security breaches: The battle could affect the long-simmering war over the billions of dollars in interchange fees that merchants pay to process credit and debit transactions. “That is the crux of the matter,” said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a payments industry publication. “The real savings is not about fraud, the real savings is about interchange.” Last year, merchants paid about $61 billion in interchange fees, Mr. Robertson said, compared with about $30 billion in fraud losses. The fight involves new payment cards, issued over the last year, that come with a small square security chip that can help make in-person transactions more secure. Retailers complain that they have spent billions of dollars upgrading their payment terminals to accommodate a system that cuts down only on the fraud shouldered by banks, not merchants. Chip and PIN, long the standard in Europe, would help retailers verify not just the card, but the person using it. Writing to their colleagues in October, two attorneys general sounded a warning bell: The new security chip would not go far enough to make transactions safer. Credit cards needed a PIN, too. “If we continue to settle for weaker standards here, we will continue to pay the price,” wrote Sam Olens, the Republican Georgia attorney general, and George Jepsen, his Democratic counterpart in Connecticut. They urged top prosecutors in other states to sign a separate letter to Visa, MasterCard, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and other institutions, pushing them to adopt the chip-and-PIN technology. Banking groups were swift to issue their own statement, saying that merchants had been “spreading an outdated narrative.” In November, a spokesman for Mr. Olens confirmed that he had taken his name off the letter.

• Pandora To Buy Music Streaming Provider Rdio Assets For $75M In Cash, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service: That was fast: just as soon as it was reported that Pandora was in talks to buy Rdio, the two sides have confirmed that an acquisition is indeed taking place. Pandora has acquired “key assets” from Rdio for $75 million in cash, the company has just announced. But as part of it, the Rdio service as we know it is tanking: the streaming service is filing for bankruptcy. “The transaction is contingent upon Rdio seeking protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. Upon approval of the proposed transaction by the bankruptcy court, Rdio will be winding down the Rdio-branded service in all markets,” Pandora noted in its statement. Separately, Rdio said in a blog post that it will shut down in the coming weeks. More immediately, however, Rdio will continue uninterrupted. In digital music market with constrained economics, we are likely to see yet more consolidation or outright closures. And with Rdio, there is still a chance that someone could step in right now and buy the company instead of Pandora, Rdio noted in its own statement: “While we are filing for bankruptcy, because the planned sale to Pandora is contingent on such a filing, by law Rdio is required to entertain competitive offers during the bankruptcy process that is being managed for us by Moelis & Company,” it noted. But, if Pandora’s pland does go ahead, it sounds like Pandora’s plan will be to create its own flavor of on-demand streaming to exist alongside its radio-style service. The assets it is planning to buy include technology and intellectual property. Additionally it’s taking on several members of Rdio’s team, but that will not include Anthony Bay, who is staying on with Rdio to wind down the business, Brian McAndrews confirmed on a conference call about the news today.

• Amazon is the Tiger Global's second-largest public stake at $1.6 billion: Tiger Global Increased Amazon, Cut Back JD.Com in Third Quarter: Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management boosted its stake in Amazon.com Inc. and cut its holding in JD.Com Inc. in the third quarter, reflecting the disparate performance of the two online retailers.  Tiger Global increased its number of shares in Amazon by more than three times in the quarter, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm’s position, its second-largest U.S. stock holding, was valued at $1.64 billion at the end of September. The shares jumped 18 percent in the three-month period, extending this year’s gains. The asset manager trimmed its stake in JD.com’s American depositary receipts by about 18 percent. Even with a 24 percent decline in price for the Chinese company’s ADRs and the reduction in holdings, Tiger Global’s stake was worth $1.5 billion at the end of September, making it the firm’s third-largest disclosed position. The firm’s U.S. stock positions were valued at $8.1 billion as of Sept. 30, about 15 percent below its second-quarter level. Money managers who oversee more than $100 million in equities in the U.S. must file a Form 13F within 45 days of each quarter’s end to list those stocks as well as options and convertible bonds. The filings don’t show non-U.S. securities, holdings that aren’t publicly traded, or cash.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

