Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 17

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Google Shares Rise 11% as CFO Porat Signals She’ll Rein In Spending: In the first earnings report for Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer Google lured from Morgan Stanley, Ms. Porat said the company was keeping a closer eye on costs. “People are realizing it’s a new era,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial LP. “She’s coming in and she’s expressing what investors wanted -- that’s there’s going to be cost rationalization, a degree of discipline.” The numbers backed her up, with revenue and profits outpacing the expectations of Wall Street. The company reported that revenue rose 11 percent to $17.7 billion from a year earlier, with net revenue — a figure that excludes payments to advertising partners — increasing to $14.35 billion. That was above the $14.28 billion projected by analysts, according to Bloomberg. Google said that absent currency fluctuations, overall revenue would have risen 18 percent from a year ago. Google’s cash pile swelled to $70 billion in the second quarter. In the recent quarter, the number of clicks on ads rose 18 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase in the first quarter, while the average cost per click fell 11 percent after dropping 7 percent in the prior period. Google’s mobile cost-per-click is climbing, helping to close the gap with desktop ads, Porat said on the call. Watch time on YouTube, the company’s video-sharing site, was up 60 percent, with mobile watch time more than doubling, she said. The slower growth in costs, along with suggestions from Ms. Porat that Google will try to be more forthcoming with investors — and may be open to redistributing some of the company’s cash pile down the line — suggested a new era of cooperation from a company that has historically had an antagonistic relationship with Wall Street. She confirmed that they are more open to focusing on expense controls, more open to providing new disclosures and more open to potentially returning cash,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities. “Those are the three things people wanted, and she came through.” Analysts like Mr. Schachter were impressed by her investor-friendly tone, and Google shares jumped nearly 11 percent in after-hours trading.


• The surprising way smartphones are changing the way we shop: Smartphones and tablets now account for up to 68 percent of the traffic to the videogame chain’s Web site, where customers are frequently browsing products and looking up trade-in values for their old games. One thing they’re not doing much of on mobile devices? Buying stuff. In fact, “purchasing through that phone probably wouldn’t even make the top ten list of engagement activities that they do,” said Jason Allen, the retailer’s vice president of multichannel. “We’re not overly focused on conversion on mobile, we really see it as a tool to drive traffic in our stores” This reflects a trend seen throughout the industry: While there has been a surge in traffic to retailers' Web sites from smartphones, a proportionately big boom in sales on these gadgets have yet to appear. In other words, for all the time we spend swiping and tapping on our phones, we still aren’t especially willing to make purchases on them. At Kohl’s, executives say they have spent the last year and a half updating their app, in part to accommodate an in-store shopper who is more frequently searching for product reviews, watching video content about merchandise and sharing their finds on social media. When customers are in Kohl’s stores and on the retailer’s Wifi network, customers spend more time on the app than when they’re not in the store, company officials said. These behaviors have led Kohl’s to develop a new “in-store mode” for its app, in which users who walk into a Kohl’s store will be asked if they want to use a special version that is tailored for wandering the store. Kohl’s declined to say how the in-store mode will be different from its regular app experience, but said it would be available in September. Big-box behemoth Target is also catering to shoppers who are using their phone to guide them through stores with a relaunched app that has a stronger emphasis on a tool that helps them building their weekly shopping list and an interactive map of each store in its fleet. It’s easy to see why the company has moved in this direction: Since it installed free WiFi in its stores a few years ago, Target has found that the most-visited site, by far, is the retailer’s own Web site. This enthusiastic embrace of in-store phone use might have seemed unthinkable in corners of the retail industry only a few years ago, when many brick-and-mortar chains were panicking about showrooming, the industry term for when shoppers would go to a store to check out merchandise, only to ultimately buy it online for a better price. But that fear has largely dissipated as study after study has shown showrooming is not a huge threat. In fact, several studies have found that the opposite behavior -- browsing online before buying in a physical store -- is more common.



