Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 10

• With a Mobile Website Like an App, Flipkart Takes a Swipe at Apple: India’s e-commerce start-up Flipkart has worked with Google to make a new mobile website that could eliminate the need for apps, in a move that takes a swipe at Apple’s grip on the mobile experience. On Monday, Flipkart unveiled the website, which it created with the Google team that focuses on the mobile web browser Chrome. The two made a site that supports push notifications, the ability to search for and read information while offline, location-based data and access to hardware features like a smartphone’s camera. While such features have long been available in apps that people download to their phones, they typically have not been prevalent on mobile websites. Flipkart plans to show other companies what it took to build the website — including the hurdles it had to overcome and the weaknesses it found — at Google’s Chrome Developers Conference this month. Google’s parent company is Alphabet.

• Match Is Seeking $3.1 Billion Value in I.P.O.: The Match Group is seeking a valuation of about $3.1 billion as it prepares for an initial public offering. The company, which owns the online dating brands OkCupid and Tinder, said on Monday that it planned to sell 33.3 million shares for $12 to $14 apiece. Those terms indicate an offering size of $433 million and a market valuation of $3.1 billion at the midpoint. In setting these terms, Match begins a roadshow, meeting with investors who will help the company set an official I.P.O. price in a few weeks, based on demand. The media conglomerate that owns Match, IAC/InterActiveCorp, whose chairman is Barry Diller, has been acquiring a number of dating sites over the last few years. As the online-dating industry increased in popularity, legacy sites like Match.com started facing more competition from free models like OkCupid. Mr. Diller’s strategy was to build scale by acquiring a portfolio of brands – now 45 in all – and eventually spin them off under the Match umbrella.

• Google Offers Free Software in Bid to Gain an Edge in Machine Learning: A race is underway toward the future of computer technology with advances in a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. Machine-learning software is trained to handle vast amounts of data, and then learns as it goes, often on its own. Machine learning has been around for a long time, and it has been a crucial technology in the success of Internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook — used in the development of search, ad targeting and product recommendations. But in the last few years, machine learning has made huge improvements in computer vision, language translation and speech recognition, largely by applying the techniques of deep learning, which is inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns. Every major technology company is investing aggressively in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And not just computer companies. Last Friday, Toyota announced it would spend $1 billion for research and development on artificial intelligence in the United States over the next five years. Google announced on Monday a bold step to establish its leadership in the field of machine learning, accelerate the pace of innovation in the field and potentially strengthen its business. It is making the software of its new machine-learning system, TensorFlow, which was developed over years, open-source code. The software will be freely available for outside programmers to use and modify.

• How Pinterest Got the Full Attention of Ad Agency Execs: Better features for marketers and consumers: Pinterest is getting serious about becoming a formidable digital advertising player, and agency executives are taking notice. "What Pinterest has accomplished in the last nine months is the most evolution of any platform," said Chris Tuff, evp and director of business development and partnerships at 22Squared. For comparison, Tuff said it took Facebook four and a half years to build the same kind of sophisticated ad tools that Pinterest is pitching. On Monday, the site launched a search feature that uses photos to comb through millions of product images. For example, someone looking at a picture of a table can zero in on finding similar tables by tapping on the Pin to start a search result without typing a word. Up until now, people have only been able to search on Pinterest with text queries. Marketers won't be able to buy visual search ads like they've been able to with text search ads, which debuted in early 2014. Pinterest hasn't said whether visual search ads were part of its future plans, but that scenario seems likely. The visual-search move should prove popular to users—which will help maintain marketers' attention for the Pinterest ad products that currently exist. In January, Pinterest opened its Promoted Pins advertising business to all U.S. advertisers. Then in May, the San Francisco-based company started offering more targeting and video promos.

• Rackspace Announces Better-Than-Expected Q3 Results, Including Revenue of $509M, Plans $350M Debt Offering: Following the bell, Rackspace announced its third-quarter financial results, including revenue of $509 million and earnings per share of $0.26. The market had expected Rackspace to report $0.20 in per-share profit off revenue of $503.08 million. Down nearly four points in regular trading, the company has swayed both positive and negative following its earnings announcement; investors, it seems, are not entirely sure at the moment how to parse the results. The company’s top line expansion clocked in at 10.7 percent, compared to the year-ago quarter. On the product side of things, Rackspace recently announced, and I’ll quote here to avoid butchering the truth, “Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers.” It has been rumored that Rackspace could entertain the possibility of going Full Dell, and heading private.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, October 28