• Singapore Post, Like Amazon, Tests Package Delivery by Drone: Singapore Post Ltd. is testing package delivery by drone, echoing attempts by Amazon.com Inc. to extend the commercial capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The company known as SingPost said a drone it developed with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore carried a packet containing a letter and T-shirt on a five-minute, two-kilometer (1.2 miles) flight. This marks the first time any postal service has successfully used a drone for “point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery,” it said in a statement Thursday. SingPost is looking to such unmanned aircraft as online transactions increase in the Asia-Pacific region and as Singapore plans to develop itself into a so-called Smart Nation through technology usage. There is “immense potential” in drone technology for last-mile mail and e-commerce delivery, Bernard Leong, SingPost’s head of digital services, said in the statement.

• An Amazon Rival, Jet.com, Eliminates Its Membership Fee: Just three months after its introduction, Jet.com, the much-hyped rival to Amazon and Costco, has done a 180-degree turn in its business model by making its members-only shopping club freely accessible. On Wednesday, Jet said it would eliminate its $50 annual membership fee, but continue to provide better prices on items, along with high-quality customer service and free shipping on orders of more than $35, among other benefits. The about-face raises questions of whether Jet was struggling to gain the traction it needed to expand its business. But Marc Lore, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said. While eliminating a membership fee may help expand Jet.com’s customer base, the move could diminish the company’s chances of turning a healthy profit. Mr. Lore had raised more than $200 million from investors to fund the site. In an interview with The New York Times, he had predicted that the company would take five years to grow to a point where it was not losing money on every shipment. The $50 membership fee would have been a major revenue stream contributing to Jet’s profit. Now Jet’s revenue will rely on raking in commissions on sales from retailers. Discounts for customers come from what Jet calls Smart Cart savings, which let shoppers lower costs by adding more products to their shopping carts, resulting in orders that are more efficient and cheaper to fulfill.

• Amazon Seeks Cloud Computing Growth With New Data Products: Amazon Web Services announced products Wednesday that give businesses new ways to transfer, manipulate and derive insights from data they store in the company’s cloud. The products span diverse areas of information technology from a business intelligence service named Quicksight, to security systems, to new tools to help people migrate databases from proprietary versions into free ones hosted within Amazon. The company also unveiled a new product, called Snowball, that is a hardware device that lets businesses securely transfer large amounts of data into the Amazon Web Services cloud. And Amazon announced a deal with consulting giant Accenture Plc to focus on corporate customers. The products and services shown at the company’s re:invent customer conference in Las Vegas represent a further expansion by Amazon into competitors’ territories, whether database vendors such as Oracle Corp. or business intelligence companies such as Tableau Software. The effort also keeps the pressure on traditional hardware providers, who are seeing their businesses slow as more of their customers opt for cloud computing offered by Amazon and others. Amazon’s Web Services division generated $1.8 billion in sales in the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarter and almost $400 million in operating profit. The e-commerce company created the AWS division almost 10 years ago, giving it a lead on competitors such as Microsoft, Google  and IBM. that were slow to release their own cloud services. In recent years that has changed. Microsoft is now a major competitor to AWS via its Azure service, and companies like Oracle are converting more applications to run in the cloud.

• Snapdeal invests $20M more in logistics firm gojavas: Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs online e-com marketplace Snapdeal, has invested $20 million (Rs 131 crore) more in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the gojavas brand, it said on Wednesday. Snapdeal had first invested in gojavas, which was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet, in March this year. It had not disclosed the investment amount but said it has picked a minority stake in the logistics firm. “The company’s average timeline for delivering Snapdeal orders has reduced by a full 24 hours in the last six months and our teams have worked closely to come up with innovative solutions that are enhancing customers’ shopping experience on Snapdeal. With the freshly infused funds, our aim is to help gojavas become more successful and expand their reach,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal. Snapdeal said it has invested $100 million in the last six months to improve it delivery timelines by 70 per cent and it will invest $200 million more in next 12 months to strengthen its supply chain. gojavas will be using the capital for expanding its operations to 100 more cities within 12 months. Vijay Ghadge, COO at gojavas, said the partnership with Snapdeal has helped it become one of the largest independent logistics players in the country with a revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore currently. gojavas currently manages over 1 lakh sq ft of fulfilment centres and helps more than 400 companies reach consumers in close to 350 cities and towns in more than 3,000 PIN-codes. It claims to deliver over 1.8 lakh packages every day and closed FY15 with revenues of over Rs 200 crore. It was originally an in-house delivery venture of Jabong but later spun out as a separate third-party logistics firm.

