Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 23

• Facebook Says It Gave Advertisers Inflated Video Metrics: Facebook Inc. has been giving advertisers an inflated metric for the average time users spent watching a video, a measurement that may have helped boost marketer spending on one of Facebook’s most popular ad products. The company, owner of the world’s largest social network, only counts a video as "viewed" if it has been seen for more than 3 seconds. The metric it gave advertisers for their average video view time incorporated only the people who had watched the video long enough to count as a "view" in the first place, inflating the metric because it didn’t count anyone who didn’t watch, or watched for a shorter time. Facebook’s stock fell more than 1.5 percent in extended trading after the miscalculation was earlier reported in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook had disclosed the mistake in a posting on its advertiser help center web page several weeks ago. Big advertising buyers and marketers are upset about the inflated metric, and asked the company for more details, according to the report in the Journal, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The Menlo Park, California-based company has kept revenue surging in part because of enthusiasm for its video ads, which advertisers compare in performance to those on Twitter, YouTube and around the web.

• Apple Inc. has acquired Indian machine-learning startup Tuplejump  as it seeks to expand its expertise in artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker bought the Hyderabad, India-based company in June, according to a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified. Tuplejump’s software specializes in processing and analyzing big sets of data quickly. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed. Tuplejump has about a dozen employees, many of whom were already based on the west coast of the U.S., the person said. Founder Rohit Rai’s LinkedIn profile says he started working for Apple in May and is now also based in Seattle.

• Yahoo has confirmed a data breach with 500 million accounts stolen, as questions about disclosure to Verizon and users grow: Yahoo confirmed today that it had been subject of a massive hacking attack that exposed the data of at least 500 million users. Recode previously reported that Yahoo was about to reveal the breach and Yahoo had declined to comment when contacted last night. Now, the company is unveiling a situation much worse than expected, although the Recode report noted that it would be. Earlier this summer, Yahoo said it was investigating a data breach in which hackers claimed to have access to 200 million user accounts and one was selling them online. “It’s as bad as that,” said one source. “Worse, really.” The announcement has huge implications on Yahoo’s pending deal to be bought by Verizon for $4.8 billion. Sources at Verizon said they were largely unaware of the severity of the attack until recently and that CEO Marissa Mayer and others did not flag them as to the extent of the issue in the bidding process. You can read that ire clearly between the lines in a statement from Verizon-owned AOL, which is expected to be integrated with Yahoo when the deal is complete. "Within the last two days, we were notified of Yahoo's security incident. We understand that Yahoo is conducting an active investigation of this matter, but we otherwise have limited information and understanding of the impact. We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities. Until then, we are not in position to further comment." In addition, internal sources at Yahoo said the company had been subjected to a number of previous incidents that were not managed swiftly by CEO Marissa Mayer. One executive close to the situation said that former Yahoo information security head Alex Stamos had tried aggressively to get management to act more strongly at the time, but he had not been successful. The well-regarded techie left Yahoo in mid-2015 for a job as chief security officer at Facebook. This whole incident was first revealed in August when “Peace,” an infamous cybercriminal, advertised the sale of user credentials for some 200 million Yahoo users on the “dark web.” The data included user names, some passwords and personal information like birth dates and other email addresses. At the time, Yahoo said it was “aware of the claim,” but declined to say if it was legitimate. Instead, it opened an investigation, but did not issue a call for a password reset to users.

• Uber rival Grab partners with driverless car firm in Singapore: Users of ride-hailing firm Grab will be able to book driverless cars from Friday as it partners with a start-up testing the technology in Singapore, just days after rival Uber debuted its self-driving vehicles in the United States. The move comes as technology companies and automakers race to build autonomous vehicles and develop new business plans for what is expected to be a long-term makeover of personal transportation. Southeast Asia's Grab said its app will allow select commuters to book and ride start-up nuTonomy's driverless vehicles within a western Singapore district, where the vehicles are being tested, and adjacent neighborhoods. A safety driver and support engineer will ride in each nuTonomy car, the two companies said in a statement. nuTonomy, which started a limited public trial of the first driverless taxi in August in Singapore, has said it hopes to have 100 taxis working commercially in the city-state by 2018. Countries around the world are encouraging the development of autonomous technologies, and Singapore, with its limited land and workforce, is hoping driverless vehicles will encourage its residents to use more shared vehicles and public transport. Grab said its data showed drivers in Singapore are less likely to accept a passenger booking request originating from or destined for remote locations, highlighting the need for "robo-cars" that can meet transportation needs in far-flung areas. If a trip requires travel on roads outside of Singapore's one-north district, the safety driver will take control of the vehicle for that portion of the trip.

• LinkedIn is bringing Lynda.com courses to its news feed and building a messaging bot. LinkedIn is finally bringing Lynda.com — the online education company it bought 18 months ago for $1.5 billion — into its news feed. Beginning Thursday, LinkedIn will start recommending online courses for its members based on things like their jobs and their listed skills, and recommended courses shared by friends of colleagues. Users can take the course on LinkedIn, then add completed courses and new skills to their profiles after completion. CEO Jeff Weiner also teased out a number of upcoming products. Among them: A new LinkedIn messaging bot that will help LinkedIn users schedule and arrange meetings. The bot will pull info from users’ calendars to help find time for people to meet, then suggest physical meeting locations based on where the two people have met in the past. It’s the first such messaging bot from LinkedIn, which is not known for having an advanced messaging product. (It didn’t even announce a text-like messaging feature until a year ago.)

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 26

• Four years and $22 billion later, WhatsApp has decided ads aren’t awful, after all: First rule about being bought by an advertising company: You’re probably going to end up selling advertising.  WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting. Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company — including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service. “[B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp,” WhatsApp writes in a blog on the change today. “Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of.” WhatsApp will also be sharing the data with the “Facebook family of companies” — so presumably its user data could also be fed to VR firm Oculus Rift, another Fb acquisition, and photo-sharing network Instagram. WhatsApp data that will be shared under the new T&Cs includes the phone number a user used to verify their account, and the last time they used the service. Two pieces of data which — on a creepiness scale of ‘personal intel you’d rather not hand over to a data-mining tech giant’ — are both right up there.

• Google Fiber is pulling back on its broadband rollout as pressure grows to cut costs: For the past year, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and its parent Alphabet, has told Wall Street that Google Fiber is her most expensive unit outside of the core business — and is well worth the costs. Her bosses may be telling Fiber employees the opposite. According to a report in The Information, Alphabet chiefs Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently instructed Fiber to severely trim staff and expenses, frustrated with mounting costs of delivering high-speed internet by digging up dirt. Creating broadband networks via traditional pipes is enormously expensive. And Fiber still hasn’t proven that it has figured out a better way to do it. The Information story comes on the heels of reports that Fiber has put plans to build broadband networks on hold in two cities as it ponders ways to roll out experimental wireless tech. Fiber, like the “Other Bets” businesses outside of Google, is facing ongoing scrutiny about its operations. Here are the key parts of The Information’s report. The unit initially shot for five million broadband subscribers in its first years, but has fallen short of that. Last month, Page told Craig Barratt, the CEO of Fiber (or Access, as it’s known), to halve his staff down to 500. Porat, who has developed a reputation as a cost cutter, interceded on Fiber’s behalf, arguing to Page that Fiber’s business model is defensible. Barratt considered leaving earlier in the year, reportedly irked by the changes at Alphabet. If he did, he would not be the first “Other Bets” exec to do so.