• Apple Profit Is Up 31%, Revenue Up 22% as iPhones Sell Briskly, but Its Forecast Is Muted: Apple on Tuesday turned in another quarter of enviable revenue and profit growth, fueled by sales of the iPhone. But the results raised a perennial question for the world’s most valuable company: How can it keep its growth streak alive? The issue was stoked by Apple’s muted forecast for its all-important holiday quarter, as well as the unwillingness of Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, to go into detail in an earnings conference call about how Apple plans to rev up sales next year. Over all, Apple posted a profit of $11.1 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, up 31 percent from a year ago. Revenue was $51.5 billion, up 22 percent from last year. The results exceeded Wall Street estimates. Yet while the performance was bolstered by sales of the iPhone — Apple said that it sold 48 million iPhones in the quarter, up from 39 million in the same period last year — the company was more cautious about sales for the key holiday sales period. Apple projected revenue of $75.5 billion to $77.5 billion for the end-of-year quarter. While the sheer numbers are huge, the low end of the forecast fell below Wall Street estimates and would amount to anemic growth of less than 4 percent from a year ago. The last time Apple’s quarterly sales fell below 4 percent was in mid-2013. New Products: Apple is going into 2016 with a full slate of refreshed products. In late September, the company introduced its newest iPhone models, the 6s and 6s Plus. It also announced a larger iPad, the iPad Pro, and will begin shipping a new Apple TV this week. IPad Struggles: While the iPhone continues to grow, the iPad has been facing declines. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Apple said iPad sales dropped 20 percent from a year ago, making it the seventh consecutive quarter that sales of the tablet have slipped. The company is increasingly positioning the iPad as a business device. Apple Watch: The company did not break out sales of the Apple Watch, which debuted in April. But the category called “other products” — which includes the watch — posted $3 billion in revenue in the quarter, up from $2.6 billion in the previous quarter, which was the first quarter that included sales of the device. Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that the numbers for the “other” category were in line with his expectations, and implied somewhere between 3.5 million and four million watches were sold over the quarter. China: One of Apple’s fastest-growing markets — China — continued to grow. Sales in the region that Apple calls Greater China jumped 99 percent in the quarter to $12.5 billion. The region remained the company’s second-largest market after the Americas, accounting for 24 percent of sales in the quarter, compared with 13.7 percent a year ago. Investors have been scrutinizing the China business given that the country has been cutting interest rates to shore up a slowing economy. Apple Pay: Apple said it has partnered with American Express to bring its Apple Pay mobile payments service to global markets. Chief Executive Tim Cook said the credit card company will bring the service to customers in Australia and Canada, then expand to Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2016.

• Dismal Twitter Forecast and Flat User Growth Send Its Stock Lower: On Tuesday, Twitter gave a dismal forecast for its fourth-quarter revenue and profits. Shares in Twitter, a social media company, plunged as much as 13 percent in after-hours trading as Mr. Dorsey and his lieutenants offered little explanation for the gloom in a conference call with investors. In a similar call three months ago, Mr. Dorsey’s pointed critique of Twitter’s product failings sent the stock down 11 percent. Twitter also reported revenue of $569 million for the quarter, up 58 percent from $361 million a year ago. Its net loss was $132 million, or 20 cents a share, compared to a loss of $175 million, or 29 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. For the fourth quarter, usually the strongest thanks to holiday advertising, Twitter warned that revenue would be $695 million to $710 million, well below the $740 million that Wall Street had been expecting. The new projections, delivered as the company exceeded analysts’ expectations for its third-quarter results, provided fresh evidence that Twitter is failing to win over advertisers, the source of most of its revenue, as it confronts stiffening competition from Facebook, Instagram and Google. “The company is finding real challenges gaining traction with advertisers,” said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, citing the new forecasts and an advertiser survey his firm conducts twice a year. Mr. Mahaney, who has a neutral rating on Twitter’s stock, said he was struck by the contrast between the upbeat tone of Twitter’s executives on the call and the company’s deteriorating outlook. “Everything sounds so good, yet you reduced your forecast pretty materially. Why?” Mr. Dorsey didn’t answer that question, although Adam Bain, the company’s former ad chief and new chief operating officer, offered a clue: Ad prices plunged 39 percent in the third quarter, which he said was partly because of improved efficiency of video ads.

• Alibaba Revenue Up 32%, Sends Shares up 4%; Cloud Computing Revenue Doubles Y/Y; Overseas Sales at 8%; GMV growth sinks to lowest in 3 years: China's Alibaba is squeezing more money from online shopping than expected, beating analyst forecasts for revenue growth, as mobile shopping grows. The company wrung out higher-than-expected revenue growth of 32 percent year-on-year, even as gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of goods transacted across its platforms, sank to its slowest annual growth rate in more than three years. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares closed about 4 percent higher on Tuesday, after rising as much as 8.4 percent during market hours. Alibaba is trying to replace decelerating volume growth in online shopping with new kinds of online buying, mirrored in its latest investments. For instance, Alibaba invested $4.6 billion in Suning during the quarter. It also offered $3.5 billion to become sole owner of Youku Tudou, known as China's YouTube. Online video users in the country are beginning to cough up money for high-quality online streaming services. But the majority of Alibaba's revenue still comes from China's online shoppers buying from domestic businesses, a business driven by growth in GMV. For the latest quarter, growth came mostly from Tmall, an Amazon-like website allowing businesses to sell to customers, where GMV rose 56 percent. Gains at Taobao, more akin to eBay and by far the company's biggest contributor to GMV, showed signs of slowing at just 15 percent. Alibaba's revenue rose to $3.49 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30. Net income attributable to shareholders reached $3.58 billion, or $1.40 per share. International Expansion: The proportion of revenue Alibaba gets from abroad reached 8 percent, compared with 9 percent in the previous quarter. Co-founder Jack Ma has said he wants half of the company’s sales to originate outside China. The company named Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs  partner, as president in August to spearhead a global expansion into regions such as Russia and Brazil. The company is also looking to make forays into Italy, France, Australia and New Zealand, Evans said in October. Cloud Business: Revenue from cloud computing more than doubled from a year earlier. The e-commerce giant is betting on Internet-based computing and big data to boost growth for the next decade thanks to demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. AliCloud could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018