• Pandora Buys Ticketfly, a Competitor to Ticketmaster: Pandora Media, the biggest player in Internet radio, has moved into the ticketing business with an agreement to buy Ticketfly, an independent firm that competes with Ticketmaster and is popular with clubs and festivals in the United States and Canada. Pandora announced early Wednesday that it would acquire Ticketfly for $450 million, in a mix of cash and stock. The deal further expands Pandora’s interests in providing services to artists. Last year, it introduced a data system, the Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP, that shows musicians which songs are most popular on the service and where. And in May, Pandora bought Next Big Sound, another data service, which studies the listening and searching patterns of streaming music customers. Pandora, which has nearly 80 million regular listeners, said that its acquisition would benefit artists and listeners. The deal will also add a level of complexity to the sometimes delicate system of alliances in the ticketing world, which is dominated by Ticketmaster, a unit of Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketfly, which was founded in 2008 and was an early proponent of using social media and the web to market tickets, has become a popular choice for promoters that want to avoid the Ticketmaster system. Last year, according to its announcement with Pandora, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets worth more than $500 million. Among Ticketfly’s clients are the club Brooklyn Bowl and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. This year, the independent ticketing world was jolted when Ticketmaster bought Front Gate Tickets, another service popular with clubs, festivals and acts, a move that led some bands, like Wilco, to shift their alliances to other companies. Pandora’s control of Ticketfly could pose a challenge to Ticketmaster, particularly given Pandora’s history of using its user data for marketing. The company, which derives about 80 percent of its revenue from ad sales, has long pitched advertisers on its ability to identify its users based on their demographic data and listening habits — even going so far as to say it can predict its listeners’ political affiliation. “The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse.”

• Amazon considering online TV service: Amazon.com Inc is considering the creation of a live online TV service and has reached out to networks such as CBS Corp and Comcast's NBCUniversal to express interest in carrying their channels, Bloomberg reported. The e-commerce giant's talks with the networks are in preliminary stages, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Such a move would increase Amazon's already growing presence in online video. Amazon currently offers an on-demand video streaming service similar to that of Netflix. Amazon signed an exclusive deal with former "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson in July to present a new motoring show for its Amazon Prime subscription service. The company last month said it would launch six TV show pilots for its video streaming service in the United States, the UK, Germany and Austria for the 2015 fall pilot season.

• If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your Router: Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless connection in his bedroom. For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland, Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.” What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department. Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a router or try to decide which one to pick. So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal. The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too complex for their needs.

• Pure Storage Falls In Public Debut, CEO Optimistic: Pure Storage, the enterprise storage company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. After pricing at $17, shares traded down in its debut, closing the day at $16.01. CEO Scott Dietzen spoke to TechCrunch about why the company executed an IPO during what has been a lackluster year for tech stocks. “We were ready to be a public company,” said Dietzen. “We don’t worry about market conditions. Great companies can come out when it’s right for them.” The company’s IPO performance, slipping in its first day’s trading, isn’t big news. Other recent IPOs that have seen sharp declines in value following their flotation have performed more strongly. For example, Box, a tech company that went public this year, surged on its initial day as a public company. In the ensuing months, its shares have sagged. For industry watchers, any current public technology offering is a bellwether. The IPO cadence for technology firms has been infamously slow in 2015, causing concern among those both seeking liquidity for their investments, and executives worried about where their private valuation might square with the public markets. To underscore that point, Dropbox, a company that could formerly do no wrong, recently endured an embarrassing haircut. Pure Storage’s offering went off mid-range. It fell a modest 5.8 percent. These things are not the end of the world. But they may describe public investor uncertainty about the value of firms that are burning large quantities of cash to expand their top line. Box, MobileIron, and a host of others have endured related declines.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 24