• Uber Loses at Least $1.2 Billion in First Half of 2016: The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. is not a public company, but every three months, dozens of shareholders get on a conference call to hear the latest details on its business performance from its head of finance, Gautam Gupta. On Friday, Gupta told investors that Uber's losses mounted in the second quarter. Even in the U.S., where Uber had turned a profit during its first quarter, the company was once again losing money. In the first quarter of this year, Uber lost about $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to people familiar with the matter. In the second quarter the losses significantly exceeded $750 million, including a roughly $100 million shortfall in the U.S., those people said. That means Uber's losses in the first half of 2016 totaled at least $1.27 billion. Subsidies for Uber's drivers are responsible for the majority of the company's losses globally, Gupta told investors, according to people familiar with the matter. "You won't find too many technology companies that could lose this much money, this quickly," said Aswath Damodaran, a business professor at New York University who has written skeptically of Uber's astronomical valuation on his blog. "For a private business to raise as much capital as Uber has been able to is unprecedented." Bookings grew tremendously from the first quarter of this year to the second, from above $3.8 billion to more than $5 billion. Net revenue, under generally accepted accounting principles, grew about 18 percent, from about $960 million in the first quarter to about $1.1 billion in the second. Uber also told investors during the call that it was changing how it calculates UberPool's contribution to revenue in the second quarter, which had the effect of increasing revenue. Uber's losses and revenue have generally grown in lockstep as the company's global ambitions have expanded. Uber has lost money quarter after quarter. In 2015, Uber lost at least $2 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Uber, which is seven years old, has lost at least $4 billion in the history of the company.

• First driverless taxi hits the streets of Singapore: The first driverless taxi began work on Thursday in a limited public trial on the streets of Singapore. Developer nuTonomy invited a select group of people to download their app and ride for free in its "robo-taxi" in a western Singapore hi-tech business district, hoping to get feedback ahead of a planned full launch of the service in 2018.The trial rides took place in a Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric vehicle, with an engineer sitting behind the steering wheel to monitor the system and take control if necessary. The trial is on an on-going basis, nuTonomy said, and follows private testing that began in April. Parker, whose company has partnered with the Singapore government on the project, said he hoped to have 100 taxis working commercially in the Southeast Asian citystate by 2018.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 2nd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, July 07

• India's $4 Smartphone Seems Too Good to Be True: A little-known Indian company called Ringing Bells Pvt is set to start shipping the Freedom 251. The prototype touts a quad-core processor, a 4-inch screen and front and back cameras - at the astonishingly low price of 251 rupees (less than $4). While global brands Samsung Electronics Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. sell devices for less than $100, the $4 smartphone is the one stirring up the internet-hungry, app-crazy hordes in a country where Apple Inc. has been unable to make a dent. With iPhones costing upwards of $700, Apple commands a mere 2 percent market share in a country where the World Bank puts the per capita income at $5,630. Brands can't make money even on $50 smartphones, so profiting from a $4 device is a ludicrous idea, say experts like Tarun Pathak, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Technology Market Research. While Micromax sells millions of cheap devices every month in smaller cities - it profits by taking advantage of economies of scale. Ringing Bells’ managing director Mohit Goel isn't counting on a profit from device sales, conceding that the company will lose hundreds of rupees on each unit, and is instead planning to recoup money through advertising and marketing deals. Goel has said the company is importing kits from Taiwan and assembling the phones in a factory in Haridwar near Delhi.Even at $4, the smartphone could still be out of reach for most because of scarcity. When Goel first announced Freedom 251 in February, the company said over 70 million jostled to register, crashing its website. Last week he said Ringing Bells will soon start shipping 200,000 smartphones to buyers picked by lottery. Other details were not available and e-mails, phone calls and text messages to Goel and his representatives in the past days went unanswered. Selling such a cheap device has attracted scrutiny along with the publicity. The prototype Freedom 251 presented to the media turned out to be produced by another manufacturer with its logos covered. Thwarted buyers protested outside the company’s headquarters, setting off inquiries by the police and tax officials. Pankaj Mahindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association, with members including Apple and Samsung, said “We are concerned and keeping a close watch.”

• Another Tesla crash is under investigation to see if Autopilot is at fault: U.S. transportation regulators are opening a new probe of a Tesla car crash, one week afterannouncing an investigation into a fatal crash of a Tesla operating in the company’s semi-autonomous driving mode. The new investigation involves a non-fatal crash on July 1 in Pennsylvania. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will try to determine if the Tesla’s Autopilot functions were active at the time. The additional investigation will likely intensify scrutiny around the safety and design of Tesla’s Autopilot product, which provides some self-driving features as a software update. 

• Zomato's Results: For the year ending March 2016, Zomato posted revenues of Rs 87.5 crore for the India region, up from Rs 46 crore revenues in 2015. India accounted for 47.3% of Zomato's overall revenues that stood at 184.97 crore for FY16. The net loss for the India region however shot up to Rs 247 crore for the fiscal, up more than three times from Rs 62.3 crore loss in 2015. This is nearly half of Zomato's overall net loss of Rs 574.5 crore in FY16.In the US market that accounts for nearly 50% of its listings, the Gurugram-based company posted a net loss of Rs 327.5 crore on revenues of Rs 6.73 crore for the fiscal. This is a massive increase from Rs 33 crore on revenues of Rs 5.1 crore in 2015. Zomato had forayed into United States last year with the $52 million UrbanSpoon acquisition that was eventually folded into the company.In terms of segments, Online advertising still dominates Zomato's revenues, accounting for 91.4% of the company's overall revenues. The segment's revenues grew by 76.1% to Rs 169.1 crore for FY16, from Rs 96 crore in FY15. Revenues from online ordering was at Rs 7.5 crore for the fiscal, accounting for nearly 4% of the company's revenues. Goyal had recently said that 20% of its India revenues came from the ordering business in April this year. Subscription revenues grew to Rs 8.4 crore from Rs 0.64 crore in 2015. This includes revenues from its business app from restaurants and its Whitelabel platform among others.

• Apple Drops to Fifth in China’s Mobile Market as Locals Rise: Apple Inc. dropped to fifth place in Chinese smartphone shipments, losing ground in its biggest overseas market in a fresh blow for the technology giant. IPhones made up 10.8 percent of devices sold in May, down from 12 percent a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. By comparison, Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies Co. increased its lead with 17.3 percent. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has publicly touted the importance of China, where the company is combating a slowing domestic economy and local vendors with increasingly popular devices. The launch of the cheaper iPhone SE was meant to boost Apple’s popularity in developing markets and Cook met with China’s vice premier Liu Yandong in May. Instead, it has suffered commercial, legal and regulatory setbacks in recent months leading to lawsuits and key products getting shut down. Local brands Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi are now the top four smartphone makers in China with a combined market share of 53 percent, according to Counterpoint research director Neil Shah. Oppo almost doubled its market share to 11 percent. Apple’s sales in Greater China, which also includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, fell 26 percent during the March quarter compared to a year earlier, amid a slowing market.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 4

• Uber enables global e-hailing through Alipay to fend against Lyft/Didi alliance: Starting today, Uber riders from China won’t have to worry about language barriers or currency when traveling outside of the country. Now, riders will be able to pay for and hail a ride in the Alipay app in the more than 400 cities in which Uber operates. It’s an extension of Uber’s existing partnership with the company, which initially only allowed passengers in China to pay for their rides using Alipay. The move comes just a few weeks after Lyft and China’s Didi launched a similar integration that allows Didi riders to hail a Lyft in the U.S. using the Didi Chuxing (formerly Didi Kuaidi) app, and vice versa. That partnership is part of a larger global ride-hail alliance that also includes South East Asia’s Grab and India’s Ola. The clear winner in this entire situation is Alipay’s affiliate company, Alibaba. That’s because the Chinese e-commerce company is playing both sides of the fence — Alibaba is an investor in both Didi and Lyft, and Ant Financial, which operates Alipay, has had this partnership with Uber since 2014. It’s certainly true that Alibaba has a higher stake in Lyft and Didi beating out Uber, but the transportation industry isn’t a zero-sum game. Since there’s room for both sides to coexist, Alibaba can afford to put bets on Didi and Lyft, and Uber too. But Alipay may be playing favorites. According to company SVP of business Emil Michael, Uber will be the primary featured transportation app on Alipay’s platform outside of the U.S. Alipay is essentially promoting Uber to its 450 million users.

