Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 18, 2016

• Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. The deals were spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division, and brought about 300 robotics engineers into Google. Rubin left the company in October 2014. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. At the heart of Replicant’s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term. Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent e-mails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them. The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, who was temporarily in charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, “we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years."

• Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services: Alibaba has formally thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring after the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its own VR research lab, dubbed GnomeMagic Lab. The company invested in red hot augmented reality company Magic Leap earlier this year, in a deal that put Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai on the board, and it has tinkered with 360 degree panoramic video for Youku Tudou — the Chinese video site it invested in and is in the process of acquiring for $3.5 billion — but this is its official entry into the space. Alibaba, which claims 400 million users across its services, said that GnomeMagic Lab will work with its shopping businesses with a view to integrating VR into the shopping experience while exploring other applications, such as video with Youku Tudou and entertainment via Alibaba Pictures. In a press announcement, former Facebook engineer Zhao Haiping, who is on the Alibaba’s GnomeMagic Lab team, said VR could enable customers to shop virtually on New York’s Fifth Avenue from the comfort of their own home. On a more practical level, Alibaba wants to help merchants use VR to sell on its sites, it said it has already created VR visuals for hundreds of products. That’s the plan for where Alibaba believes that VR is going, or could go, in the longer term. For now, the company is setting up a store dedicated to VR hardware to help companies tap into its vast audience.VR is the hot topic of the moment, and it’s more a case of which tech companies aren’t getting into it. Samsung has already shipped a headset. Facebook bought Occulus, which is about to launch its Rift VR and an initial 30 games. HTC’s is arriving imminently and Sony’s effort is also on its way. On the content side, Facebook, YouTube and — today — even British broadcaster Sky are opening themselves up to the virtual future.

• Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won’t give them a college degree: One of the biggest booms in the job market right now: an influx of coders graduating from three- to six-month coding crunch programs in lieu of traditional four-year Computer Science degree programs. These for-profit programs, non-accredited and operating without much regulation, have been cropping up in response to a swelling market demand for STEM workers. They vary in quality, but most bootcamps promise steady, high-paying work upon graduation, prompting aspiring coders to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 of personal money to enroll. Now, colleges and universities are teaming up with these private schools, or rolling out their own bootcamp-style programs to offer accelerated coding workshops to their students. Northeastern, UPenn, and Rutgers have announced in-house bootcamps in the couple of months, while Lynn University and Concordia University have paired with programs like General Assembly and The Software Craftsmanship Guild. It’s a response to thetremendous growth in bootcamp enrollment, which increased by 138 percent from 2014 to 2015, compared to more modest growth in traditional Computer Science degrees (14 percent from 2013 to 2014). The demand is clear. But should universities be borrowing bootcamp tactics? O’Neill, who is Principal Architect at Monetate, agrees. He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said. A typical four-year CS degree will require students to study theoretical principles of programming on top of straight coding skills. Bootcamps, on the other hand, focus on programming alone, with an emphasis on in-demand languages in popular sectors like app development, functioning more like vocational school. But Anupam Joshi sees the immediate benefits of these programs. He’s Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which doesn’t currently have plans to incorporate bootcamp style programs into its CS department (though the university does have a “training center” that offers vocational services, including coding). But he appreciates the bootcamps' quick adaptability to industry fads and the wider scope of needs they fill amidst the student body. “Bootcamps are good for someone who wants to get an entry level job,” he said of the promotion of coding over theory. “It’s like every other trade.”

• Blackstone nears $940 million deal to buy HP Enterprise stake in India's MphasiS: sources Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is nearing a deal to acquire Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) (HPE.N) controlling stake worth about $940 million in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS Ltd (MBFL.NS), according to three sources directly involved in the deal. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and the U.S.-based parent had been looking to exit from the Indian venture to shore up its capital. Bids for buying the MphasiS stake were submitted earlier this month and the U.S. private equity firm has emerged as the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter, the sources said. Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS' stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company's total market value is about $1.6 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 14th