• Coming Soon to Checkouts: Microchip-Card Payment Systems: Starting next month, retailers that haven’t upgraded their payment systems to read E.M.V. microchips — the small, metallic rectangles that are increasingly prevalent on the front of American charge cards — will bear the financial liability for some fraudulent charges. (Gas stations have an extra two years to make the switch for charges from their fuel pumps.) E.M.V. stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the companies that created the standard in the mid-1990s. The new technology is a significant change from the current system, under which card issuers absorb most of the losses for in-person transactions made with counterfeit or stolen cards. Banks and merchants lost an estimated $16.3 billion last year globally on fraudulent transactions, and America has been their biggest problem spot. The country accounts for nearly half of the global losses, despite generating only 21 percent of the worldwide transaction volume, according to the Nilson Report, an industry researcher.Visa drew a line in the sand four years ago: American merchants would have until October 2015 to update their systems or absorb the losses themselves. Other major card networks quickly adopted the same deadline. Just days before the deadline, few merchants are ready. A handful of national retailers — most prominently, Walmart and Target — have invested in E.M.V.-ready terminals and spoken publicly about the switch, but many others have stayed silent. Around 27 percent of American merchants will be ready to process E.M.V. cards next month, according to a survey conducted this month by the Strawhecker Group, a consulting firm for the payments industry. For small sellers, the readiness rate is even lower. Banks and industry groups estimate that one in five will have their new systems running by Oct. 1. Both systems will continue to be available during a lengthy transition period.

• SoftBank Drops on Decline in Alibaba Stake’s Market Value: SoftBank Group Corp. dropped to the lowest in two years as the market values of its biggest U.S. holdings, Alibaba and Sprint, plunged. Billionaire Masayoshi Son’s mobile carrier and Internet investment company fell as much as 6.9 percent to 5,835 yen, the lowest since July 2013. The slump came on the first Japanese trading day after the lockup on Alibaba shares was lifted one year after its initial public offering.SoftBank has more than 1,000 investments, and its three biggest shareholdings of Alibaba, Sprint and Yahoo Japan Corp. have dropped by 700 billion yen ($5.8 billion) over the past 10 days to 8.7 trillion yen. Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier also slumped with rivals on concerns that revenue may weaken after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the nation’s mobile-phone rates were too high. Alibaba fell for a fifth day Wednesday in New York, slumping to as low as $59.68, compared with its IPO price of $68.

• Pandora says has paid $500 million in artist royalties in past year: Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc said it paid nearly $500 million in artist royalties over the past 12 months, bringing the total to more than $1.5 billion in about 10 years. "It took us nearly nine years to generate the first billion dollars in royalties, and just over a year to increase that total by 50 percent," Chief Executive Brian McAndrews said in a statement on Wednesday. Pandora gets revenue from advertising and paid subscriptions.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 24

• Archived snippets are here, and MP3 versions are here

• Amazon Reports Unexpected Profit, and Stock Soars; Market Value Exceeds Wal-Mart's: The e-commerce company beloved by Wall Street for its fast-growing ways did something completely out of character in the second quarter: It made a profit. It was only $92 million, practically a rounding error for Google or Apple. But it confirmed all the hopes and expectations of analysts and investors, who immediately pushed Amazon shares up 17 percent in after-hours trading Thursday to $566. Amazon’s second-quarter profit amounted to 19 cents a share. A year ago, the company lost 27 cents a share. Analysts had been predicting another loss of 13 cents. Revenue was better than expected, too, up 20 percent to $23.2 billion. That was about $800 million more than forecast. One big contribution to the improved profit and revenue was Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division whose numbers were broken out for the first time in the first quarter. A.W.S. is the undisputed leader in the sector, outdistancing both Microsoft and Google, but analysts had been wondering if price cuts would hamper growth. Apparently not. A.W.S. revenue rose 81 percent to $1.82 billion from a year ago, even better than it did last quarter. In the first quarter, A.W.S. revenue was up 49 percent. Operating income for the cloud division rose to $391 million from $77 million. No wonder analysts on a conference call with Amazon financial executives offered their congratulations. Amazon hired another 50,000 employees over the last year, increasing its head count by 38 percent. Many of those workers are in its network of more than 100 fulfillment centers. Amazon held a Prime Day sale last week that was a demonstration of Prime’s power — and also a few of its problems. Enough shoppers found fault with the selection to create a popular Twitter hashtag, #PrimeDayFail. Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities, estimated Amazon took in $1.5 billion in revenue on Prime Day, versus $250 million for a typical day during the quarter. “That means that they can deliver $1.25 billion of upside by scheduling a flash sale,” he said. “There’s no reason that they can’t do this once per quarter,” although he noted that no such announcement had been made.