• As Google and Microsoft push app developers to reveal their content, coders balk at making apps searchable: The giants of the Web have been pressing developers of mobile apps to index their content so it can be parsed by search engines or linked to from other sites. That’s already possible with most Web pages, thanks to pieces of embedded code known as deep links. Imagine a future in which a Google search for a “tulle mini” would call up results from Wish, a fashion app, along with links to e-commerce sites. A Facebook user who wanted to share a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies from the Yummly app would be able to post a link that would take viewers to the relevant page instead of forcing them to download the app first. So far, the effort has been a bit like herding cats: Only a few thousand apps—a tiny fraction of the millions out there—have adopted the competing tech protocols that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are pushing. Google’s pitch to developers is that deep links benefit them by driving more traffic to their apps. The company says traffic on the Yellow Pages and Etsy apps increased by 8 percent and 12 percent, respectively, after they began using Google’s indexing. Rajan Patel, a principal engineer at Google, says more than 1,000 apps—mainly those designed for its Android mobile operating system but also some for Apple’s iOS—use its deep linking. “To us, the main advantage that we see coming from this is removing friction—not having to find the app on your phone and fire it up,” says Atul Kakkar, principal product manager at Eventbrite, a website that helps people publicize and sell tickets to yoga classes, tech conferences, and other happenings. The company plans to start indexing its app to enable Google searches. Some developers have resisted using deep links because it’s costly and laborious to create separate code for each mobile platform. (Android and iOS are the predominant ones.) Inserting the links eats up as much as 5 percent of the time it takes developers to build an app, says Alex Matjanec, managing partner at AD:60, a New York-based ad agency that creates apps for clients.


• YouTube's Top Advertisers Increased Their Spending by 60% in Q2: Google's second quarter earnings report today, the tech giant revealed that YouTube viewership is growing faster than it has in two years, and advertiser money is following. YouTube's mobile users averaged 40 minutes per session during Q2, which represents a 50 percent increase year over year while ultimately helping the Mountain View, Calif.-based player beat Wall Street expectations. The number of advertisers rose 40 percent year over year on the video platform, while the average spend of YouTube's top 100 advertisers rose 60 percent. Google does not break out how much revenue YouTube generates, but executives were clearly satisfied with the performance. There are more 18- to-49-year-olds on YouTube than there are consumers who watch cable TV, Porat said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday January 12

• JD.com and Tencent back the same horse - to invest $1.55 billion in Chinese auto e-commerce site Bitauto: Chinese auto information website operator Bitauto Holdings Ltd said JD.com Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd would invest about $1.3 billion in the company, sending its shares sharply higher in early trading on Friday. E-commerce company JD.com and Tencent, best known for its communications app WeChat, will also invest a total of $250 million in Bitauto unit YiXin Capital Ltd. JD.com, China's No. 2 e-commerce company after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, will invest $400 million in cash and about $750 million in resources to Bitauto, whose sites offer sales data and other information on new and used vehicles as well as customer reviews. Tencent will pay $150 million for its shares.

• Infosys weighs smart uses of its ~INR 35,000 Crore cash pile; stock up 7% on strong earnings (Q3 Rev INR 13,796 Crore, +6%, NI INR 3250 Crore, +13% Y/Y): Under new CEO Vishal Sikka Infosys, once a trendsetter for India's more than $100 billion IT outsourcing industry, has made a push for new age technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, which the CEO has said will help Infosys hit annual revenue growth rates of 15-18 percent over time. On Friday, Infosys said it was also using its workforce more efficiently, with a utilisation rate of 82.7 percent excluding trainees, its highest in 11 years. Attrition, or the number of people leaving or retiring, fell in absolute terms to 8,900 employees in the third quarter from 10,100 in the quarter before. India’s second largest software company reported a 13 percent on year increase in net profit to Rs 3,250 crore and 6 percent rise in revenue to Rs 13,796 crore for the quarter ended December, sending its shares soaring about 6 percent yesterday. The company’s cash and cash equivalents stood at Rs 34,873 crore as on 31 December. With a change in the top leadership, there are expectations that the company will start using this cash more productively. "We are interested in acquisition of small innovative companies. We are not interested in acquiring technologies from yesterday, but in acquiring technologies of tomorrow," Sikka had told analysts in a recent interaction. 