• Instagram is selling a new type of video ad: Instagram has been pushing users to create more video content. Now it’s pushing advertisers to create more video ads. Instagram announced Tuesday that it will soon roll out video carousel ads, a move that will let advertisers share up to five separate videos with one single ad purchase. Each video can be up to 60 seconds long. Instagram already sells carousel ads, the kinds of ads that let users swipe between different pages (often called cards). But video functionality wasn’t available until now. The change aligns with Instagram’s conscious push into video more broadly, a strategy reminiscent of Facebook’s video push a few years back. Instagram is adding video featuresand making video more prominent in search in hopes users will watch more of it. It’s essentially feeding people what it wants them to consume — and video can be good business. If users expect to see videos when they open Instagram, then video ads, which are typically more lucrative than static ads, won’t feel out of place. These new video ads are now in beta and will roll out to all advertisers in the “coming weeks,” according to a company spokesperson.

• Amazon, Web Giants Shift to Report Real Cost of Equity Pay: For more than a decade, technology companies doled out heaps of stock to recruit top talent -- then pretended this wasn’t a normal part of doing business by reporting profit numbers that subtracted the cost. That’s changing as the industry grows up and responds to pressure from regulators and investors. Amazon.com Inc. started breaking out stock-based compensation in the results of its different businesses in the first quarter. This is “the way we now evaluate our business performance and manage our operations,” Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts after the earnings report last week. Facebook Inc. Chief Financial Officer David Wehner had a similar message. From now on, he said he’ll talk about the social network’s results and other metrics based on U.S. standards known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, which include equity-based pay costs, instead of a mix of GAAP and non-GAAP numbers. “We view it as a real expense,” he said. Some technology companies, such as Netflix Inc. and Intel Corp., already take this approach, but many don’t. If the shift to focusing on the real bottom line catches on more broadly, it could slice billions of dollars off the reported profits and official forecasts that underpin the technology sector’s lofty market valuations. Facebook stock trades at about 35 times estimated earnings over the next 12 months. Add in equity compensation expense and that price-to-earnings ratio jumps to 50, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analysis. Amazon would trade at 122 times projected profit, rather than a multiple of 63. Using GAAP numbers, Alphabet Inc. would trade at 26 times forecast profit, versus 21 times, Bernstein estimates. The change also highlights the struggles of smaller Internet companies like Twitter Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. to generate GAAP earnings. Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet may have high stock valuations, but they are also very profitable by GAAP and non-GAAP measures. Twitter shares trade at about 36 times estimated profit, but including stock-based compensation analysts expect it to have a loss over the next 12 months, Bernstein research shows. “Some companies have been egregious with stock compensation,” Fish said, citing LinkedIn, which has relatively high equity-based pay compared to its revenue and earnings. LinkedIn shares have declined 44 percent this year, while rival social network Facebook is up 13 percent.

• Google, Fiat Chrysler to partner on self-driving minivans: Alphabet Inc's Google unit and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV have agreed to work together to build a fleet of 100 self-driving minivans in the most advanced collaboration to date between Silicon Valley and a traditional carmaker, the companies said Tuesday. The deal marks the first time that Google has worked directly with an automaker "to integrate its self-driving system, including its sensors and software, into a passenger vehicle," the companies said in a statement on Tuesday. Google and Fiat Chrysler engineers will work together to fit Google's autonomous driving technology into the Pacifica minivan. Some engineers for both companies will work together at a facility in Southeast Michigan, where Fiat Chrysler has its major North American engineering center, the companies said. Google said it is not sharing proprietary self-driving vehicle technology with Fiat Chrysler, however, and the vehicles will not be offered for sale to the public. The agreement between Google and Fiat Chrysler comes as rival technology and auto companies are accelerating efforts to master the complex hardware and artificial intelligence systems required to allow vehicles to pilot themselves.

• Match Group revenue beats as Tinder attracts more paid users: Dating website operator Match Group Inc reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue on Tuesday, as its popular dating app Tinder attracted more paying users. The company's shares rose 7.3 percent to $11.98 in after-hours trading. Match Group, which also owns Match.com and OkCupid, gets bulk of its revenue from membership fees and paid features. The company said its average paid-member count jumped 36 percent to 5.1 million in the first quarter ended March 31, also helped by the acquisition of PlentyOfFish. Match Group, majority owned by media mogul Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, agreed to buy Vancouver-based PlentyOfFish for $575 million in July last year. Tinder surpassed 1 million paid members during the quarter. The Dallas-based company's dating business, its biggest, which includes apps such as Tinder, recorded a 24 percent rise in revenue to $260.4 million. Total revenue rose 21.4 percent to $285.3 million. Revenue from the company's non-dating business, which includes educational websites Princeton Review and Tutor.com, was flat at $24.9 million. Up to Tuesday's close of $11.16, Match Group's shares had fallen 7 percent since the company went public in November.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 4

• Tesla says Model 3 orders top $10 billion in first 36 hours: Tesla Motors said orders for its new Model 3 electric sedan topped 253,000 in the first 36 hours -- a fast start for the company's first mass-market vehicle, which may not begin to reach customers for another 18 months or more. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that the Model 3, which is slated to go into production in late 2017, will sell at an average price of $42,000, including the price of options and additional features, which would give the initial flurry of orders an estimated retail value of $10.6 billion. That intense interest, fanned in part by a steady stream of tweets by Musk, could help boost Tesla's stock price, which closed Friday at $237.59, up 3.4 percent. The stock has soared more than 60 percent since hitting a 12-month low in February. The car's average selling price projected by Musk is well above the $35,000 base price. Analysts earlier had estimated the first Model 3s off the factory line in Fremont, California, could be loaded with extra equipment and sell for $50,000 to$60,000. Tesla has undertaken a costly expansion of the Fremont plant, aiming to boost annual capacity to 500,000 by 2020, with production of the Model 3, the company's first mass-market car, ramping up slowly through 2019. Some analysts said the company could have trouble filling all the initial Model 3 orders, which are accompanied by a refundable $1,000 deposit, until 2020. Barclays analyst Brian Johnson on Friday said the heavy influx of Model 3 orders "sets the stage for an equity offering" later this year by Tesla, much of which would go toward factory construction and product development.

• China’s Companies Poised to Take Leap in Developing a Driverless Car: some argue that conditions in China are actually more favorable for quick adoption of driverless cars, in part because of more aggressive support from the national and local governments. And, unlike in the United States, China never fully developed a romance with the open road and car ownership. Car ownership has spiked in China, of course. And in recent years, it has become a middle-class status symbol to own a car. For the ultrawealthy, there are clubs dedicated to Ferraris and Maseratis. But enormous traffic jams in China’s largest cities can make driving a less-than-romantic experience. Why not let a machine built with artificial intelligence inside do the work for you? “It’s not that people are more willing to use the cars in Beijing or Shanghai, it’s that the economic value is much higher in China than in the U.S.,” Mr. Mosquet said, adding that air pollution could be as much a catalyst as bad traffic. Even as American companies like Google and Tesla work on autonomous vehicles, a number of Chinese companies are working on driverless car technology. The Internet company Leshi Internet Information & Technology (better known as Letv) has a driverless car tech unit, and the Chinese carmaker Great Wall Motors has opened a research center in Silicon Valley. The assumed leader in the field in China is the search engine company Baidu, which has been at work on autonomous vehicles since 2013.

• Jeff Bezos just live-tweeted his space company’s latest rocket launch: Opening the doors to his space company to the media for the first time last month, Jeff Bezos said he had kept the company so quiet and secretive for a simple reason: “We’ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.” Now Bezos is talking — and tweeting. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com (and owner of The Washington Post) not only announced ahead of time that his space company would launch a rocket on Saturday, but he live-tweeted it, giving his followers a play-by-play of the event, and a few inside glimpses. Saturday’s liftoff from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas was the third consecutive time the company has launched and landed its reusable New Shepard suborbital vehicle, which consists of a rocket and a capsule designed to take astronauts just past the edge of space. While the company has yet to fly any humans — Bezos said that test flights with humans are probably a year away — it has now demonstrated that its rocket can fly repeatedly. Bezos, and others, believe that is a key step toward lowering the cost of spaceflight, and therefore making it more accessible. Typically the first stages of rockets are discarded after each use. But Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk are developing technologies to land the first stages vertically, using the engine thrust to slow them down. The United Launch Alliance is also working to recover the engines of its new rocket. But in his live-tweeting Saturday, Bezos not only chronicled the launch and landing, but also showed how the company paints a turtle on the capsule to commemorate each successful launch. He even tweeted a picture of a pair of new cowboy boots with the company’s motto printed on them. That motto is “Gradatim Ferociter,” loosely translated to “Step by Step, Ferociously,” which captures the ethos of the company to move methodically toward its goals. That’s also why it uses the symbol of a tortoise, which moved slowly but still crossed the finish line ahead of the hare.