• Amazon’s Cloud Business Rose 81 Percent in Q2, Its Fastest Growing and Most Profitable Business: Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of the Web retail giant, grew its revenue by 81 percent year on year in the second quarter. It grew faster and with higher profit margins than any other aspect of Amazon’s business. AWS, which offers leased computing services to businesses, posted revenue of $1.82 billion, up from $1 billion a year ago, as part of its second-quarter results. By comparison, retail sales in North America grew only 26 percent to $13.8 billion from $11 billion a year ago. The cloud computing business also posted operating income of $391 million — up an astonishing 407 percent from $77 million at this time last year — for an operating margin of 21 percent, making it Amazon’s most profitable business unit by far. The North American retail unit turned in an operating margin of only 5.1 percent. The AWS profit margin has also risen despite price competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM. Last quarter, the operating margin at AWS was closer to 17 percent. If it were broken out as a separate business — something that some investors may want but which Amazon has no intention of doing — AWS would be on track to reach about $7 billion and change in revenue this year.

• Apple's India test: how to gain volume and meet aspiration: For years, India has been a low priority for Apple as spending power is weaker than in China, where the company's iPhones swiftly became must-have devices after their 2007 launch. But Apple is now looking to build on a 93 percent increase in its iPhone sales in India in April-June, which for the first time outpaced growth in China, of 87 percent - albeit from a low base. Apple has just a 2 percent share of India's smartphone market, while South Korean rival Samsung Electronics accounts for around one third of volume sales with its range of Android phones. "Apple is consciously expanding its distribution in India and pushing its products aggressively. The marketing spend too is a part of that," said Jaideep Mehta, managing director for India and South Asia at tech research firm IDC. Executives at several electronics retail chains and Apple distributors said the Cupertino-based firm was chasing shelf space to make its gadgets more visible, and has more than doubled the number of distributors to five. Apple has also brought in a new senior executive to take charge solely of the Indian market, industry sources said, and has placed advertisements for a policy adviser to help it work with New Delhi's bureaucracy. "Apple's single-minded focus for India is on volume," said a senior executive at an electronics chain store, who declined to be named. "They have increased distributors and want to reach out to smaller cities." Taking to Indian TV screens for the first time, Apple plays up the aspirational appeal of its phones, showing a glamorous Indian bride using Facetime, Apple's video calling feature, to send coy flashes to her groom of a henna-ed hand or skirt hem before their wedding. In addition, Apple offers financing schemes where buyers of its latest iPhone 6 can pay in monthly instalments, and has launched Apple Music, a cloud-based music streaming service, for just 120 rupees ($1.88) a month in India - a fifth of the price in the United States. "The premium smartphone market will be close to 8 million units in 2015," said Neil Shah, analyst at Counterpoint. "Apple has a lot of room to grow and capture a significant share of that," he added, noting Apple sold just over a million iPhones in India in the year to April.

• Pandora Sales, Forecast Beat Estimates Amid Apple Pressure: The largest Internet radio service reported a 30 percent increase in revenue to $285.6 million, according to a statement Thursday. Pandora is trying to grab advertisers from terrestrial radio while it faces pressure from rivals Spotify Ltd. and Apple. Pandora said listener hours rose 5 percent in the period ended June 30, the day of Apple Music’s debut. This quarter, sales will be $310 million to $315 million, the company said, above analysts’ estimates of $309.1 million. Both Spotify and Apple market streaming-music services that allow users to tailor their choice of songs and create music libraries. Each also offers Web-based radio that competes with Pandora. They use the free products to attract consumers to their paid services. Pandora raised its forecast for full-year revenue to a range of $1.175 billion to $1.185 billion.