• Amazon takes 1.3 days on average to return cash, the quickest among online stores, and customers respond, according to new research from StellaService Inc., which tracks e-commerce data. While most Web stores will only pay once a return parcel is on its way, Amazon offers instant refunds for some purchases, issuing immediate credit and 30 days to return a product. Instead of tying up cash and preventing customers from buying other things, Amazon’s aim is to get people spending again. That’s especially critical during and after the annual holiday shopping season, when gift returns spike and consumers are predisposed to buy merchandise. Fast refunds are also important in Internet commerce because shoppers buy things they haven’t touched or tried, making return rates higher than in retail outlets. “Amazon is killing it on refunds and others should follow suit,” said Eduardo Vilar, chief executive officer of Returnly Technologies Inc., a San Francisco company that researches retail returns. “Customers who are given the right experience on a return are more loyal shoppers.” Amazon’s instant refund, which was rolled out quietly last year, gave the Web retailer the fastest refund-processing time out of 40 companies measured by StellaService. Amazon’s closest competitors in refund-processing speed include online furniture and home goods retailer Wayfair Inc. (W) and personal computer and printer-maker Hewlett-Packard Co., which both took about three days to issue refunds, according to StellaService. The average refund-processing time of the 40 companies tracked by the researcher was more than nine days.

• Offline retailers bet on smart in-store tech: Neiman Marcus is reinventing the mirror: The retailer announced Thursday that it has installed a MemoryMirror from MemoMi in its Walnut Creek, Calif. store. It plans to install two in its San Francisco store later this month and then two in Dallas. The mirror* allows for shoppers to compare in real time how different outfits look on them. After trying on clothes in the fitting room, a customer can head to the sales floor where the special “mirror” is located. A customer controls the mirror with an iPad, instructing it when to start recording or take photos. Then he or she can try on additional outfits, and compare video footage. Two outfits can be looked at side-by-side, and the mirror stores as many clips as the customer wants. So a customer could try on a dozen looks, take videos of each, and quickly compare how each look. There’s also the option to e-mail videos or photos to friends for their input, or share on social media. The MemoryMirror isn’t technically a mirror, but a 70-inch screen with a camera on top that films the consumer. MemoMi founder Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky says the secret sauce is its perspective distortion correction, which automatically sizes the mirror to fit the customer. So no matter if you’re standing four feet in front of it or 10 feet away, it proportions the mirror so the customer fills the shot. “The world is going in the direction of in-store devices and personalization. We want to make these devices as cheap as possible and give these services not only for luxury brands,” said Vilcovsky. Nordstrom and Rebecca Minkoff have also dabbled in the smart fitting room space, using eBay technology. MemoMi is working on adding features to its MemoryMirror that allow a customer to see how they look in different colors or patterns of the clothes they’re trying on. Vilcovsky also envisions one day technology such as this being available on consumers’ televisions.