• IBM says SEC investigating company's books, shares fall: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) recognized revenue for certain deals in the United States, Britain and Ireland, IBM said on Tuesday, news that sent its shares down 4 percent. Shares of IBM fell as much as 4.4 percent to a five-year low of $137.33 and closed down 4 percent. News of the SEC probe came a week after the company posted lackluster quarterly results and cut its 2015 profit forecast. "It couldn't come at a worse possible time because now the stock is at another 52-week low as a result of this," said Belpointe analyst David Nelson. He said, however, that the probe "doesn't look like a massive smoking gun." "The investigation could be into warranty reserves, they could have recognized an item at the wrong time," Nelson said.

• PayPal says makes $1 billion in small-business loans in first two years: PayPal Holdings, the online payment processor, said on Tuesday its small-business lending program has processed $1 billion in loans in the first two years of its launch and more than doubled loan growth in that span. PayPal Working Capital is extending short-term loans totaling more than $100 million per month, or $3 million per day, to a mix of sellers on eBay and standalone small- to medium-sized merchants, the company said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. PayPal separated from eBay earlier this year, and Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman has stated he is looking to use PayPal's size to offer affordable financial services widely.

• Even As Oracle and AWS Circle Each Other, Oracle Will Not Build a Giant Cloud System Like AWS: Counter to the expectations of many industry watchers, Oracle, the world’s largest maker of software for businesses, is not planning a global computing system to rival Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the other big global cloud companies. While it has built out a network of 20 data centers, largely filled with Oracle equipment, it now plans to go after customers by offering faster updates of its core products, new ways of customizing applications and a much younger, retooled sales force. “We’ve made our investments,” Mark Hurd, co-chief executive of Oracle, said in an interview. Compared with A.W.S., he said, “the place we like is one of higher profit margins.” Besides applications, Amazon sells raw computing and data storage, which are generally lower-margin businesses. Oracle is expected Tuesday to announce better security inside its cloud because of changes from its proprietary hardware, but won’t sell access to the machines on their own. Oracle’s better margins, Mr. Hurd said, will come from selling large-scale software that can be customized by its buyers to suit local markets and products. He hopes to lower his sales costs and bring in younger companies with salespeople recruited straight from college and given crash courses in selling Oracle cloud products. In the last four years, he said, the company has hired 1,000 graduates a year. “We train them in products, sales skills and processes,” said Mr. Hurd. “They’re selling within a year, with a much lower cost of sales.” Oracle’s sales force, some 30,000 people globally, is considered among the most aggressive and highly compensated in the tech business. Now, Mr. Hurd said, “we have to do some branding” to entice the kind of smaller companies and start-ups the new sales team is chasing. The ease of modification and the faster sales force illustrate how, while still far apart, Oracle and A.W.S. are becoming more like each other as cloud computing goes mainstream. For its part, a few weeks ago A.W.S. dropped all pretense and made a direct bid for Oracle’s customers. A.W.S. even put up a thinly disguised picture of Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison.

• Japan's Carmakers Proceed With Caution on Self-Driving Cars: At this week’s Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan Motor Co. will display a concept car with retractable steering wheel and message-flashing windshield, joining Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. in exhibiting vehicles with autonomous modes for changing lanes and avoiding collisions on highways. But while Tesla deployed its Autopilot system this month and Google aims to have fully self-driving cars on the road by 2020, Japan’s automakers see a wait for such vehicles, with introductions coming only after 2025. The unwillingness to take a software-testing approach -- with beta versions used for trial periods and ongoing updates -- and apply this to car-making divides traditional auto companies and tech-industry challengers, said Tatsuo Yoshida, an auto industry analyst with Barclays Plc. Whereas Tesla beamed Autopilot into Model S sedans with the promise the system would continually learn and improve itself, Japan’s automakers view such an approach as putting features on the road before they’re ready. They’re also wary of exposure to liability if they introduce safety features that fail. Each of Japan’s three biggest automakers have set targets to start deploying the technology around 2020. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told reporters this month the company can probably develop a completely self-driving car in about three years, while Google has forecast about a five-year time frame.