• Apple's Push to Flood India With Used iPhones Ignites Backlash: Apple Inc.’s latest attempt to crack the Indian smartphone market -- by selling used phones -- is meeting a wall of resistance. The iPhone maker is seeking permission to become the first company allowed to import and sell used phones into the country, its second attempt in as many years. This time, the stakes are higher and a growing number of industry executives are fighting the move, warning government officials in private that it’ll open the floodgates to electronic waste, jeopardize local players, and make a farce of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India program to encourage local manufacturing. “Make in India could turn into Dump in India,” said Sudhir Hasija, chairman of Karbonn Mobiles, who said it sells about 1.7 million phones a month. Apple’s application in 2015 was rejected by the environment ministry without much fanfare. But things have changed since: India, as the world’s second largest mobile population, now represents a vast untapped opportunity for Apple just as China and the U.S. are slowing. Apple has publicly talked up its prospects in India and is on course to get the green light to open its first retail stores. Apple now has less than 2 percent of an Indian market in which four-fifths of phones cost less than $150. Branded smartphones are available for as little as $35 in India. Western multinationals from car-makers to soda vendors use “India only” prices and cut-rate “India edition” products to woo customers. Apple can’t employ those strategies without tarnishing its marquee phone’s premium aura.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 1st

• Where's the lane? Self-driving cars confused by shabby U.S. roadways, Volvo CEO is not amused: Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. "It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!" Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings "crazy," complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars. In other developed countries, greater standardization of road signs and markings makes it easier for robot cars to navigate. In the U.S., however, traffic lights can be aligned vertically, horizontally or "dog-house" style in two columns. Pavement markings use paint with different degrees of reflectivity - or don't exist at all. "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose," said Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. "But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails." To make up for roadway aberrations, carmakers and their suppliers are incorporating multiple sensors, maps and data into their cars, all of which adds cost. Mercedes says the "drive pilot" system found in its recently unveiled luxury E Class 2017 sedans works even with no lane markings. The system - which incorporates 23 sensors - takes into account guard rails, barriers, and other cars to keep cars in their lanes up to 84 miles (135km) per hour, under "suitable circumstances." Boston Consulting Group estimates that initial semi-autonomous features add $4,000 to a car's price.

• Facebook’s Live Video Effort Entices Media Companies: When severe weather passed through the Atlanta area early this month, Brad Nitz, a meteorologist for a local television station, WSB-TV, fed viewers live video updates on the station’s website, as he has done for years. But then he did something new: He turned away from the television camera and addressed an iPhone that was streaming him live — on Facebook. And the station’s social media manager, Jonathan Anker, watched this new Facebook audience swell. At its peak, the stream reached 8,800 viewers at once, and the segment has been played more than 77,000 times in total, far more than the station’s typical online audience. The numbers, Mr. Anker said, were “seriously out of whack, in a delightful way.” Experiences like this have media companies swooning over the possibilities of posting live video to Facebook, a feature made widely available two months ago. For years, companies have searched for ways to unlock three tough questions: How do you attract people to live online videos? How do you reach people on their mobile devices? And how do you get more out of Facebook’s 1.6 billion users? Now, they hope, they have found a key for all three. Yet it is also raising some questions inside the companies about if — and when — they will see any meaningful money come from the push. The feature, called Facebook Live, has largely lived under the radar so far. But it is one of the company’s highest-priority projects, according to three people directly involved with the initiative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Internally, Facebook Live is seen as a way to move beyond hosting conversations about television and live events to becoming a venue for both. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has made Facebook Live one of his pet projects, two of the people said, devoting significant resources and effort to the initiative. Facebook plans to announce a suite of new features and partners in early April and at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco later in the month. Facebook, though, has prioritized getting live video in front of as many users as possible. The company has been eager to talk with media companies about getting started with streaming, but remains vague in conversations about revenue sharing or subscription models. It is pushing a build-first, make-money-later philosophy, one that can be frustrating to media partners, particularly those struggling to navigate broader changes in the online media industry. But whatever the frustrations, they are outweighed by the prospect of reaching Facebook’s huge audience.

• LinkedIn Buddies Up Closer to Lynda.com, Adds Course Recommendations Based on Your Career: LinkedIn is finding more ways to pair its professional network with Lynda.com, the online video library it bought for $1.5 billion last April. The most recent integration: LinkedIn is using data around which jobs are most popular among its users to suggest collections of videos that can help train someone interested in that career. If you were interested in becoming a Web designer, for example, Lynda.com could now recommend a collection of classes to help you learn the skills necessary for that job. Some extra revenue would be great news for the company, and would also help justify the $1.5 billion it paid for the video library last year. It’s one of the reasons LinkedIn is also putting Lynda.com courses on Virgin America flights. LinkedIn stock has fallen by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year, and just this week Barclay’s analyst Paul Vogel downgraded the stock over fear of slowing revenue growth. It’s unclear whether a “shopping list” of videos will actually open any wallets, but it certainly can’t hurt.

• Government report details Theranos quality control issues: A government report released late Thursday accuses Theranos of producing inaccurate test results, of failing to meet its own lab standards and hiring unqualified personnel. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service visited Theranos’ main facilities in Newark, California last November and found the one drop blood test startup’s machines produced wildly inaccurate test results – including one for cancer detection, according to a redacted version of the report put out by the Wall Street Journal. The newly released 121-page report, obtained in full by the WSJ details quality control issues – including the failure to meet Theranos own standards. According to the report, erratic test results were frequent when tested in July 2014, and from February to June of 2015 on Theranos’ proprietary blood test machine Edison. One example – a test to measure a hormone affecting testosterone levels failed 87 percent of the time when run on Edison. It is unfathomable Theranos would be allowed to run test results for the public during this time. and these new details provide an inside look at some very real issues surrounding Theranos as a company, particularly around its code-named Edison technology – the supporting reason for the company’s $9 billion valuation.

• Amazon Expands Buttons for Reordering Essentials -- Like Doritos: Amazon.com Inc. is expanding the number of products available for instant re-ordering through its wireless Dash Buttons, citing high customer demand. After last year rolling out the WiFi-connected plastic tabs that can be mounted to the fridge, washing machine or kitchen cupboard, the online retailing giant is increasing the number of brands that can be re-ordered by pushing a button to more than 100, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. Now Amazon Prime customers who suddenly find themselves low on supplies -- from Trojan condoms to Doritos chips, Energizer batteries, Purina dog food and more -- can hit the button to reorder the product and get it delivered for free. The buttons cost $4.99 each, with the cost reimbursed after the first order through Dash. When the buttons were first introduced in March 2015 they were met with some skepticism as to whether people would want or use them. But Amazon said orders placed through Dash have grown by more than 75 percent in the last three months alone and now take place more than once a minute. 