• Box is finally close to $162M IPO, valulation likely lower than last round of funding: After months of delay, Box is finally close to making its stock market debut. Box, the online data storage provider, disclosed on Friday that it was seeking to raise up to $162.5 million in its initial public offering, as the company embarked on a road show for potential investors. (If demand proved high, the company could sell additional shares and raise up to $186.9 million.) In an amended prospectus, Box said that it planned to price its shares at $11 to $13 a share. At the midpoint of that range, the company would be valued at about $1.4 billion — less than the valuation the company fetched in a private $150 million fund-raising round last summer. Founded in 2005, Box became one of the most prominent independent providers of online storage and file sharing services, particularly for corporations. But the company has been somewhat overshadowed by the much bigger Dropbox, a member of the 11-digit club of start-ups with a $10 billion or more valuation, and rival file-sharing offerings from technology juggernauts like Google. According to its prospectus, Box still hasn’t turned a profit. It lost $121.5 million in the nine months ended Oct. 31, a slight narrowing from the same time in the previous year. Sales, however, jumped 80 percent during that same period, to $153.8 million. And Box has asserted that it has won clients like General Electric, DirecTV and AstraZeneca. The company first filed to go public last spring, but put off its I.P.O. plans as a sudden investor distaste for risky technology companies rippled through the markets. Since then, the start-up has waited for a more propitious time to make its stock market debut. Bankers and companies are betting that time is now. Last month, a number of technology start-ups, ranging from the peer-to-peer lending juggernaut Lending Club to the data analysis provider New Relic, enjoyed strong trading debuts. The company is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “BOX.”

• Americans teens switching to Snapchat, but adults are still loyal to Facebook; Instagram, Pinterest gaining, Twitter and LinkedIn losing: Pew study of user engagement: American Teenagers may be spending more time on messaging services like Snapchat, but American adults are still increasing their use of social networks, according to a new survey released Friday by the Pew Research Center. The Pew survey, conducted in September, found that 52 percent of Internet users regularly logged on to at least two social networks, up from 42 percent in Pew’s August 2013 survey. The percentage of adults using Facebook, the most general social network, stayed about the same, at 71 percent of the online population. But Pew found significant increases in the number of people using Instagram, a photo service owned by Facebook; Pinterest, a visually oriented service for “pinning” favorite items; LinkedIn, a business networking service; and Twitter, a microblogging service oriented toward real-time news and information. Facebook users were the most dedicated, with 70 percent logging in at least once a day. Nearly half of Instagram users visit the site daily. Twitter, which has reported slow user growth in recent quarters, saw fewer visits from its American users, according to the Pew study. Only 36 percent of them visit the site daily, the researchers found, compared with 46 percent in the 2013 survey. In a statement after the survey data was released, Twitter disputed the findings, saying, “Pew’s data is so wrong as to be laughable. As we said at our Analyst Day in November, 48 percent of our monthly active users in our top 20 markets use the service daily, and the U.S. is our top market,” said Rachel Millner, a Twitter spokeswoman. LinkedIn users also said they visited the site less frequently, although a dedicated core of 13 percent said they went at least once a day. What the numbers don’t reveal was the time people spent on each service. Because most social networks generate revenue from advertising, more time on the service means a greater opportunity for visitors to see ads. But the researchers did learn that for the median Facebook user, two-thirds of his or her friends weren’t “actual” friends at all. And less than half of adult Facebook users have friended their parents or children on the service.

• Cash collection can make the difference between life and death for a Saas business: how does one achieve rapid growth in a SaaS business while maintaining capital efficiency? By focusing on the timing of cash collection, not just cash spend. The timing of cash collection can drastically influence the cash consumption of a high-growth, recurring-revenue business significantly beyond what one would intuitively assume. This ultimately has implications on the attractiveness of a business or, at a minimum, the level of shareholder dilution it experiences over time and will become an increasing area of focus as the period of cheap growth capital slowly comes to an end. Let’s take two hypothetical early-to-mid stage, high-growth, recurring-revenue SaaS businesses and model them over a five-year period. We assume each company admirably grows annual GAAP revenue from $2M-$6M-$13M-$28M-$53M and enjoys a 100 percent annual renewal rate. Both companies have identical aggregate cost structures that are well over 100 percent of revenue, which is benchmarked on dozens of recent high-growth SaaS businesses we’ve evaluated or invested in, or that have gone public. As illustrated below, the two companies thus have identical GAAP bookings, revenues and operating income. The only difference is that the first company, Company M (“monthly”), is like most SaaS companies in that it gets paid cash monthly and ratably over the one year contract period. The second company, Company A (“advance”), collects the full annual contracted value in advance. The difference in cash consumption between the two companies is staggering. Company A would have burned $36 million less cash over the five-year period due to growing deferred revenue balances, to achieve the exact same revenue and bookings trajectory as Company M. This gap in cash consumption can be the difference between success and bankruptcy or moderate versus significant dilution for the founders and early investors. Company M burned more than three times the amount of capital as compared to Company A despite identical bookings, revenue growth and operating expenses. Who can afford to ignore this?