• Rackspace Launches Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers: Rackspace is getting deeper into the container game. The company today announced the beta launch of its Carina container service. Carina gives developers access to a fully managed container environment that offers bare-metal performance and still allows them to use the same native Docker tools they are used to from their local development environments. Right now, the service — which will remain available for free during what the team expects to be a long beta period — focuses on Docker’s tooling, but over time, the idea here is to use the flexibility of Magnum and OpenStack to give developers the ability to use other container orchestration engines like Kubernetes and Mesos, as well. The team believes that the combination of a multi-tenant environment and (near) bare-metal access will allow it to deliver the right mix of a high-performance system and low cost. Otto acknowledged a multi-tenant system may not be the right choice for workloads that are highly security sensitive, but the service also gives users the choice to also run containers on Rackspace’s private cloud service. The service provides users with a set of defaults based on the company’s experience, but users can then tweak these as necessary. Otto believes most users will opt to stay with Docker Swarm as the container orchestration engine, simply because it gives users more control (and in an imperative way) than Kubernetes, which is far more opinionated. Because of the way the company architected the service without using a traditional hypervisor (using libvirt/LXC instead), containers will start significantly faster than on a similar service that uses more traditional virtual machines. Because there are still some advantages to running containers on virtual machines — especially when it comes to security — Rackspace also plans to support virtual machines. It’s no secret that large public cloud vendors like Google, AWS and Microsoft now all offer their own container services. The Rackspace team believes that it has an advantage over them in terms of speed, but also because they don’t abstract away the containers from developers. In addition — and this is no surprise coming from Rackspace — the company believes it can offer a level of service that is significantly higher than its competitors. Rackspace already worked with a number of partners to test the service in a private beta. These include O’Reilly Media, which is using containers to power parts of its online learning tools, as well as the Drupal and WordPress hosting service Pantheon, which has long used containers at the core of its platform.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 11

Big Changes at Google: Major Restructuring and a New Holding Company Named 'Alphabet'; Shares Rise 6%: Google is listening to Wall Street, while also trying to keep its innovation going. The Silicon Valley behemoth is reorganizing under a new name — Alphabet — and separating its moneymaking businesses from the moonshot ones. Under the new structure, Mr. Page is to run Alphabet along with Sergey Brin, who co-founded the web search business with him in 1998. Alphabet would be the parent entity, housing several companies, with the biggest among them Google. In addition, the portfolio would include Nest, the smart thermostat maker, and Calico, a company focused on longevity, among other things. Sundar Pichai, who had been senior vice president in charge of products, will be chief executive of Google, which will encompass Internet such products as search, maps, YouTube and applications like Gmail. Mr. Pichai will add YouTube to his list of products. The YouTube chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, will now report to him, whereas she previously reported to Mr. Page. In addition, Mr. Pichai will oversee the business operations for Google. Google’s current business chief, Omid Kordestani, will end that role and become an adviser to Alphabet and Google. Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Google, will remain in that position and will also be chief financial officer for Alphabet. Other entities under Alphabet will include Google Fiber, a provider of ultrafast Internet service. There will also be two financial businesses, Google Ventures, the venture capital arm, and Capital, which does private-equity-like deals. Google X, which includes projects like self-driving cars, a drone delivery service and an attempt to make Internet-connected balloons, will be managed separately and run by Mr. Brin.A holding company structure also gives Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who became multibillionaires when Google went public in 2004, room to make big new bets to add to Alphabet’s portfolio — without annoying Wall Street. Over the last few years, investors have expressed concern that Google has become distracted from its core web search, instead pursuing projects fancied by its founders, like self-driving cars or a pill to detect cancer. The holding-company structure is set to provide more financial transparency. Starting in the fourth quarter of this year, Alphabet will break out financial results for Google Inc., as well as for the overall company. While investors will not be able to see individual results for other companies, the system will make it easier to get a sense of how Google’s core business is doing.

After Surprise drop in Exports, China Unexpectedly Weakens Yuan Reference Rate by Record 1.9% Amid Slowdown: China weakened the yuan’s daily reference rate by a record 1.9 percent, allowing depreciation to combat a slump in exports. The currency dropped an unprecedented 1.2 percent to 6.2848 per dollar as of 9:43 a.m. in Shanghai, and slid a similar amount in Hong Kong’s offshore trading. The onshore spot rate was 0.9 percent weaker than the reference rate of 6.2298, within the 2 percent limit allowed by the People’s Bank of China. Monday’s reference rate increase was a one-time adjustment, the PBOC said in a statement, adding that it will strengthen the market’s role in the fixing and promote the convergence of the onshore and offshore rates. It said also that it will keep the yuan stable at a reasonable level. The yuan’s effective exchange rate is stronger than that of other currencies, which is a deviation from market expectations, the central bank said. The comments come after the PBOC said earlier Tuesday that a strong yuan puts pressure on exports. China’s overseas shipments fell 8.3 percent from a year earlier in dollar terms in July, well below the estimate for a 1.5 percent decline in a Bloomberg survey.