• Inside the Little-Known Japan Firm Helping the FBI Crack iPhones: The little-known Japanese company at the center of a legal tussle between Apple Inc. and the U.S. government over the hacking of an iPhone built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the mobile phone security business almost by accident. Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd. worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected in a terrorist attack, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. Neither Cellebrite nor the FBI have confirmed the link, and a spokesman from parent Sun Corp. on Thursday said the company isn’t able to comment on specific criminal cases. Sun, based in a small town of 100,000 southwest of Tokyo, has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan’s pachinko parlors since the 1970s but has often displayed bigger tech ambitions. The Konan, Aichi-based company developed personal computers in the late 1970s, computer games and more recently, iPhone mahjong apps. In 2007, as sales slumped, Sun acquired Petah Tikva, Israel-based Cellebrite. Cellebrite hadn’t ventured into forensics at the time, and the purchase was mainly to add phone-to-phone data transfer to Sun’s fledgling telecommunications business, said the Japanese company’s spokesman Hidefumi Sugaya. When Cellebrite later took on investigative agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation as clients, the business took off, he said in a telephone interview. Today, the bulk of Sun’s mobile data solutions business comes from Cellebrite, said Sugaya. "Although the FBI didn’t get a legal decision that would require Apple to hack around its own security software, it created a situation where they can go to third parties to do that," said Matt Larson, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. "Companies like Cellebrite may have found a niche industry of assisting the FBI unlock personal devices in select cases moving forward." Cellebrite sells hardware and software for extracting data from hand-held devices, even if it has been encrypted or deleted. It employs more than 500 people and has offices in Israel, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Singapore and the U.K., according to its website.Founded in 1999, Cellebrite was bought by Sun Corp. for a reported $17.5 million. 

• Huawei 2015 revenue jumps 37 percent, strongest in seven years: China's Huawei on Friday posted its strongest revenue growth since 2008 as China's adoption of fourth-generation (4G) mobile technology and strong smartphone sales worldwide boosted sales for one of the world's largest telecom equipment makers. The Shenzhen-based company said global revenue rose 37 percent to 395 billion yuan ($61.10 billion) in 2015, slightly above its forecast of 390 billion yuan. Net profit rose 32 percent to 36.9 billion yuan, from 27.9 billion yuan a year earlier, while operating margins dipped to 11.6 percent from 11.9 percent.Revenue in Huawei's carrier business, which competes with Sweden's Ericsson for the top spot globally for telecommunication equipment, increased 21.4 percent in 2015 on strong demand for 4G telecommunication equipment. In Huawei's enterprise division, which builds private networks for companies and organizations, revenue rose 43.8 percent.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 21

• A beginner’s guide to finally buying a virtual reality headset: if you are interested in being an early adopter,  here's a quick guide of the basics, plus a little input from my experiences with these products. Sony Playstation VR (PS VR) Buy if: You have a PlayStation already, or are looking to make a slightly smaller investment. Oculus Rift: After a long wait, Oculus opened preorders for the Rift headset, the first of which are expected to arrive at the end of March. The Rift is due to hit store shelves in April. Buy if: You want a stellar experience over everything else. Oculus was the first really big name to come out of the VR space and has probably done the most to minimize motion sickness. Samsung Gear VR: Powered by Oculus's technology and Samsung's smartphones, the Gear VR was first released in 2015 and is getting a renewed PR push with the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. Buy if: You're really watching your budget and are happy with some smaller-scale experiences. HTC Vive: The product of a partnership between Taiwanese tech giant HTC and the video game company Valve, the HTC Vive is due to ship its first orders in April. Buy if: You really want an early version of a Star Trek-style Holodeck and have the room to make one.

• Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source: Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source said on Friday. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet. Earlier on Friday, Germany's Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies. The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality. Auto industry executives are wary of doing deals with newcomers from the technology and software business who threaten to upend established business models based on manufacturing and selling cars. "We don't want to end up like Nokia's handset business, which was once hugely profitable...then disappeared," a second auto industry source said about doing a deal with Uber. A key hurdle to driverless cars has been the question of liability in the event of an accident. Most countries are signatories to the 1968 United Nations Convention on Road Traffic which stipulates that a person, rather than a computer, must be in control of a vehicle. In February this year, U.S. vehicle safety regulators softened the rules to allow driverless cars, by saying an artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

• How real businesses are using machine learning: There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I’ve heard that old joke “Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it” about 20 times in the past week alone.But from where I sit, running a company that enables a huge number of real-world machine-learning projects, it’s clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. So where is it happening? Here are a few behind-the-scenes applications that make life better every day. Making user-generated content valuable: The average piece of user-generated content (UGC) is awful. It’s actually way worse than you think. It can be rife with misspellings, vulgarity or flat-out wrong information. But by identifying the best and worst UGC, machine-learning models can filter out the bad and bubble up the good without needing a real person to tag each piece of content. Pinterest uses machine learning to show you more interesting content. Yelp uses machine learning to sort through user-uploaded photos. NextDoor uses machine learning to sort through content on their message boards. Disqus uses machine learning to weed out spammy comments. Finding products faster: Successful e-commerce startups from Lyst to Trunk Archive employ machine learning to show high-quality content to their users. Other startups, like Rich Relevance and Edgecase, employ machine-learning strategies to give their commerce customers the benefits of machine learning when their users are browsing for products. Engaging with customers: You may have noticed “contact us” forms getting leaner in recent years. That’s another place where machine learning has helped streamline business processes. Instead of having users self-select an issue and fill out endless form fields, machine learning can look at the substance of a request and route it to the right place. Understanding customer behavior: Machine learning also excels at sentiment analysis. And while public opinion can sometimes seem squishy to non-marketing folks, it actually drives a lot of big decisions. For example, say a movie studio puts out a trailer for a summer blockbuster. They can monitor social chatter to see what’s resonating with their target audience, then tweak their ads immediately to surface what people are actually responding to - that puts people in theaters.
  
  
• Why unicorns falter: In early February 2016, a study of financing deals reported by The Wall Street Journal found that investors are increasingly protecting themselves from IPOs that don’t perform as expected. This fallout is a continuation of the demise of the so-called “unicorn,” a tech startup with a pre-IPO valuation of over one billion dollars. As these companies secure late-stage funding before their public market exit, smart private investors are setting terms that ensure they don’t lose a dime if the IPO falls short of expectations. This comes at a great cost to the startup if the exit doesn’t deliver, as was the case for many of the IPOs of 2015. The unicorn investment cycle has been consuming the growth ramp of an IPO-bound company. Unlike previous eras when a public exit occurred earlier in the company’s growth, leaving the best days ahead of the company, the fastest growth for an IPO-bound startup now happens in the last funding rounds before an IPO. This leaves a 20-30 percent growth rate post-IPO, which is pretty good for a company at $100-$200 million/year revenue, but bad for anyone looking for greater than 2X ROI from an IPO investment. Addressing these issues requires a little course correction as companies work toward an IPO. To ensure ample room for future growth, a startup should be careful not to push its market cap too high by taking more funding rounds than needed during the growth-stage period before IPO. This can be a challenge because funding often generates media interest and credibility, which are certainly not things a young company wants to leave on the table. However, leaving a portion of its growth for the IPO will ensure that the company has enough runway to continue to grow and deliver for its public market investors, just as the company has done for its VCs. Otherwise, you create yet another unicorn where the late-stage investors garner all the potential gains, and even force guarantees on returns. This is bad for new investors in the open market, and worse for the employees of the company who only receive poor post-lockup stock performance as compensation for years of hard work and sacrifices.

• Facebook's Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive: Facebook's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met China's propaganda tsar Liu Yunshan in Beijing on Saturday as part of a charm offensive in one of the few markets where the social network cannot be accessed. The rare meeting, reported by China's state news agency Xinhua, suggests warming relations between Facebook and the Chinese government, even as Beijing steps up censorship of and control over the Internet. Liu, who sits on the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee which is the apex of power in China, praised Facebook's technology and management methods, Xinhua said. Zuckerberg was in Beijing for the China Development Forum, a government-sponsored conference bringing together top business executives and the country's ruling elite. China "hopes (Facebook) can strengthen exchanges, share experiences and improve mutual understanding with China's Internet companies", Xinhua quoted Liu as telling Zuckerberg. On Friday, Zuckerberg posted an image of himself running through smog in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, past the portrait of the late Chairman Mao Zedong hanging over the Forbidden City. The 31-year-old has achieved celebrity status in China, one of the few markets where Facebook and other foreign Internet platforms, including Alphabet Inc's Google services and Twitter Inc, are not available due to tight government controls. He has long sought to improve his company's relationship with the Chinese authorities, and now sits on the advisory board of the School of Economics and Management at China's elite Tsinghua University.