• Modeled After Ants, Team of Just Six Tiny Robots Can Move 2-Ton Car: Archimedes pointed out that with a lever he could move the world. He most likely would have been surprised to learn that a team of six microrobots, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, could pull a car weighing 3,900 pounds. A group of researchers at the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory at Stanford University has been exploring the limits of friction in the design of tiny robots that have the ability to pull thousands of times their weight, wander like gecko lizards on vertical surfaces or mimic bats. Now they have pushed biomimicry in a new direction. They have taken their inspiration from tiny ants that work as teams to move massive objects. In this case, they are not just taking ideas from nature — the movie “Big Hero 6” made a great deal of what swarms of microrobots could do, including tossing cars. The researchers’ approach is counterintuitive. Rather than striking powerful blows like a football player making a tackle or a jackhammer, they have focused on synchronizing the smooth application of very tiny forces. The microrobots work in concert, if slowly. The researchers observed that the ants get great cooperative force by each using three of their six legs simultaneously. Their new demonstration is the functional equivalent of a team of six humans moving a weight equivalent to that of an Eiffel Tower and three Statues of Liberty, Mr. Christensen said. The car is the one he uses for commuting to campus. Part of the magic is the use of a special adhesive that was inspired by gecko toes. 

• India's Micromax, once a rising star, struggles: A year ago, Micromax vaulted past Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to become India's leading smartphone brand. Today, its market share has nearly halved, several top executives have resigned, and the company is looking for growth outside India. In Micromax's slide to second place is a tale of the promise and peril of India's booming but hyper-competitive smartphone industry. India is the world's fastest-growing smartphone market. Shipments of smartphones jumped 29 percent to 103 million units last year. Rapid growth has helped nurture a crop of local brands, led by Micromax, that outsourced production to Chinese manufacturers. Now, as Samsung rolls out more affordable phones, the same Chinese factories are entering the Indian market with their own brands, depressing prices and forcing Indian mobile makers to rethink their strategies. "What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing the same to Indian brands now, and over the next year we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers," said Tarun Pathak, analyst at Counterpoint Research in New Delhi. Micromax, which was founded in New Delhi by four partners in 2000 but only began selling mobile phones in 2008, built its market share by working with Chinese manufacturers such as Coolpad, Gionee and Oppo to offer affordable phones quickly. In 2015, it launched more than 40 new models. In 2014, the founders brought in outside managers to lead the company at a time when Micromax was challenging Samsung to become the largest mobile phone maker in India. But tensions arose soon after between founders and the newly hired executives, six former executives told Reuters. These conflicts undermined Micromax's attempts to raise funds for expansion, say former executives. Last May, Alibaba walked away from a mooted $1.2 billion purchase of a 20 percent stake, citing a lack of clarity on growth plans, according to one executive involved in the discussion. Former executives said the lack of fresh funding undermined a proposal by the new executives to move Micromax's research and design operations, which had previously been outsourced, in-house. The move was intended to help Micromax differentiate itself from generic Android clones. "We hired about 80-90 people in Bangalore to do in-house software and design, but with no money from the investors and little interest from the founders, that team fizzled away and that office has been partially shut down now," said a former executive. After Alibaba walked away, Micromax struggled to attract other investors who would have been key to Micromax's plan to invest in software R&D and hardware design. The company was forced to scale down the in-house R&D project, a top executive involved in the fundraising plan said. Meanwhile, Chinese handset makers, including Coolpad and Oppo, to which Micromax outsources its manufacturing, were sharpening their focus on India. Samsung, too, began to introduce more affordable models there. In 2015, Chinese brands doubled their market share to 18 percent, according to Counterpoint Research, taking away business from Indian budget phone makers such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. Indian brands' market share fell from 48 to 43 percent last year.