Facebook Launches Autofill Forms, Improved Customer Service and Enhanced Video Analytics: Autofill Forms: Overview: Facebook’s latest ads automatically populate contact information that people have previously given Facebook, like email addresses, phone numbers, address, company name, job title, etc. Details: Facebook has dubbed its new ad type as “lead ads” and hopes that their existence will make the mobile signup process easier. Lead ads take the friction out of the clunky experience associated with responding to mobile ads and filling out forms. Instead of leaving one app to start a form in another app and then entering all the information again from scratch, lead ads allow users to stay within their news feed. Retailer Opportunities: Removing clicks and manual data entry can greatly boost conversion rates for those brands advertising on Facebook. What You Should Know: Lead ads aren’t currently available to everyone. Facebook is testing them with a small group of businesses around the world to gain feedback before rolling them out to the wider public. Improved Customer Service. Overview: Facebook’s latest step toward enhancing customer service for pages is “saved replies” — a feature allowing page admins to write, save and reuse canned messages when they receive an inquiry via Facebook Messenger. Details: When responding to a message, saved replies appear in a list to the left. Simply click on your desired response from the list and it will automatically display in the message body and auto-populate with personalization features, such as the respondent’s name, admin’s name and company website. Retailer Opportunities: Customer service via social media is increasingly becoming more common. Why would consumers want to spend an extended amount of time waiting on the phone when they can quickly shoot the brand a message? This new feature will save businesses time when handling incoming customer service inquiries. Enhanced Video Analytics. Overview: Video metrics have been added to page insights. Details: On the new dedicated video tab, page admins can track total views, 30-second views, top videos and metrics for videos shared by other pages. In addition to customizing the date ranges, you can slice the data into various segments, such as organic versus paid, auto-played versus click-to-play and unique versus repeat.

Xiaomi Plans to Have India Smartphone Lineup Produced Locally (By FoxConn): Foxconn has begun assembling Xiaomi’s first made-in-India smartphone from a new plant in the country’s south, helping the Chinese company shorten delivery times and prop up margins. Xiaomi, the world’s fourth-largest phone vendor, will source “100 percent” of Redmi 2 Prime devices sold in India from Foxconn’s new factory in Sri City, Hugo Barra, vice president of global operations, said by phone on Sunday. The Redmi 2 Prime went on sale online Monday, at $110 for a 2GB model. “We are starting small; but our eventual aim is to make most of our devices if not all of our devices that are sold in India, manufacture them here,” said Manu Jain, Xiaomi’s India head. “The entire ecosystem needs to exist before we start manufacturing the phone from scratch. This will probably take some time,” he said. Foxconn had begun production of smartphones at the Sri City factory, a person familiar with the matter said in July. The Taiwanese company, a contract manufacturer for the world’s largest electronics brands including Apple Inc., is looking to expand in the South Asian country amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India campaign aimed at creating jobs and accelerating economic growth. Assembling locally will help Xiaomi shore up margins and take advantage of tax breaks in its largest market outside of China. As low-end smartphone sales slow in its home country, Xiaomi is depending on other emerging markets for growth.

Alibaba to invest $4.6 billion in China electronics retailer Suning; JD.com falls 6% on news: JD.com, a Chinese online retailer, sank to a four-month low after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s purchase of a stake in the country’s biggest electronics chain threatened to increase competition. The American depositary receipts plunged 6.3 percent to $30.06 in New York on Monday. Trading volume of 21.2 million ADRs was more than double the daily average of the past three months. JD.com, which gets more than half of its revenue from electronics and appliances, declined as most stocks on the Bloomberg China-U.S. Equity Index rose. JD.com slid after Alibaba, China’s biggest online retailer, said it will spend $4.6 billion to become Suning Commerce Group Ltd.’s second-largest shareholder with about a 20 percent stake. The ADRs extended their drop to 21 percent from this year’s high in June as concern mounted that stiffer competition will further slow sales growth in an industry already beset by the country’s slowest economic expansion in 25 years.

Twitter Shares Climb 8% on NFL Deal, Executive Stock Purchases: Twitter’s stock rose 8.2 percent on Monday after it unveiled a content deal with the National Football League and executives said they’re buying shares in the company. On Friday, the stock had closed at its lowest level since its November 2013 initial public offering, a slump that began in July when Jack Dorsey, co-founder and interim chief executive officer, warned that it will take a while before Twitter is able to reverse a slowdown in user growth. Today, Dorsey promoted his purchase of about $875,000 in shares with a tweet saying, “Investing in @twitter’s future.” Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto and board member Peter Fenton also bought Twitter shares last week, according to regulatory filings. It’s not the first time Twitter’s executives have coordinated their actions when confidence was low. Before reporting disappointing first-quarter sales, Twitter’s insiders halted all their sales for a few weeks.

Rackspace Pops 5% After Reporting Lackluster Q2 Results Buttressed By The Promise Of Share Buybacks: Following the bell today, Rackspace reported its second-quarter financial performance. The company mostly missed street expectations, with lower-than-expected revenue, and earnings-per-share that just met expectations. Shares in the hosting company are up just under 6 percent in after-hours trading. Rackspace reported profit of $0.20 per share on revenue of $489 million in the three-month period. Investors had expected the company to report a $0.20 per-share profit on revenue of $490.54 million. The company grew its revenue 11 percent compared to the year-ago quarter; the company was quick to note that using a constant-currency basis for measurement, it grew 13.7 percent. If Rackspace missed on its top-line projections, and barely met its profit requirements as set by the street, why are its shares up? Because the firm is signalling a stock repurchase, of $500M in the next 6-9 months; Rackspace intends to borrow money to buy its own shares to reward shareholders with presents it can only slightly afford.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, July 14

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Brands Hope You Like Them Enough to Pin Them at the Top of Your Facebook News Feed: An update to Facebook's news feed allows users to select a group of preferred friends, whose posts will always appear at the top of the home page. Facebook is billing the feature as an extra layer of personalization on top of what the news feed algorithm selects for users automatically, based on their behavior. In addition to selecting best friends, Facebook also gives users the ability to choose from the list of pages they've “Liked” for retail and consumer brands, news organizations, or interest groups. The ones that make the cut will also appear at the top of a user's news feed, along with family and best buds. The feature gives hope to marketing executives who felt burned by an overcrowded news feed that meant even fans rarely saw their updates. Some companies had been paying Facebook to advertise their pages and increase “Likes,” an expense that made less sense if people weren't seeing the posts. Now a user who designates pages as important will “see any new stories they’ve shared since your last visit to Facebook at the top of News Feed, with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the top,” according to Facebook. “You can scroll down to see the rest of your News Feed normally.”