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Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 1st,

• Souq, Online Retailer in Middle East, Gets a $275 Million Boost:  Souq.com, an online retailer based in the United Arab Emirates, said on Monday that it had raised $275 million from international investors. It was a vote of confidence for digital commerce in the Middle East, which has made little headway compared with elsewhere. Souq, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, was founded in 2005 on an eBay-like online auction model, but it subsequently evolved into more of an Amazon-style set-price retailer. It has been a rare success story in a region where online businesses face logistical problems, political challenges, stifling bureaucracy and regulations that vary greatly from country to country. Souq’s latest round of funding included money from the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management, as well as from Standard Chartered Private Equity and the International Finance Corporation, which is an arm of the World Bank. Souq, which means market in Arabic, did not provide details on what the funding round meant for its overall valuation, and it has not released details on its annual sales or profit. The $275 million funding round was, however, the largest ever disclosed by a technology start-up in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Wamda, a research firm based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. Even after multiple fund-raising rounds, the Jabbar Internet Group — which sold Maktoob, a news site, to Yahoo for more than $150 million in 2009 — still holds a majority stake. Souq, now the largest online retailer in the Arab world, ships hundreds of thousands of products across the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also has operations in Egypt.

• For the first time, Google’s self-driving car takes some blame for a crash: A Google self-driving car sideswiped a bus this month, the first blemish on the otherwise spotless driving record of the company’s vehicles. Google’s 53 vehicles have driven more than 1.4 million miles autonomously and been in 17 crashes, but never been at fault before. The crash took place at 3:20 p.m. Feb. 14, about three miles from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google’s car was attempting to make a right-hand turn on red, and moved to the right side of a wide lane on El Camino Real to pass traffic stopped at the light. But as Google’s car neared the intersection of Castro Street, its path was blocked by sandbags around a storm drain, according to a report Google filed with the California DMV. Google’s car tried to go around the sandbags by cutting into the line of vehicles on the left side of the lane. Instead, it struck a metal piece connecting the two halves of an accordion-style bus, according to a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority spokeswoman. Google said its car was going less than 2 mph and the bus was moving at 15 mph. Both parties said there were no injuries and described the crash as minor. The 15 passengers on the bus were transferred to another bus following the accident. Google characterized the crash as a misunderstanding and a learning experience, saying its cars will learn that large vehicles are less likely to yield than other types of vehicles.

• This Water Pitcher Orders New Filters From Amazon Using Wi-Fi. It Could Be the Future of Shopping. The future often seems silly in the present. Case in point: Brita’s new “smart” water pitcher. The “device” is indeed primarily a water pitcher, designed — you know — to clean and hold water. But the pitcher, which goes on sale today on Amazon, does something else that helps explain why Brita is charging $45 for it, compared to $20 to $32 for other Brita pitchers that hold the same amount of water. It connects to the Internet and senses when a given filter has purified all the water it was meant to, after about 40 gallons. It then pings Amazon.com and automatically orders a new $5.99 filter for delivery. Call it programmatic commerce, and expect it to be around for a long time. The partnership between Brita and Amazon is part of a bigger initiative at Amazon dubbed the Dash Replenishment System. The goal is to allow products like water pitchers, computer printers and pet food dispensers automatically to order related, necessary items from Amazon without a human lifting a finger (after a one-time setup). At a higher level, it fits perfectly into Amazon’s ongoing mission to shrink the time between wanting and buying. What started with one-click purchasing has escalated to Wi-Fi connected physical buttons to order mac and cheese, reordering items by talking to the Amazon Echo speaker and now filter-summoning pitchers.

• Raspberry Pi 3 Launches — 50% Faster, With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth And An Eye On IoT: A major new Raspberry Pi microprocessor has been announced today: the Pi 3 Model B board becomes the new top-of-the-line Pi, with a 64bit 1.2GHz quad-core chipset and 1GB RAM it’s being slated to offer a 50 per cent power bump over the Pi 2. But is still priced at just $35 — the original Model B Pi price-tag, four years on from its debut. Round about this time last year the Pi Foundation launched the 900Mhz quad-core Pi 2 — which was 6x faster than the then top-of-the-Pi-line Model B+ board, and dubbed an affordable “entry-level PC”. Also priced at $35. The Foundation is touting the Pi 3 as opening up “even more possibilities for IoT and embedded projects”. Speaking to the BBC, Pi founder Eben Upton said: “This is the first Pi you can stick behind your TV and completely forget about.” “The two main things that people do with their Pi are use it as a PC replacement or use it as an embedded computer,” he added. “The Pi 3 is doubling down on both those things rather than going looking for new things to do.” The really big deal here is the inclusion of built in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. The Pi 2 had Ethernet but makers wanting the board to support wireless connectivity had to add a wi-fi or Bluetooth dongle. The Pi 3 removes the need to buy wireless add-ons, so it’s being positioned for out-of-the-box IoT development and as a powerful IoT hub that can link together multiple in-home connected devices. Back in November, the Pi Foundation launched another new board: the single core 1GHz Pi Zero delivers a lot less on the processing performance front and lacks on-board connectivity options (a wi-fi dongle can be plugged into its micro-USB port) but it costs just $5 — a price-point that’s clearly targeting makers wanting to build individual IoT/connected devices. The more powerful and well connected Pi 3 doubles down on the growth in IoT devices the Pi Zero was seeking to encourage — following on from the Pi 2, which was capable of running a version of Microsoft Windows that’s designed to support IoT apps (aka Windows 10 IoT; formerly called Windows Embedded). At a launch event today the Foundation said it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full compatibility between the new Pi 3 board and Windows 10 IoT.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 10, 2016

• Amazon Building Global Delivery Business to Take On Alibaba: In recent weeks, speculation has mounted that Amazon.com Inc. plans to launch a global shipping and logistics operation that will compete with United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.Asked about reports that the company was leasing planes and had registered an ocean freight booking business, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky downplayed Amazon’s ambitions last month in an earnings call. He said the company was simply looking to supplement its delivery partners -- not replace them -- during peak periods like the Christmas shopping season. Amazon documents reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal a far bolder plan.A 2013 report to Amazon’s senior management team proposed an aggressive global expansion of the company’s Fulfillment By Amazon service, which provides storage, packing and shipping for independent merchants selling products on the company’s website. The report envisioned a global delivery network that controls the flow of goods from factories in China and India to customer doorsteps in Atlanta, New York and London. The project, called Dragon Boat, is proceeding, according to a person familiar with the initiative, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The ambitious strategy promises to turn FedEx and UPS into Amazon rivals, but also will pit the Seattle giant against Chinese counterpart Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Both companies are vying for dominance of the rapidly growing cross-border e-commerce market, which by 2020 is expected to swell into a $1 trillion industry serving 900 million shoppers, according to a June report from Accenture and AliResearch, Alibaba’s research arm. Amazon’s plan would culminate with the launch of a new venture called “Global Supply Chain by Amazon,” as soon as this year, the documents said. The new business will locate Amazon at the center of a logistics industry that involves not just shippers like FedEx and UPS but also legions of middlemen who handle cargo and paperwork associated with transnational trade. Amazon wants to bypass these brokers, amassing inventory from thousands of merchants around the world and then buying space on trucks, planes and ships at reduced rates. Merchants will be able to book cargo space online or via mobile devices, creating what Amazon described as a “one click-ship for seamless international trade and shipping.”

