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- China stocks are 8% down this morning; Alibaba stock is at its lifetime low: China's securities regulator said there was "panic sentiment" in mainland stock markets on Wednesday, acknowledging the recent increase in irrational selling, Reuters reported. Shortly after, the People's Bank of China said it will closely watch stock market direction and guard against systematic regional financial risks. The comments did little to soothe investor worries about tumbling mainland equities, with the Shanghai Composite sinking more than 8 percent in early trade on Wednesday. In US trading, Alibaba was traded at its lifetime low.
- Worldwide spend on gadgets will fall year-on-year this year for the first time since 2010: According to a new forecast from Gartner, shoppers worldwide will spend less on gadgets in 2015 than they did in 2014 — the first drop since 2010. Analysts from Gartner still predict we'll spend a total of $606 billion in 2015. But it's still a decline of 5.7 percent compared with 2014 — lower than Gartner had forecast just three months ago. So what's behind the softer sales? Its because sales of desktops, tablets and smartphones are all slowing. Fewer people are buying desktop computers in Western Europe, Japan and Russia. In addition the tablet market is reaching its saturation point, and that analysts expect users to upgrade their tablets an average of once every three years — far less than smartphones. Sales of mobile devices such as smartphones as well as of high-end laptops will continue to grow, the firm said. Still, even within that bright spot, there is some hint of a slowdown. The rates of first-time smartphone buyers in China, one of the world's fastest-growing and most important mobile markets, have slowed.
- Alibaba boosts Singapore Post stake, invest in SingPost's e-commerce unit: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is investing about $206 million to expand its holdings in Singapore Post and its e-commerce subsidiary, the two companies said in a statement. SingPost is seeking to boost its e-commerce business to offset weak postal revenues, and last year an Alibaba unit bought an over 10 percent stake in SingPost for $249 million. In the latest deal, Alibaba said it was buying an additional 5 percent stake in SingPost for S$187.1 million. Alibaba will also invest up to S$92 million to buy a 34 percent stake in Quantium Solutions, a SingPost subsidiary that provides e-commerce logistics across the Asia Pacific. Alibaba is currently the second largest shareholder in SingPost after Singapore Telecommunications
- Music streaming firm Saavn raises $100M from Tiger Global, others: Saavn (South Asian Audio Video Network), a US-based Indian music streaming firm, has raised $100 million in Series C funding from existing investor Tiger Global Management and others. The company will use the money to improve product development efforts and to speed up customer acquisition. Saavn is said to be preparing for the launch of a video streaming service. The company claims to be adding one million users every month. Earlier this year, Saavn had appointed former Google executive Mahesh Narayanan as COO. Last year, Saavn added Twitter-powered radio station to its service. It also entered into licensing agreements with Warner Music and EMI Music that helped it add 800,000 tracks from international artists.
- ClipMine Improves Videos With Crowdsourced Tagging And Annotations: So this happens to me pretty often: I pull up an online video that I want to watch, only to be taken aback when I realize that it’s 10 or 20 or 30 minutes long. It’s particularly frustrating when there’s just one section or just one quote that I’m looking for. I end up skipping around trying to find that one bit — not exactly a great experience. A new startup is trying to fix that. With ClipMine, you get searchable videos, with a table of contents. For example, here’s a curated collection of videos related to startups. With each video, not only can you see an outline of all the big topics covered and jump to the section that interests you, you can also search for every time something gets mentioned (though your success will depend on how thoroughly the video has been tagged and annotated). To be clear, ClipMine isn’t trying to build its own video player. Instead, it sits on top of players like YouTube. You can also install a plugin to see the ClipMine player anywhere you see YouTube videos.
Saavn partners with Twitter - will play requests tweeted to @SaavnRadio, other social features coming: Saavn is upping its social game after it partnered with Twitter to introduce a tweet-powered radio station for its users. Saavn launched its radio mode one year ago, and now it is taking requests from users who tweet to the @SaavnRadio account. The station will also mix in tracks that Saavn users are sharing to Twitter from the service, although the company said specific requests will be prioritized over social shares. Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra told TechCrunch in an interview that the radio feature already accounts for over half of all activity on the service and, since a large number of users are already active on Twitter, the union was a no-brainer for him. “Music streaming has always been an inherently social service, we [at Saavn] already see lots of activity from users worldwide and identified a natural opportunity to create a radio station. This puts the power of programming into our users’ hands,” he said. Malhotra also hinted that Saavn is preparing more social features next year, but he said that these new releases will be within the Saavn service itself, such as collaborative playlists.
Amazon maybe on the hook for in-app purchases made by kids without parental authorization - burden of proof rests with Amazon: A federal judge won't dismiss the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Amazon over the company's practice of billing parents for in-app purchases their children made without parental approval. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon failed to stop children from spending millions of dollars of their parents' money for virtual items in online games and other apps on devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. Some of these individual purchases cost as much as $100 each. Amazon argues that it adequately warns customers when an app allows for in-app purchases. It also says that the FTC couldn't prove that the bills that the kids racked up were "unauthorized" by parents. But Judge John C. Coughenour disagreed with that reasoning Monday, saying Amazon may still have violated federal laws against unfair billing, whether the charges were authorized or not. In any event, Coughenour added, it's Amazon's responsibility to prove that the charges were authorized, and it has not done that.
SoftBank Invests $250M In GrabTaxi, Uber’s Archrival In Southeast Asia; valuation > $1B: Neither party has confirmed what the deal values GrabTaxi at, but the company’s valuation is likely to exceed the $1 billion mark. The duo did confirm that SoftBank has become GrabTaxi’s largest investor. The round is the highest raise for a startup in Southeast Asia to date — Rocket Internet companies aside — and it is GrabTaxi’s fourth funding activity this calendar year, taking it past $320 million in capital from investors. GrabTaxi’s previous $65 million round closed in October and was led by Tiger Global — which also invested in Uber rival Ola — while GGV Capital led a $15 million raise in May. Its $10 million-plus Series A was announced in April. GrabTaxi was founded in Malaysia in 2012, has over 500 staff and is live in 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Its core offering is a service that connects registered taxis with would-be passengers via its app — thus working with the existing industry rather than against it — but it also offers an Uber-like private car service and is trialling motorbike taxis in Vietnam.
Uber's take on hiring tech talent: tie up with a collective - then hire the team and open an engineering office around them: To spearhead its mobile growth, Uber is setting up a mobile development shop in Amsterdam, led by one of its earliest employees and staffed by a set of new hires: a team of Dutch developers who originally worked on Uber’s Spotify integration and have served as advisors to the company since 2009. Uber has effectively taken on 10 former employees from Dutch firm Moop.me, which effectively functions as a collective of engineers and designers. Uber has not acquired the whole agency, because Moop’s people have also taken on other projects that have very little synergy with what Uber is today. Those projects, and Moop, will continue.