• Flipboard has confirmed that it has raised $50 million. Flipboard didn’t provide valuation for the round, though JP Morgan is participating, and the funding will be used to build out the product and team, the company said. According to the regulatory documents, the valuation of the most-recent round could range from $800 million to $1.32 billion. The raise comes at a time when rumors cropped up that Twitter might buy Flipboard — though, to be sure, it’s not exactly clear how far those talks progressed — and had held discussions with a few other companies like Google and Yahoo. The company said its user base had jumped 75% in the past six months or so to 72 million monthly active users, with the vast majority of that coming from mobile devices. The company said it sees anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 activations every day around the world. Still, the company will face stiff competition from new entries like Apple News — and will have to grapple whether the company can continue to grow in the face of that competition.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 11

• Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet.

• Facebook expands its Buy Button test; ties up with Shopify. With the news that Google and Pinterest are introducing their own Buy buttons, Facebook has a message: We’re still working on our own version, too. The company on Wednesday announced it is working with e-commerce software company Shopify, which helps companies set up digital storefronts, to expand its Buy button test to a larger number of small businesses that already work with Shopify. Since July, Facebook has been testing the Buy buttons with a few hundred small- and mid-sized businesses.

• Spotify Value Tops $8 Billion as Investors Bet on Streaming: Spotify Ltd. received a valuation topping $8 billion in its latest round of funding as the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service said its number of customers exceeded 75 million. The company raised $526 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Discovery Capital Management, Lansdowne Partners, Rinkelberg Capital and Senvest Capital for a valuation of $8.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. Phone carrier TeliaSonera said Wednesday it invested $115 million. In comparison, Pandora, which runs an ad-supported Web radio, and reported 79.2 million active listeners at the end of the first quarter, has a market value of $3.6 billion. Spotify continues to amass funds as it tries to boost its subscription service before Apple Inc. gains more customers for its updated music offering, unveiled this week. Both Apple and Spotify give users access to more than 30 million songs, and each service costs $9.99 a month. With music purchases shrinking in stores and online, streaming has emerged as the industry’s primary source of growth. Record labels acknowledge its significance, while complaining streaming has failed to replace lost retail sales. Spotify now has more than 20 million paying subscribers and more than 75 million active users, it said in a statement on its website Wednesday. The company said it has paid more than $3 billion in royalties to artists and record labels since its start over six years ago.

• Twitter Advertisers Can Now Target You Based on the Other Apps on Your Phone. For the past six months, Twitter has been collecting data on which smartphone apps its users download. Now, the company is using that data to make some money. Twitter announced on Wednesday that its advertisers can use that app information to target users with ads. Marketers will be able to target you based on the different categories of apps you have downloaded onto your phone as well as how recently you downloaded them. Twitter first announced in November that it was collecting this data, but until now, it wasn’t using it for anything. It’s easy to understand the draw from Twitter’s perspective: If Twitter knows you like Candy Crush, it may assume you like other similar games as well. It’s also easy to understand why this type of targeting may freak some users out. You can block Twitter from collecting this data in settings, but the feature is opt-out, which means the company will gather this information unless you tell it to stop. Twitter won’t, however, have access to information within the apps you download. For example, the company may know you’ve downloaded WhatsApp, but it won’t have access to your messages.

• Microsoft Launches Giant Smart Whiteboard - Picks Unusual Place to Manufacture it - the U.S.: There is nothing ordinary about Surface Hub, a gargantuan touch-screen computer that Microsoft is about to start selling to companies as a high-tech replacement for conference room whiteboards. People in a meeting can scribble on the screen with a stylus and pan around an image using their hands. Everything on the screen, along with video images of meeting participants, can be shared over the Internet with people in other locations. The largest Surface Hub, measuring 84 inches diagonally, looks like an iPad that has gone through a growth spurt. The 4K resolution of the screen produces dazzling images. At $20,000 apiece, a price Microsoft plans to announce on Wednesday, it should. Just as unusual is where Microsoft is building the Surface Hub: Wilsonville, Oregon, just outside Portland and about 200 miles south of the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. That puts the Surface Hub in a rare category, since most of Microsoft’s better-known devices, like the Xbox game console, are made overseas.In recent years, there has been a surge of optimism about the prospect of high-tech manufacturing jobs returning to the United States after some headline-grabbing moves, like Apple’s decision to build its Mac Pro computer in Texas starting in 2013. But they remain outliers in an industry that has outsourced to Asia the making of everything from game consoles to smartphones. The Surface Hub, though, is an illustration of an exotic tech product that its makers believe can be manufactured cost-effectively in the United States. The product is so unusual — representing one of the largest touch screens of its kind — that Microsoft could not find existing assembly lines in Asia to build it on, the company said. At 220 pounds, the largest Surface Hub is expensive to ship long distances. And its already hefty price means any additional labor costs associated with making it in the United States will be harder for customers to detect.