• Federal Government Will Treat Google’s Driverless Car System as a Legal Driver: Google’s robot just got its driver’s license. On Tuesday, the federal agency that sets road rules — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — released a letter to the Internet giant that supports its interpretation of a driverless system as legally adequate for roadways, a key victory for the critical initiative within Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Previously, the NHTSA only considered humans as drivers under law, because that’s how cars worked until Google came along. Now the agency has said it will consider Google’s self-driving system a driver, too. The letter came in response to a November petition from Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving car project. Urmson argued that regulators should treat Google’s homemade cars, built without a steering wheel and brakes, on par with human drivers. It’s been a persistent sticking point for the Google unit, particularly after California issued draft autonomous vehicle rules expressly prohibiting driverless cars. Ensuring that its driverless fleet has regulatory approval to get on the roads is critical to Google’s car strategy.

• Public Markets Are Sending Some Ominous Signals to Private Tech Companies: After years of rapidly growing valuations and additions to the "Unicorn" club, a number of private companies have seen their valuations take dramatic cuts. From Foursquare Labs Inc. raising funds at a roughly $250 million valuation versus a former round in 2013 at $600 million, to Fidelity writing down its Snapchat Inc. holding, there's a lot of interest in where private tech companies might be valued right now. One way to think about private tech valuations is to look at publicly-traded entities that might reasonably seen as proxies. Here's a few examples: The Bloomberg IPO index tracks the performance of companies during their first year of trading, and it has certainly taken a tumble. Cracks began to show late in 2015 as many of them fell below their IPO price. Charlie Bilello, Director of Research at Pension Partners, pointed out just how rare the positive performance of Facebook Inc. actually is, with firms like Groupon Inc., Etsy Inc., Twitter Inc., GoPro Inc., and LendingClub Corp. all down more than 40 percent from their offering price. The index is down 30 percent over the past year and 36 percent from recent highs. One company to keep an eye on is SVB Financial Group, which is the holding company for Silicon Valley Bank. This commercial bank serves emerging and middle-market growth companies in the fields of technology and life sciences.You could see it as a gauge of red-hot tech since it has done business with Pinterest, BuzzFeed, and others. Shares are down 43 percent from recent highs and 31 percent over the past year.

• SolarCity Beats Q4 Estimates, But Stock Plunges 30 Percent On Soft Outlook: SolarCity, which is down more than 50 percent over the past year, just released its Q4 2015 earnings. The market has reacted negatively, with the stock trading down about 30 percent after-hours at a price of around $17.50 per-share. While Q4 revenue of $115M and loss of $2.37 per share beat estimates of $111M in revenue and a loss of $2.59 per share, the company’s Q1 2016 forecast was lower than expected. Additionally, the company missed its quarterly installation estimates for Q4, installing 272 MW, below the guidance of 280 MW – 300 MW. In its shareholder letter, SolarCity said they expect to install 180 MW of solar panels in Q1 2016, which represents 18 percent year-over-year growth, but a 34 percent decline compared to the previous quarter. While some seasonal slowdown for Q1 is normal, the company said that this estimate reflects a “higher-than-usual” seasonal slowdown.

• GitHub Updates Its Enterprise Product With Clustering Support, Updated Design: GitHub Enterprise, the company’s on-premises solution for managing code, is getting a major update today. It comes at a time when there seems to be some upheaval in the company around the importance management has been putting on this product. The marquee feature of GitHub Enterprise 2.5 is support for clustering. With this, businesses can now set up a cluster of GitHub Enterprise servers that act as a single installation, enabling it to support significantly larger teams. “With GitHub Enterprise 2.5 more users can be enabled on one system as teams grow,” Kakul Srivastava, GitHub’s VP of Product, tells me. “We have customers with tens of thousands of developers who need to be able to work together, and this is really important functionality to enable them to do this in a scalable way.” She also noted that clustering doesn’t currently come at an additional cost to GitHub’s enterprise users. This new version also includes interface improvements with updated designs for everything from log-in screens to the look and feel of the GitHub repositories. This brings GitHub’s enterprise product in line with its hosted version. Also new in this version is improved Subversion support — for those who aren’t using git as their version control system — as well as an API for managing protected branches (that is, branches developers can neither delete nor force-push their code to). This new API is currently in preview.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 23

• Elon Musk's SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket After Launch of Satellites Into Orbit: People living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida have for decades enjoyed the spectacle of rockets headed for space. On Monday night, they were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing. “It really felt like it was right on top of us,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX for short, said during a telephone news conference afterward. For SpaceX, the 8:29 p.m. liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was a threefold success. First, it marked the company’s return to flight after half a year. In SpaceX’s last launch attempt, a rocket taking supplies to the International Space Station disintegrated. Second, SpaceX’s upgraded design for its Falcon 9 rocket worked flawlessly. The liquid oxygen was chilled to minus 340 degrees Fahrenheit, about 40 degrees colder than on earlier flights, and the kerosene fuel was cooled to 20 degrees instead of 70 degrees. Most significant to SpaceX’s ambitions, however, is that after the second stage of the rocket with the satellites continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around, back to Cape Canaveral. Currently, most rockets are launched just once, the boosters falling back to Earth as expensive junk. Making spaceflight more like air travel, with rockets capable of being refueled and sent up again, is essential for SpaceX’s long-term goal of sending people to Mars. “It’s all the difference in the world,” Mr. Musk said, “absolutely fundamental.”

• Google, Ford in talks on self-driving car partnership: source: Google and Ford Motor Co are in talks about forming a partnership to develop autonomous car technology, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. The extent of a partnership between the second-largest U.S. automaker and search engine giant Alphabet Inc remains under discussion and the precise framework of any effort is unclear but it could include jointly building and developing cars. The two sides have been talking for months, the source said. A partnership between a major automaker and Google could speed the introduction of self-driving vehicles by giving the car company access to Google's wealth of software development while Google would benefit from the industrial and automotive know-how of a firm such as Ford. Fully autonomous cars could eventually prevent thousands of crashes, deaths and injuries, reduce oil use through better traffic management and extend personal mobility to people unable to drive.

• Jet.com Misses Last-Minute Christmas Sales and Shows Downside of Its Model: The heavily funded e-commerce startup began notifying customers 10 days before Christmas that it could not guarantee delivery by the holiday, citing “nationwide shipping delays that have affected many of our shipping partners.” On December 16, Jet.com added an alert to the top of its homepage. The company has still been guaranteeing two-day delivery for items it ships out of its own warehouses, but those are mostly household goods like toilet paper, detergent and packaged groceries that are typically not bought as gifts.While Jet.com is less than six months old, the incident highlights one big downside of its current model compared to Amazon’s. Jet’s pitch is that its large network of warehousing partners helps it choose the most efficient way to fulfill an order, thus stripping out excess costs and passing along discounts of 5 percent to 10 percent to shoppers if they order multiple items at once. But the model also means Jet doesn’t currently have as much control over the experience shoppers have after they complete a purchase for a large number of orders. Some items on Amazon also come from someone else’s warehouse. But Amazon can still guarantee two-day shipping on more than 20 million items through Amazon Prime, thanks to its huge Fulfillment by Amazon program that lets merchants store goods with Amazon for a fee.

• Google Calls Its New Ad Option for App Developers 'an Install-Seeking Machine' Google says developers running "universal app campaigns" across its network are finding them to be more cost-effective than ads run than other digital platforms. The Adwords-based campaign option, which Google introduced in September, allows developers to run a campaign across Google search, YouTube, Google Play store and the Google Display network. A developer designates a target cost per install and budget, and then Google automates where across its platforms the promos should go."Basically, think of it as an install-seeking machine," Anthony Chavez, Google's product management director for mobile ads and Universal App Campaigns, told Adweek. As an example, Google pointed to Sparkpeople, which has 15 million users in the U.S. and Canada for its fitness and dieting apps and has been testing the sytem. Joe Robb, the digital marketing director for the company, said that while the cost per install has been slightly higher than he expected, his team is still spending between 30 and 50 percent less than they do on Facebook. The campaign is also now driving about 20 percent of the company's total downloads.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 21

• Amazon in talks to lease Boeing jets to launch air-cargo business: report: Amazon.com is negotiating to lease 20 Boeing Co (BA.N) 767 jets to start its own air-delivery service next month, seeking to avoid delays from third-party carriers, the Seattle Times reported, citing cargo-industry executives. Amazon has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up the planes, the newspaper reported on Friday, citing a senior aircraft-leasing company executive familiar with matter.