• How a simple typo helped stop a $1 billion digital bank heist: It was just a few letters off: Someone misspelled "foundation" as "fandation" on an online payment transfer request. But that simple typo helped stop hackers from getting away with a nearly $1 billion digital heist last month, Reuters reports. Hackers broke into the Bangladeshi central bank's computer systems, according to anonymous officials at the financial institution cited by Reuters, stealing the credentials needed to authorize payment transfers. The attackers used the stolen information to ask the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to make massive money transfers -- nearly three dozen of them -- from the Bangladeshi bank's account with the Fed to accounts at other financial institutions overseas. Four transfers to accounts in the Philippines, totaling abut $80 million, worked. But then a fifth request, for $20 million to be sent to an apparently fictitious Sri Lankan nonprofit, was flagged as suspicious by a routing bank due to the "fandation" error. The Bangladesh central bank was able to stop that transaction after the routing bank asked for confirmation. "The Sri Lankan bank did not disburse it immediately, and we could recover the full amount," the central bank told the Financial Times. The requests waiting to be processed -- amounting to a total of between $850 million and $870 million, according to an unnamed official cited by Reuters -- were also halted. So if it weren't for that typo, the attackers may have escaped with an even bigger payday. Bangladesh's finance minister has blamed the incident on the Federal Reserve and said his government will "file a case in the international court against" the financial institution, according to local outlet the Dhaka Tribune. A New York Fed spokesperson denied the accusation, telling The Washington Post in a statement that "there is no evidence of any attempt to penetrate Federal Reserve systems in connection with the payments in question" or that the institution's systems were compromised. According to the spokesperson, the payment instructions were "fully authenticated" using standard methods.

• Top Start-Up Investors Are Betting on Growth, Not Waiting for It: For the last few years, the spotlight in start-up investing has largely shone on those who poured money into a company when it was already well along on a growth path. It turns out that spotlight may have been misdirected. While some investors are throwing giant sums into more mature start-ups like Uber and Airbnb at soaring valuations, it is the venture capitalists who identify a promising company at its infancy and bet on its growth who often come out on top. Known as early-stage investors, they dominate a list of the top 20 venture capitalists worldwide that was recently created by the research firm CB Insights. About three-quarters of the top 20 are investors who put money into start-ups during their early rounds of financing. Only a handful on the list are focused on investing at a later stage in a company’s life. Early-stage investments have accounted for the lion’s share of the venture industry’s gains since 1994, according to Cambridge Associates, a research firm that studied the quarterly financial reports of dozens of venture firms. Since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the industry’s returns have been generated by early-stage investments in any given year. But the value of investing in a company when it is still nascent has been somewhat obscured in recent years as hordes of nontraditional start-up investors — including mutual funds, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds — have piled into private tech companies, often when those start-ups are already proven growth stories. When Uber raised around $2.1 billion in December, for example, one of its investors was Tiger Global Management, a New York investment firm with a hedge fund component. Rebecca Lynn, a managing director and co-founder of Canvas Ventures who is on the CB Insights list, said early-stage investments generally pay off more because “investors can get more of an ownership stake and you’re also part of the team.” Ms. Lynn, who invested early in the alternative lending platform Lending Club, which went public in 2014, added that “later-stage investing is more like a stock bet. You’re along for the ride.”

• Instacart Gets Red Bull and Doritos to Pay Your Delivery Fees: Online shoppers hate paying delivery fees. So Instacart Inc. is getting Pepsi to foot the bill. The grocery delivery startup is working with General Mills Inc., Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc., Unilever NV, and other consumer goods makers to cover the cost of delivery or provide other discounts when customers buy their products. In addition to the coupons, the companies pay Instacart to advertise on its website. Since introducing the program about six months ago, it now accounts for 15 percent of Instacart’s revenue, said Apoorva Mehta, the company’s chief executive officer. Shoppers can find discounts when filling up their carts with brands such as Degree, Doritos, DiGiorno, Häagen-Dazs, Quaker Oats, and Stella Artois. Instacart ads promise free delivery if you spend $10 on Red Bull, or consumers can get 75 cents off any Dove soap. Mehta compares the ads to those offered on the side of Google search results. “It’s like AdWords for groceries,” he said. In its quest to build a profitable business, Instacart is searching for new sources of revenue that won’t turn off shoppers. The company, which was valued at $2 billion by investors last year, had previously made up some of its costs by selling products for more than what the grocery stores charged. Customers complained, and Instacart backtracked. The company recently cut pay for some workers, according to reports this week in Quartz and Re/code. Instacart said it costs much more to deliver an order than the $5.99 it charges shoppers, but customers are unwilling to pay more.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 19