• Hackers May Have Obtained Names of Chinese With Ties to U.S. Government. Chinese hackers who attacked the databases of the Office of Personnel Management may have obtained the names of Chinese relatives, friends and frequent associates of American diplomats and other government officials, information that Beijing could use for blackmail or retaliation. Federal employees who handle national security information are required to list some or all of their foreign contacts, depending on the agency, to receive high-level clearances. Investigators say that the hackers obtained many of the lists, and they are trying to determine how many of those thousands of names were compromised. “They are pumping this through their databases just as the N.S.A. pumps telephone data through their databases,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It gives the Chinese the ability to exploit who is listed as a foreign contact. And if you are a Chinese person who didn’t report your contacts or relationships with an American, you may have a problem.” Officials have conceded in the briefings that most of the compromised data was not encrypted, though they have argued that the attacks were so sophisticated and well hidden that encryption might have done little good.

• Box Spikes 9% On Strong FQ1 Revenue Growth, Narrowing Losses. Cloud storage provider Box raised its full-year forecast as more customers subscribed to its content-sharing platform. Box raised its full-year forecast to $286 million-$290 million from $281 million-$285 million earlier. Shares of the company, whose customers include AstraZeneca, General Electric and Chevron , rose about 8.7 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company said it surpassed 37 million registered users, compared with 34 million at the end of the fourth quarter. The number of paying users grew 70 percent from a year earlier, and now accounts for more than 10 percent of total users, the company said. The online file-sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses leverages a "freemium" business model, providing up to 10 GB of free storage for personal accounts and charging for additional space. In April, Box launched its premium security service, which lets businesses control their encryption keys, the encoding tools used to keep data safe. The company's main competitors include privately held Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive, Citrix Systems ShareFile and Google's Drive.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday January 2

• Snapchat is raising funds in an unusual manner - has raised $485M from >23 Investors since April 2014, valuation >$10B, 200M MAU:  “[Snapchat] goes after individual investors at different valuations. It’s a rolling investment and a rolling close. In theory you could say he’s already done 40 rounds.” (40 is likely figurative rather than literal.) What this means is that, if it’s true, then yes, Snapchat may have raised nearly $500 million in the last six months. Of that $500 million, it may be that only 75% of it is closed, and with portions at different valuations, some getting in pre-$10-billion, like Yahoo, and some above it and closer to $20 billion.The SEC filing notes that the date of first sale was in April 2014. We’ve also heard that the current post money valuation is $20 billion, although others have disputed this and said it’s closer to $10 billion. The cash is much-needed. One source said that Snapchat has an over $30 million-per-year burn rate, and pays half of that to Google Apps Engine to host all its photos, though this number seems low to us. Another noted that at one point the company was paying $3 million each month in legal fees alone. Snapchat’s had its share of lawsuits. Monthly Active Users are now at 200M, up from 100M in August. Amazon was not one of the investors in this round

• 'While you were away' - Twitter's recap feature is rolling out to significant numbers of users: ‘While you were away’ works much like Facebook’s Timeline and is the first major non-chronological feature to hit Twitter. Back in November, the company said it would look at the ‘best’ tweets from your network since you last opened Twitter, and put them at the top of your timeline so you don’t miss them. The algorithm that Twitter uses to source your ‘best’ tweets from your friends is crucial to its success. As someone who doesn’t use Twitter every minute of every day, I’d appreciate a recap but only if it is able to surface content that is relevant and interesting to me. There are already some services that exist solely to do that, while Twitter has email alerts for the purpose too. Nuzzel, for example, taps into your Facebook and Twitter network to surface news stories and other items that are popular with people you know. I’m skeptical that Twitter’s feature can be as effective, particularly since it only serves up a single tweet and that takes up precious real-estate at the top of your feed. Nonetheless, the addition looks like it will be more useful for users than many of Twitter’s recent features — which include sponsored accounts appearing in following lists, tweets from people you don’t follow in your timeline, and a test that meddled with the retweet button.