• Alibaba Heads Into 2016 Struggling With Knock-Off Reputation: Cash-strapped Star Wars fans can pick up Darth Vader figurines and light sabers for as little as $4.59. Tom Brady jerseys go for about a 10th of those on the National Football League’s store. A pair of red Beats Solo headphones can be had for just $107 -- about half its official price. It’s bargains galore at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao: the EBay-like bazaar where buyers meet up with sellers. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma is struggling to shake the company’s reputation as a haven for cheap knock-offs and unauthorized merchandise, 21 months after calling counterfeits cancerous. He heads into 2016 after a bruising year that saw more than $50 billion wiped off its market value amid lawsuits and criticism from Chinese and U.S. regulators. Cleaning up its image next year is crucial to Alibaba’s goal of winning the trust of merchants and shoppers overseas, from where Jack Ma wants to get more than half the company’s revenue within a decade. A cooling Chinese economy makes that effort even more pressing. At home, JD.com Inc. is winning customers partly because it holds the inventory itself and sells directly to consumers, similar to Amazon, a business model easier to police and regulate, said Michelle Ma, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “By now, management should have eliminated this problem,” said Cyrus Mewawalla, managing director of London-based CM Research. “The fact that they haven’t is a worrying sign forinvestors.”

• Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation: Last year, as the deadly and highly contagious Ebola virus threatened to spread around the globe, Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up, was scrambling to find a test that could quickly detect if a person was infected. This was exactly the sort of thing the company was supposed to do. Its fundamental promise was to revolutionize laboratory testing by offering hundreds of different blood tests that could be done through a simple finger stick for a fraction of the cost of typical lab blood work. More than that, Elizabeth Holmes, who started the company in 2003, had a higher-minded purpose. She also wanted to defeat epidemics. The company devoted significant resources to the Ebola effort. “We stopped everything for Ebola — for the world,” says Richard Kovacevich, the former chief executive of Wells Fargo, who joined Theranos as a director in 2013. And then, nothing. Even as other companies received approval from regulators, Theranos watched from the sidelines. “I have no doubt we would have” gotten the green light for the tests, Mr. Kovacevich said. But the crisis ebbed, and the company says getting approval for that test is no longer a priority. Now, after a surprise inspection last summer, the Food and Drug Administration is requiring that Theranos’s equipment and individual tests go through the regulatory process and get approval. This will determine whether its foundational technology is a reality — or, like that Ebola test, an unfulfilled grand promise. While Theranos says it has conducted millions of tests, largely through a partnership with Walgreens, the drugstore chain, no one from outside Theranos has ever verified the technology. Institutions whose names were often linked with Theranos, like the Cleveland Clinic, insist they have not yet had a chance to use the technology. It has struggled to forge business relationships with other potential partners, like Safeway.

• Twitter Stock Closes at an All-Time Low: Twitter stock fell 4 percent Thursday, finishing the session at $23.31, the lowest the stock has ever closed. Yahoo Finance lists the stock’s 52-week low at $21.01, but that was during intra-day trading back in August (the stock closed at $25.17 that day). The stock market was crummy in general on Thursday. But it has also been a tough quarter for Twitter, which has dropped 11 percent since Jack Dorsey was named CEO back in early October. Twitter announced last week that it would finally start showing ads to its logged-out audience, which created a nice stock spike, but it’s clear that investors are looking for more.

• Waze Could Be Google’s Ace in the Hole in a Self-Driving Car War With Uber: It’s 2025. You’re in a big city and have somewhere to be. Fire up an app and an autonomous car — with a driver at the wheel or maybe without one — picks you up. Odds are good the company behind that car will be Uber or Google. The two are set to vie for the reigning position as the transit service platform of the future. Uber has advantages — for one, its name is becoming the verb for ride-hailing, the way Google’s has for search. But Google has the mobile platform, the lead in self-driving tech and deeper pockets. It has another edge: Deep ties with local governments, critical players in making autonomous vehicles a reality. This proximity is thanks to Waze, the mapping startup Google bought in 2013, which has invested heavily in building data-sharing agreements with cities around the world. If autonomous cars are going to work, there needs to be tight coordination of transit data between governments and private companies. Before you can hail a self-driving car, there’ll likely need to be a host of things (designated lanes, re-zonings, ordinances) that let it drive itself. Then there is the planning to ensure they drive effectively. That’s why Google has cut data deals with its flagship mapping product, and why Uber is scrambling to build similar programs. Waze is, from what we can tell, ahead. In its program, called the Connected Citizens Program, Waze hands over info reported by its users, like accidents and road closures, to urban governments free of charge. It has cut deals with 51 cities worldwide; they get fresh data from the app’s users every two minutes. For cities, the program gives them timely, unprecedented data that helps manage traffic flows, safety and (ideally) costs. In Boston, a city not known for its sober traffic design, officials are using Waze data to measure the impact of their planning changes. “We heard that traffic improved anecdotally,” said Connor McKay, a data scientist for the city. “Now we can say that, quantitatively, traffic has improved.” In return, cities give Waze their own traffic data. (This is why you may see some Uber drivers using Waze to get around.) Accurate road information is critical to making self-driving cars work — hence, Uber hurriedly pouring its investor stockpile into a mapping operation. The ballooning ride-hailing startup has had less success currying favor with city officials. It has proved it can get its way in cities, but usually after some messy standoffs. This summer, Waze rolled out its first flirtation with Uber’s turf: A trial in Tel Aviv that lets Waze users pick up passengers along their commute routes. It has since expanded to a few suburbs around the city. A Waze rep would only share that the Google unit is “quite pleased with the results.” Waze also insists that its trial is not like Uber — drivers aren’t making money, and the program is framed as a way for cities to tackle congestion problems. It’s a key framing. When governments begin to approach autonomy, they are likely to turn to tech partners they know best.

• How Intelligent Lighting Is Ushering In The Internet Of Buildings:  The LED revolution is over. To no one’s surprise, LEDs have won. Solid-state lighting is changing how we light the world, successfully displacing traditional illumination sources across every part of the global lighting market. Over the next few years, billions of sockets will be in play. This transition has kicked off a new phase of LED adoption — the race to connect every socket. The stakes are high for consumers and vendors alike. A trifecta of qualities — ubiquity, network connectivity and access to power — make intelligent lights a perfect platform on which the promise of the Internet of Things can start to come to life. Behind the scenes, this race to own sockets is really a contest to see who will control the infrastructure of the IoT across our built environment. These intelligent, networked, sensor-laden lights of the near future will form the central nervous system of every smart building. Beyond simple illumination, this “Internet of Buildings” built on top of next-generation lighting systems will forever change the way we interact with the spaces in which we live. In your kids’ elementary school, biometric sensors will track students’ alertness, subtly shifting spectrum to automatically boost their focus any time it starts to wane. Around the corner at the grocery store, beacons embedded in connected fixtures will track every movement you (or your mobile phone) make — from produce to dairy — beaming coupons at you along the way. Even the lights around your home will be intelligent, learning from and responding to the steady stream of data generated by your wearable devices — using light to help de-stress you after a long day or to perk you up on a cold, dark winter morning. Consumer-facing tech giants — Apple, Google, Amazon — see residential lighting as a key step toward the connected home. Why settle for one or two thermostats or smart toasters when you can gather data from dozens of sensor-enabled lights scattered throughout every house and apartment? For networking companies — Cisco, Qualcomm and their ilk — intelligent lighting is an infrastructure play. Billions of connected lights will need new routing fabric, if only to handle the massive amount of new data traffic they will produce. Even the largest building management systems companies — Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, Johnson Controls — see the threat posed to their core businesses in HVAC and physical security as the next generation of intelligent buildings are built on top of new lighting networks. Of course, the traditional lighting players — Acuity, Philips, GE — are deeply engaged in this shift, too. But their success is far from guaranteed. The land grab is on. Who will win?