• In a Major Shift of Emphasis, Out-Gunned Rackspace Seeks Growth in Microsoft Cloud Partnership: Rackspace Hosting will sell support services to customers running on Microsoft’s Internet-based Windows Azure service, in a major shift of emphasis for the cloud-computing company. The partnership announced Monday means people can pay the San Antonio, Texas-based company to set up, manage and support technology rented from Windows Azure, or for support services on top of their existing Microsoft cloud deployments. Rackspace will continue to operate its own web-hosting and cloud services supported by its data centers and will let customers mix and match their IT between the two companies’ facilities. The shift is part of a broader one for Rackspace as it seeks to make more money out of its support organization. Revenue growth slowed the past two years to about 17 percent annually and the company’s stock fell the most in eight months in May after it released a second-quarter sales forecast that was below analysts’ estimates. Rackspace support services will start at $1,500 per month, Engates said, and customers should save from 40 percent to 70 percent by using the company’s services rather than doing the same support tasks in-house. Microsoft is the first of multiple partners. Providing support services on top of Amazon.com Inc.’s market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud is “the headline” of the strategy, Pichler said. Larger cloud companies have outspent Rackspace on infrastructure for the best part of a decade. Microsoft spent $5.5 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 2014, compared with $435 million for Rackspace. The three companies each deploy millions of servers, versus the estimated 100,000 that Rackspace has under management. While Rackspace generated $1.79 billion in 2014 revenue, Amazon’s cloud subsidiary, for example, brought in $1.57 billion in its most recent quarter, up 49 percent from a year earlier.


• Wal-Mart to Counterattack Amazon’s ‘Prime Day’ With Web Sale: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is cutting prices on thousands of products this week in a counterattack to Prime Day, an event Amazon.com Inc. is using to promote its subscription service. Wal-Mart will begin the sale on July 15, the same day as Amazon’s much-publicized promotion. During Prime Day, Amazon will offer special discounts to members of its service, which costs $99 a year. As part of the effort, Wal-Mart also is lowering its minimum purchase for free shipping to $35 from $50. The move marks an escalating battle between Wal-Mart’s e-commerce site and Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Wal-Mart also has been developing its own competitor to Prime that will cost $50 a year, half the cost. But it won’t have the same speed of delivery as Prime or some of the other perks, such as Amazon’s streaming video and music services. Wal-Mart’s promotion this week is separate from that push, and the deals are available to all customers. Fernando Madeira, president of Walmart.com, took a dig at Amazon in a blog post on Monday, saying that Wal-Mart’s discounts won’t just be for people who pay for a membership.


• Shares of China's ZTE set to rise over 30 percent on share buyback: Shares of Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp were set to surge more than 30 percent in early Tuesday trade after the board approved an A-share buyback plan estimated at no more than 1 billion yuan ($161 million).


• Uber resumes payments through credit card in India: Beginning today, ride sharing app Uber Technologies Inc has resumed accepting credit card payments in India. Uber’s app has been tweaked for the two-factor authentication (2FA) flow that the Reserve Bank of India mandates for all card-based payments, the company said in a press statement. This feature is available to all Android users immediately and will be extended on the iOS platform in the coming weeks. Uber had stopped accepting payments through credit cards (issued in India) and debit cards seven months ago after it was pulled up by the RBI. As a safety measure, RBI requires all credit and debit card transactions to undergo a two-step process for honouring payments. Typically, a user swipes or enters the credit/debit card information in the first step and then has to enter a password in the second step. Uber followed only one-step authentication and directly billed users at the end of the ride, which fell foul of RBI rules. The San Francisco-based company had tied up with mobile wallet firm Paytm to sidestep the 2FA compliance requirement. Uber will continue to accept Paytm payments, it said.


• Netflix Hits A New All-Time High Ahead Of Its Stock Split And Q2 Earnings: Netflix’s shares popped nearly four percent today to an all-time high of $707.61. The new record comes a day before the company splits its shares on a seven-for-one basis, and two days before it will report earnings. Shares in the online video streaming and content shop have been on a tear, roughly doubling so far this year. Netflix is now worth north of $40 billion. Driving the bull run in Netflix has been its share split, which has proved quite popular with investors, and recent strong analyst sentiment on the company. New price targets can sometimes move prices closer to targets, of course. At risk for Netflix is the heavy weight of high expectations. On the heels of its split, if Netflix borks its earnings, investors will be merciless. Also in the cards for Netflix is simply how richly it is valued. The company has, according to Yahoo Finance, a forward price-earnings ratio of more than 200. That implies that investors are quite willing to pay for tomorrow’s profits today when it comes to Big Red.