• Uber is profitable in the US, but is losing $1 billion a year to compete in China: Uber is burning through more than a billion dollars a year in China as it wages a fierce price war against local rival Didi Kuaidi, its chief executive said. The company's Chinese business boosted its valuation last month to more than $8 billion after raising more than $1 billion in its latest funding round, but the U.S. ride-hailing app is not yet profitable in mainland China because of the intense competition. "We're profitable in the USA, but we're losing over $1 billion a year in China," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Canadian technology platform Betakit.  "We have a fierce competitor that's unprofitable in every city they exist in, but they're buying up market share. I wish the world wasn't that way."  The $1 billion figure was confirmed by Uber officials in China in an email to Reuters on Thursday. Uber and China's Didi Kuaidi, backed by Chinese technology giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, have both spent heavily to subsidise fares to gain market share, betting on China's Internet-linked transport market becoming the world's biggest.

• Facebook Plans To Put Ads In Messenger: A leaked document Facebook sent to some of its biggest advertisers reveals that Facebook will launch ads within Messenger in Q2 2016. The document, obtained by TechCrunch but kept private to protect its verified source, says businesses will be able to send ads as messages to people who previously initiated a chat thread with that company. To prepare, the document recommends that businesses get consumers to start message threads with them now so they’ll be able to send them ads when the feature launches. The document also notes that Facebook has quietly launched a URL short link fb.com/msg/ that instantly opens a chat thread with a business. Facebook confirmed the existence of the URL short link. That seems to back up the validity of the leaked document. Messenger is one of Facebook’s most popular and fastest-growing products, with 800 million monthly active users. Yet the social network has never monetized it directly before. Thankfully for users, Facebook isn’t going to let brands send ad messages to just anyone or even people who’ve liked their Pages. Only those who have voluntarily chatted with a business can be sent ads. This should somewhat limit the spam potential and annoyance. Right now, almost all messages come from one’s friends, so Facebook will likely try to preserve this high signal-to-noise ratio with limits on advertising.

• Secondary Shops Flooded With Unicorn Sellers: Until recently, shares of some of the highest-flying unicorn companies have been so hard to come by that secondary buyers have battled each other, not to mention other investors, to acquire some of the startups’ common shares. As the fortunes of billion-dollar companies like Evernote have fizzled, however, so has their shareholders’ enthusiasm. Says the cofounder of one secondary shop who asked not to be named, “We aren’t seeing huge discounts yet in the top 10 names, but people are trying to dump them. It’s not just one person calling you about a particular company. It’s four.” Says another secondary investor, who also asked not to be identified for this story, “We’re seeing an enormous uptick in inbound selling interest.” The situation is changing so quickly that several people with whom we spoke say a number of new characters are now peddling shares of so-called “A List” companies whose shares would have been beyond nearly anyone’s reach six months ago. “We’re seeing a lot of sketchy people advertising these deals,” says one insider. It didn’t used to be like this. Just a year ago, demand for unicorn stock was at an unprecedented level, as were the number of companies establishing billion-dollar valuations for themselves. Unicorn coverage became a cottage industry unto itself, with tech outlets and even data analysis firms poring over which unicorns were the best employers, which companies were positioned to become unicorns, and which venture firms were the best at spotting unicorns early on, among other angles. Alas, by late August, China’s market was in a nose-drive, and both late-and early-stage investors began applying the brakes. It wasn’t long before non-traditional venture investors like Fidelity and Blackrock were slashing the valuations of some of the startups in the portfolio. A parade of well-reported WSJ pieces about what isn’t quite right at high-flying Theranos seemed to cement what many had started to think: That many unicorns really weren’t worth what their ambitious investors had settled on. (It didn’t help when, last week, the human resources startup Zenefits asked its CEO to resign over sloppy and possibly damning business practices. Ten months ago, the company was valued at $4.5 billion by investors.) Partly, such nervousness owes to employees, some of whom are getting laid off as companies cut back on costs in order to lengthen their runway. These former staffers have to exercise their options within 90 days or else lose them, and they’re calling secondary firms for help in figuring out what to do. Some sellers are venture capital firms that thought they could exit some of their investments in 2016 and are now concluding that they can’t. (As some readers will know, the clock is always ticking on a venture fund. Most have 10 or 11 years, tops, to invest in startups and get some cash back to investors before losing the confidence of those backers.)