• VMWare, Workday testing a data-driven technology to predict employee attrition: VMware has been testing a new prediction technology from Workday, which makes software for human resources departments. The system delivers notifications about when employees might be getting ready to quit, and allows managers to intervene before it's too late. It looks for trends within employee activity, when promotions were last handed out, regional factors, changes in the industry and other data to make its predictions. The recommendations can improve over time as employers train the system. "We've had some great results to date with the data,” Amy Gannaway, VMware’s senior director for worldwide human resources information systems, said at a Workday conference in September. The tool gave VMware "a very high percentage" of accurate predictions for which employees would leave the company, she said.

• The Indian Railways will soon launch an iOS app, as mobile travel bookings are surging in India: According to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the number of mobile Internet users has witnessed a steady rise to 159 million in October. This is estimated to reach 173 million by the end of December. There were 119 million users in urban India accessing the Internet on mobile devices in October. Rural India is not that far behind, with a base of 40 million mobile Internet users in October 2013. Indian Railways, which has the largest share in online bookings, is witnessing surge of mobile bookings as well. According to sources at IRCTC, its mobile ticket booking app receives 8,000-9,000 bookings a day through mobiles. The numbers are low compared with the 600,000 tickets booked online every day, but officials say they expect this segment to grow. "Our mobile app has been downloaded 15,00,000 times on the Windows platform. On Android it has been downloaded 10,00,000 times. In a month's time we will be launching an app for iOS too," says a senior official on condition of anonymity.

• The 10 Most Innovative Digital Ad Products of 2014: (1) Google Shopping Campaigns took on Amazon with Product Listing Ads in early 2014, and then AdSense for Shopping, which shows product ads on third-party websites, in September 2014. (2) Snapchat's sponsored updates and live feed, which crowdsources Snapchat messages at events like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, now features commercials mixed in with the snaps from everyday users. For instance, Amazon sponsored Black Friday on Snapchat. (3) Instagram's autoplay sponsored videos, and brands from Disney to Electronic Arts to Banana Republic were the first to try them out. The video offering comes on top of sponsored photos, which were first served in 2013. (4) Facebook's Premium Video Ads didn't fully launch until March. These ads are autoplaying videos that are attracting a number of brands such as Macy's during Christmas. Video is the future of Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and billions of videos from users and marketers are seen everyday.(5) Twitter's app-install ads and e-commerce ads that have Buy Now buttons and video ads with View Now, and the list of potential actions is only growing. (6) Tumblr Sponsored Dot: Tumblr was full of new ad ideas this year, perhaps the most intriguing was the Sponsored Dot (that period at the end of its logo). Now, brands can buy it, dressing their logo as the punctuation mark for special occasions, like Starbucks did on National Coffee Day. (7) Kik Promoted Chats: The paid chats launched this year and let properties like Funny or Die and electronics brands like Skullcandy to message one-on-one with followers who opt in. It's a new kind of marketing built for mobile and messaging, two increasingly relevant areas. (8) Pinterest's Promoted Pins are the platform's first ad product, which launched fully earlier this year after being tested in late 2013. Brands like Kraft, Dell, Home Depot and Walmart are paying to boost their Pins, and there are now self-serve tools, too, for managing marketing campaigns on the platform. (9) Pandora's Sponsored Listening product, which offers users ad-free listening for an hour in return for watching a sponsored clip. In October, Fox helped promote new shows on Pandora with the help of the format. (10) Google Giferator: shows that Google is allowing advertisers to be more creative on the digital platform. The Giferator was generating dynamic ads in real time that could be highly targeted to select audiences. The ad technology was developed as part of Google's Art, Copy and Code program, where it tries to blend the creative and technical sides of digital advertising. Also, the Giferator let users create their own Gifs, a format that marketers couldn't get enough of this year.