• As Ad Tech consolidates, firms that could be acquisition targets: InMobi tops list: AOL reportedly in talks to buy mobile ad network Millennial Media for $300 million to $350 million, which would let AOL sell ads within thousands of apps and give it access to more data and better targeting tools. But industry players said there are other mobile companies up for grabs. 1. InMobi is one of the first choices to replace Millennial on a list of lucrative, independent mobile players. Google supposedly had its eye on the India-based network earlier this year, but CEO Naveen Tewari claims he wants to keep the company independent. InMobi's a bit bigger internationally than it is in the U.S., but it's acquired companies like Overlay Media—a data scientist team that zeroes in on targeting—to build up its ad offerings. Verve, xAd and NinthDecimal all put a different spin on working the location data that bounces off of phones for advertisers. Sam Bloom, general manager of interactive at Camelot, contended that the players risk being outpaced as digital powerhouses Facebook, Google and Yahoo build their own geo-targeting technology. "My sense is some of these [smaller] guys will just crumble," Bloom said. "While [location has] been unique for a period of time, I don't think that's the case any longer. Over time, the smaller guys will get beat because the bigger guys have bigger sales forces."

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 12

• Xiaomi’s rolls out a money market fund to take on Alibaba and Tencent: Like Baidu and Alibaba, Xiaomi is eyeing China’s finance industry and seeing dollar signs. Today the company is officially launching a money-market fund called Huoqibao inside a new standalone app called “Xiaomi Finance.” Like the Alibaba-affiliated Yu’ebao, Xiaomi’s Huoqibao lets consumers save excess cash and earn interest from it. After registering for a Xiaomi Finance account with one’s national ID, users can bind a bank card to the app can store as little as RMB 1 (about US$0.15). The fund is managed by China’s E Fund Management and currently offers an annual return rate of 4.26 percent. This marks Xiaomi’s first foray into serious finance, but it has dabbled in money in the past. Huoqibao was once available in beta for select users of Xiaomi Wallet, another standalone app that was primarily used to manage virtual currency known as Mi coins. Users from inside China could purchase Mi coins through bound bank cards or Alipay accounts, and redeem them for customized launcher themes, or media like e-books. Compared to China’s other internet giants, Xiaomi is slightly late to the money market game. As of late 2014, Yu’ebao had over 185 million users] and and a fund size of RMB 578.93 billion (about US$93 billion). Yu’ebao’s deep integration with Alipay Wallet, which is also tied to Alibaba’s mobile ecommerce properties like Tmall and Taobao, make it tough for new customers to miss. Tencent and Baidu also have mobile money-market funds of their own. Of these three companies, Xiaomi is arguably in the weakest position when it comes to promoting consumer finance products. Alibaba already owns the biggest pool of money online in China thanks to Alipay, and Tencent owns the best mobile real estate thanks to WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app. Messaging apps and ecommerce marketplaces both contain powerful network effects that help ensure longevity. Unlike these companies (and arguably any other company in the world), Xiaomi is extremely well positioned to benefit from the emergence of smart home devices. Since thousands of customers log onto Xiaomi’s website to buy a smartphones every week, it can leverage that focused attention by selling smart lightbulbs and smart cameras and taking a cut in the process. Many of the hardware startups it invests in go on to list their items on the company’s ecommerce platform. Documents discovered last year by the Wall Street Journal indicated that Xiaomi makes the majority of its revenue and profits from hardware sales. But the company continues to invest in “services” – broadly defined as all of the semi-tangibles one buys on the internet. The company claimed to earn more than US$1 billlion in revenues from services in 2014, marking 6 percent of its total revenues.

• Chinese Smartphone Makers Try to Make Inroads in India: The era of fast growth is coming to an end in China, where the research group IDC said on Monday that phone sales fell 4 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the first contraction in six years. IDC expects no growth in China’s smartphone market in 2015. India’s smartphone sales are just a fraction of China’s. But as one of the fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world, with hundreds of millions of potential new customers, India may indicate whether a new generation of Chinese hardware companies can grow beyond their country’s borders. It is intensely competitive, with more than 150 brands. Among the best-selling brands are several indigenous companies with an inside track on local phone habits. Another top seller is a multinational, Samsung, which has deep experience selling across different cultures. Xiaomi, the most successful Chinese company in India, owned only 4 percent of the market in the fourth quarter. But India is also the only place that has a scale like China’s. Indians are expected to buy 111 million smartphones this year, and 149 million in 2016. And China’s smartphone makers say Chinese and Indian customers have a lot in common: Both tend to obsess over arcane features and specs, and both are highly sensitive to cost. Many Chinese companies are trying to make their case directly to potential Indian buyers online. It is a technique pioneered by Xiaomi, which used e-commerce to overcome difficult-to-manage and expensive storefronts and distribution deals in China and now India. So-called flash sales, which offer limited batches of phones to drive up demand and build brand cachet, have rattled the current top sellers in India, the local company Micromax and the South Korean giant Samsung, according to analysts. The tactic is cheap and effective, said Mr. Sharma of Coolpad: “We don’t need to spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing or building distribution networks.” One of the most successful Chinese brands in India so far, Xiaomi has gone to great lengths to create products catering to customers there. Its new Mi 4i phone costs more than many rivals at about $200, but supports six Indian languages, with local engineers working to increase that number. The company has also built an online store that focuses on India’s passions of cricket and Bollywood, and has plans to open 100 stores around the country before the end of the year. “We want to become an Indian company,” Xiaomi’s chief executive, Lei Jun, told a local newspaper after the introduction of the Mi 4i.