• Why Carriers Want to Delete WhatsApp: Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the Mobile World Congress, an annual industry gathering held in Barcelona, to reassure phone companies that Facebook is their natural ally. He’d just announced the $22 billion purchase of the WhatsApp messaging service and was touting an initiative called Internet.org, a low-bandwidth suite of basic services carriers would offer in conjunction with Facebook to get hundreds of millions of people online for the first time. He pledged to “build what is going to be a more profitable model with more subscribers for carriers.” By sticking together, the Facebook founder said, both sides could benefit handsomely.As Zuckerberg prepares to return to Barcelona for this year’s MWC on Feb. 22, phone executives say his company looks more like a competitor than a partner. Last year, WhatsApp introduced free voice calls—something Facebook already offered—and both brands have messaging apps. These so-called over-the-top services cut into mobile carriers’ voice and texting revenue because they’re offered over the Internet. Some phone companies say Facebook and its ilk are freeloaders that rely on carriers’ network infrastructure without spending any money to support it. “WhatsApp is competing with us, not only with messaging but with voice, too,” Telefónica Chief Operating Officer José María Álvarez-Pallete said in August at a telecommunications industry event in the Spanish coastal city of Santander. “The premise should be, same services, same rules.” Not all carriers are lining up against Facebook. The company has more than a dozen partnerships with phone companies from Paraguay to the Philippines. Many of them say teaming up with Facebook is beneficial, because it boosts data usage and has the potential to increase revenue. Millicom International Cellular, a carrier with more than 63 million subscribers in Africa and Latin America, has run promotions in certain markets where it offers free access to Facebook and Internet.org for a couple of months. The company reported last year that 33 percent of subscribers who take part end up upgrading to fee-paying data plans. Similarly, South Africa’s No. 3 mobile company, Cell C, offers Facebook and WhatsApp for free in certain subscription packages, because they draw new users. “If we don’t innovate around these services and drive value to our customers, we run a higher risk of being left out of the future entirely,” said Cell C Chief Executive Officer José Dos Santos in an e-mail. In the long run, say some industry analysts, WhatsApp and other alternatives shouldn’t be seen as a threat to the voice service of phone companies. The typically superior sound quality of the voice calls in the apps uses lots of data. “If carriers price their data offerings correctly, it could drive up revenues,” says John Delaney, an analyst at researcher IDC. And when people graduate to video apps like Skype, data consumption grows exponentially. Says Delaney, “What carriers resent is investing heavily and having others piggyback on their investments.”

• Scientists created a three-armed cyborg to play the drums like no human can: Georgia Tech researchers have built a robotic arm that attaches to a drummer’s shoulder and plays along. This allows drummers — now equipped with three arms — to play sequences that two-armed humans can’t even attempt. “It’s a richer and more sophisticated rhythm because you can hit one more thing,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech. The robotic arm is capable of hitting a drum up to 20 times per second, a rate that’s impossible for humans. And it never needs a break. The computerized arm listens to the sound of the human playing and improvises to accompany the beat. Currently it can’t be programmed to play specific songs. The robotic arm will generally mirror the volume and speed that the human is playing. Weinberg stopped short of saying the three-armed solution is presently better than what a drummer can do with two hands. The arm, finalized last week, hasn’t been tested yet to see how it complements professional drummers. Weinberg’s next step is having drummers wear a brain-scanning headband, and see whether the robotic arm can interpret their intentions and play exactly what they desire. Since 2006, he has worked to create memorable music through artificial intelligence. In one project, Weinberg built a robotic prosthesis for a drummer who lost an arm in an accident.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, January 18