• SoftBank names Nikesh Arora President and Son's Likely Successor: Japan's SoftBank Corp unveiled a management reshuffle on Monday, appointing investments head Nikesh Arora as president and naming him as a potential successor to CEO Masayoshi Son, as the telecoms conglomerate steps up its overseas expansion. The move comes as Son and SoftBank are battling to make their 2013 acquisition of U.S. carrier Sprint Corp for more than $20 billion profitable. A sluggish Japanese economy, though, has forced the company to increasingly look overseas for growth. Announcing Arora's appointment at SoftBank's earnings conference, billionaire Son, who is relinquishing the president's post, said the former Google Inc executive was a "strong candidate" to lead the company in future. "Yes. He's 10 years younger than me, and he has more abilities than me," Son told reporters, when asked if Arora was a potential candidate to succeed him. "The last nine months I've spent with him have made me sure of that, but I'm not going to retire soon," Son said. SoftBank has been weighed down by the costs of trying to turn around Sprint, which has been in intense competition with larger U.S. rivals AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc. Sprint, in which SoftBank owns 80 percent, has undergone a long-haul revamping of its network, shedding thousands of jobs and triggering a mass exodus of subscribers. SoftBank has made a string of other investments in recent years, including $250 million in privately-held Hollywood movie studio Legendary Entertainment, and $600 million in Travice Inc, the operator of Chinese taxi hailing app Kuaidi Dache. As well as being the largest investor in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, SoftBank has plans to invest $10 billion in India's potentially huge but under-developed online retail market. "We expect more investments and acquisitions, even more so than now," Son said. "Going forward, the overseas market will be the main factor for SoftBank." SoftBank posted a 9 percent fall in operating profit for the year ended March to 982.7 billion yen ($8.2 billion), hurt by the absence of one-time gains enjoyed the year before.

• Rackspace Earnings: Revenue $480M (+14% Y/Y) Net Income $28M; Shares Fall 13% on Outlook: Rackspace Hosting Inc, a web hosting company, forecast revenue for the current quarter below market estimates and said a strong dollar hurt its revenue growth in the first quarter. Shares of the company, which faces tough competition from Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), Google Inc (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) were down 13 percent in extended trading on Monday. Revenue from a contract with a "large" financial services company will be realized only in the third quarter, hurting revenue growth in the second quarter, Rackspace Chief Executive Taylor Rhodes said in a post-earnings call. Rackspace Hosting will also take a one-time charge in the quarter as a customer moved some of its "production elements" away from a Rackspace data center in the United Kingdom. Rackspace leases online storage space to companies and provides its clients management and support services for their cloud-based operations. It gets about a third of its revenue from outside the United States. The company said foreign currency exchange rates hurt its revenue growth. Revenue increased 14.1 percent to $480.2 million in the first quarter ended March 31. On a constant currency basis, revenue grew 16.6 percent. Analysts had expected revenue of $481.6 million. Net income rose to $28.4 million, or 20 cents per share, from $25.4 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier. Analysts expected a profit of 20 cents per share. Rackspace shares closed at $53.13 on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. They have risen 89 percent in the past 12 months.

• In global first, Uber tests cash payments for cabs in India: Uber is testing cash payments in India as the online taxi-hailing company seeks a stronger foothold in a country where many fewer people have credit cards than internet connections. San Francisco-based Uber has grown rapidly in value to be worth around $40 billion. But in India it has lagged local rival Ola, which has about 80 percent of the organized cab market. Many analysts say that is because Uber has not adapted its business model enough to suit India's needs. Uber said on Tuesday it was piloting cash payments for cabs in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, in a first for the company globally. Until now, Uber's mobile application around the world has charged customers through credit cards or other electronic payment methods. India has about 20 million credit cards for a population of 1.3 billion. Though the government is trying to change this, most purchases are done with cash. Ola and other Indian cab services accept cash for rides, while e-commerce giant Amazon introduced a cash on delivery option when it launched in India. "Tradition dictates that cash plays a big role for Indian consumers," said Siddharth Shanker, Uber's general manager in Hyderabad.

• In 1.7M miles of test drives over 6 years, Google's self-driving cars have been in only 11 accidents, and caused none: Internet search company Google Inc's self-driving cars have been involved in 11 accidents, but have not been the cause of any, over the last six years since the project began, the program's director said on Monday. A team of drivers that is testing the fleet of more than 20 vehicles have driven 1.7 million miles so far. "...Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Chris Urmson said in a post on technology news website Backchannel's blog Medium. (bit.ly/1GZciuW) No one was injured in the accidents, Urmson added. "If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you're in a car or a self-driving car." The cars had been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights, with a majority of the accidents being on city streets rather than on freeways.