• Modi Offers $1.5 Billion Fund, Tax Breaks for India Startups: India said it will set up a 100-billion-rupee ($1.5 billion) fund to encourage startup businesses and pledged to ease regulations for entrepreneurs, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi strives to create the jobs needed in a developing nation of 1.3 billion people. Startups will get tax breaks such as income-tax exemptions for the first three years, quicker patent applications, a credit guarantee program and easier routes to wind up if they fail, Modi said at a government conference for entrepreneurs in New Delhi. The fund will be established over four years. "The government should not interfere in startups," Modi said on Saturday to an audience that included billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., and Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick. "India’s youth should be a job creator, not a seeker."

• Jawbone Raises $165 Million at Half Its Last Valuation: Jawbone, the once-hot wearable technology start-up, said on Friday that it had raised $165 million in funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion, or roughly half the amount that the company was valued at as recently as 2014, continuing a burgeoning trend of start-ups raising money at lower values than before. When private companies raise money at a lower value than they had previously, the event is known as a “down round.” On Thursday, Foursquare announced it had raised a $45 million round of venture capital — which people familiar with the terms have said was also a down round, with Foursquare valued at $250 million, less than half of the $650 million it was valued at during its last round in 2013. Down rounds are increasing as Silicon Valley sobers up somewhat after a frothy period. In the last quarter of 2015, there was a major investment slowdown; funding to private companies dropped 30 percent from the previous quarter, to $27.3 billion, the research firm CB Insights said. Mutual fund investors have also recently marked down the valuations of other high-profile private companies like Zenefits, Dropbox and Snapchat. Down rounds, like the ones that Jawbone and Foursquare have raised, tend to destroy value for all of the pre-existing shareholders, including employees who own the company’s private stock. It has been a tumultuous year for Jawbone, which is based in San Francisco. The company’s Up fitness band line faces stiff competition in a crowded market for wearable technology that is dominated by Fitbit and Apple, according to the research firm IDC. Last year, Jawbone laid off employees as part of a restructuring. The company raised nearly $300 million in debt from the money management firm BlackRock last April.

• As Delivery Startups Cool, Food-Delivery Startup DoorDash Eats Its Words in Fundraising Talks: The company lowered its ambitions by cutting as much as $400 million off its proposed valuation to investors. In meetings late last year, DoorDash pitched venture capitalists on an investment that would value the food-delivery company at $1 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said. The company is back on the fundraising trail for that same round, except this time it’s slashed its lofty goal to as low as $600 million, according to the people, who requested not to be named because the discussions were private. If DoorDash closes the financing at the terms proposed to some investors recently, the valuation would be around the same as the one from the last round in March 2015, which was $600 million, the people said this week. The talks are ongoing, and the terms could change again, they said. A spokesman for DoorDash declined to comment. The comedown for DoorDash shows delivery startups may be losing some of their allure. Such businesses are costly to operate and often take on huge losses in pursuit of growth. Instacart, the grocery-delivery company that was valued at $2 billion by investors, raised prices in December, a move it attributed partly to “changing market conditions.” It also cut staff, according to Re/code. Good Eggs, which works with farmers to deliver fresh produce, closed all of its operations outside San Francisco in August.

• Alphabet (formerly known as Google) Shakes Up Its Robotics Division:  Google’s robotics division has been plagued by low morale and a lack of leadership since the unit’s founder left abruptly in 2014. Now Alphabet is cleaning it up. Over the last two months, Alphabet, the new holding company that separated Google from its collection of speculative projects, has reframed the robots effort, moving it from a stand-alone division inside Google to a piece of the X research division. The company has also hired Hans Peter Brondmo, a technology industry veteran who last worked at Nokia, to help with management. A reorganization of the robots group is one of several recent moves inside the X division, which used to be called Google X but was rebranded with the Alphabet reorganization and recently unveiled a new logo. A range of companies, including tech competitors like Amazon and car manufacturers, are signaling their interest in robotics. X has several projects in varying degrees of completion, but has lately been “graduating” them as stand-alone companies or preparing them for such a move. The life sciences group, for example, is now called Verily. X also recently hired an auto industry veteran to lead its self-driving car effort — called Chauffeur internally — and noted that the project was a good candidate to be spun out. Robotics has gone in the opposite direction for reasons that are personal and practical. The division was created in 2013 by Andy Rubin, who led the development of the widely used Android operating system software, and it has been without a leader since Mr. Rubin left in 2014 to start a technology incubator that helps young start-ups turn their ideas into businesses. After starting the robotics division, Mr. Rubin quickly went on a buying spree, purchasing a number of promising companies, including Boston Dynamics, the maker of experimental military robots, and Schaft, an elite group of Japanese roboticists from the University of Tokyo. But while the companies were promising, Mr. Rubin invested in several technologies that had industry observers scratching their heads about his overall direction. Mr. Rubin originally said that the robotics division would be a 10-year moonshot, and when he was in negotiations to acquire companies he talked about the possibility of the driverless Google car rolling up to your house and the Google robot jumping off the back bumper. Google’s robotics effort stalled after his departure, going through a variety of leaders, including James Kuffner, a Carnegie Mellon roboticist who has since joined Toyota’s research and development laboratory in Palo Alto, and Jonathan Rosenberg, who is a troubleshooter for Larry Page, the Google co-founder who is Alphabet’s chief executive. Many in the industry say it is likely to be awhile before companies, Alphabet included, can get through the many technological and regulatory hurdles that stand in the way of robots becoming a huge business.

• Xiaomi Misses Smartphone Sales Target by 10% on China Slowdown: Xiaomi Corp. sold more than 70 million smartphones last year, falling well short of its target and prompting founder Lei Jun to tell employees he was refocusing research efforts into “cool stuff” like robotics and virtual reality. The Chinese startup had a stated goal of selling 80 million devices. Xiaomi originally predicted selling 100 million units, but then changed that after China set its lowest growth target in 15 years and copycat vendors started taking away market share. The miss was a blow to company morale, Lei said in an e-mail to employees. “We set a target of 80 million and, before we knew it, it became an obligation,” Lei said. “We changed under this pressure, and everyone’s faces gradually lost all traces of humor.” The smartphone maker was one of China’s most exciting startup stories of past years, with a valuation of $45 billion that trailed only that of Uber Technologies Inc. Xiaomi thrived through online sales of budget-priced devices with advanced components, overtaking domestic competitors and challenging Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. for supremacy in the world’s biggest market. Xiaomi’s market share has been pinched by competitors including Huawei and Meizu, said Jeff Pu, an analyst at Yuanta Securities Co. They are among the Chinese vendors that have flooded the Internet with ultra-thin phones offering similar features and prices to Xiaomi’s Mi 4i and Redmi Note 2. Huawei said it shipped more than 100 million smartphones last year as it expanded in the U.S. and Europe, defying an industry slowdown. Pu expects Xiaomi’s sales growth to slow to 10 percent this year. “With sales growth slowing, Xiaomi’s valuation will be hurt,” Pu said. “It could even face a down round, as investors are less willing to pay.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September, 21

• Apple's iOS App Store suffers first major attack: Apple said on Sunday it is cleaning up its iOS App Store to remove malicious iPhone and iPad programs identified in the first large-scale attack on the popular mobile software outlet. The company disclosed the effort after several cyber security firms reported finding a malicious program dubbed XcodeGhost that was embedded in hundreds of legitimate apps. It is the first reported case of large numbers of malicious software programs making their way past Apple's stringent app review process. Prior to this attack, a total of just five malicious apps had ever been found in the App Store. The hackers embedded the malicious code in these apps by convincing developers of legitimate software to use a tainted, counterfeit version of Apple's software for creating iOS and Mac apps, which is known as Xcode, Apple said. Palo Alto Networks Director of Threat Intelligence Ryan Olson said the malware had limited functionality and his firm had uncovered no examples of data theft or other harm as a result of the attack. Still, he said it was "a pretty big deal" because it showed that the App Store could be compromised if hackers infected machines of software developers writing legitimate apps. Other attackers may copy that approach, which is hard to defend against, he said. Researchers said infected apps included Tencent's popular mobile chat app WeChat, car-hailing app Didi Kuaidi and a music app from Internet portal NetEase. The tainted version of Xcode was downloaded from a server in China that developers may have used because it allowed for faster downloads than using Apple's U.S. servers, Olson said.

• Cheap robots may shift car making from China to U.S.: Magna CEO. The falling cost of intelligent robots may help repatriate some car manufacturing work away from low-cost locations like China back to factories in Germany and North America, Donald Walker, Chief Executive of auto supplier Magna told Reuters. Rising wages in China and the cost of importing heavy components like electric car batteries into Europe may lead established car makers to introduce more highly efficient automated manufacturing closer to home, Walker told Reuters in an interview at the Frankfurt auto show. "If you have a high labor, easy-to-ship part, it has already gone, for the most part, to a low-cost jurisdiction," Walker said about the evolution of assembly work in the car manufacturing business. "A bigger issue is how fast do you have intelligent robotics replace manual labor everywhere in the world," Walker said. By 2025 the total cost of manufacturing labor is projected to fall between 18 and 33 percent in countries which already deploy industrial robots, including South Korea, China, the U.S. Germany and Japan, a study on advanced manufacturing technologies by the Boston Consulting Group showed.

• Amazon Wins First Emmy for 'Transparent': Jeffrey Tambor and Jill Soloway delivered Amazon.com its first major Emmy awards for the show “Transparent,” as the online retailer went toe-to-toe with Time Warner’s HBO in the comedy categories. Tambor plays the patriarch of a Los Angeles family who reveals to his children that he has long felt he’s a woman and is going to begin to dress like one. Soloway created “Transparent” and won an award for directing, one of 11 nominations the show received.

• From EyeEm, Technology to See and Tag Photos:  A little-known German start-up may have just made it a lot easier to search for photos online. EyeEm, a photo-sharing service started in 2011 that has drawn parallels to Instagram, announced new technology in Brooklyn on Friday that uses a sophisticated algorithm and machine learning to analyze the details of online photos. The technology, called EyeVision, automatically scans images and tags them with certain keywords, from “landscape” and “New York” to the perceived emotions of people in each photo, which makes them easier to find through web searches. While other companies have tried similar techniques to categorize online images, the German start-up’s efforts — which comes after roughly three years of development — are based on analyzing millions of photos already shared on EyeEm’s photo-sharing social network. The company has roughly 15 million users compared to about 300 million on Instagram. Combined with the company’s machine-learning techniques, EyeEm’s search algorithm adapts over time to better understand what is part of each uploaded image, making it easier to find specific photos online, according to the company’s chief executive.

• Gentex transforms rear-view mirror into high-tech vision system: Gentex Corp is broadening its role from a traditional Michigan-based auto parts maker to a supplier of high-tech vision systems that eventually could be integrated into self-driving cars. General Motors Co will be the first automaker to use a new rear-view mirror developed by Gentex, on the 2016 Cadillac CT6 sedan. The car goes on sale early next year and the mirror will be offered at extra cost. At the flip of a switch, the full display mirror converts into a video display that provides a panoramic view behind the vehicle. Called the Gentex Full Display Mirror, it incorporates a rear camera and software that transforms a prosaic piece of hardware into a platform for more advanced safety technology, marketing director Craig Piersma said. While relatively young tech-focused suppliers such as Mobileye NV have become investor favorites as the auto industry ramps up development of advanced driver assistance systems - the building blocks for future self-driving cars - Gentex has quietly been turning out 30 million rear-view mirrors a year. Founded in 1974, Gentex is one of the world's largest suppliers of auto-dimming automotive mirrors, but it also has steadily beefed up its capability as an electronics manufacturer, expanding its expertise in cameras and displays. Among its products is the camera-based SmartBeam system that automatically switches headlamps from high to low beam. It also provides collision and lane departure warnings and vehicle and pedestrian detection.