• Twitter Product Update #1: Twitter Will Launch Autoplay Video, but Here's How It Will Differ From Facebook Marketers have 6 seconds to entice users to click. Twitter is about to give marketers new ways to share videos with a feature the ad world has been asking for: autoplay. Twitter has been working on its built-in video system for months, which would finally give users and marketers a way to shoot footage within the app. However, the video capabilities will be different for users and brands. We spoke with industry insiders who saw Twitter's video pitch at CES, and here's what it will look like: Six-seconds to wow The autoplay feature allows marketers to create a six-second video preview, a quick opportunity to entice users to click. Choose wisely The six-second preview, however, does not have to be the first six of the video. Brands can take the best six seconds, the most captivating, and use that as the autoplay preview. Everyone knows that getting clicks on video is all about an exciting hook from the start. No sound to start The autoplay video will not have sound until a user clicks to watch the promoted tweet. Advertisers don't pay until they get that click. There's a lot of time to play with Brands will be offered up to 10 minutes of video time, which is an eternity in social media. Everyday users will only get 30 seconds.

• Twitter Product Update #2: Twitter Plans To Increase Revenue With Ads On Publisher’s Apps: Twitter reportedly has a new advertising strategy – sell ads within third-party apps. According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media network revealed the new plan to expand advertising revenue during a presentation at CES. The social media company is planning to sell ads within streams of tweets on other publishers’ apps and websites.” It isn’t clear which publishers have signed up so far. The WSJ says there were references to ESPN’s Sports Center app and Flipboard during the meeting. Twitter and ESPN have reportedly been chatting about the idea

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday December 22

• In China, digital ad spend will overtake TV next year, amid a rapid jump to mobile advertising: Next year companies are expected to spend more money on digital advertising than on television campaigns in China. It is a stark shift from three years ago when nearly half of the advertising dollars went to television and just 14 percent went to digital, according to ZenithOptimedia, an advertising agency. China is also diverging from the United States, where television continues to dominate. Homegrown social media platforms in China are at the center of the push. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all blocked in China, giving platforms like Tencent’s Weixin — known as WeChat outside the country — and Sina Weibo an advantage. “I’ve been here four years. In that time I’m now on the third dominant social network — first it was Renren, then Weibo and now it’s WeChat,” said Chris Jones, the executive creative director at the ad agency Wunderman in China. Weixin’s particular quirk — that users communicate only with friends and contacts within their circle — has allowed companies to develop direct relationships with consumers. But it also poses a challenge since users have to first choose to include a brand within their Weixin network.

• YouTube struggles to monetize despite its enormous engagement..:  For all of its influence as a cultural force, YouTube is still finding its way as an economic one. Viewers may be migrating online in droves from traditional television, but the advertising dollars have not yet followed. The marketing research company eMarketer estimates that YouTube will log about $1.13 billion in ad revenue in 2014, a small fraction of the $200 billion global TV advertising market. The quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers. YouTube creators, meanwhile, complain that the company takes too much of the ad revenue — as much as 49 percent — and does too little to market and promote its stars, which makes it hard for them to leverage their celebrity.

• YouTube also faces a host of small rivals - startups like Interlude that are gaining traction: The basic format of Interlude’s videos will be familiar to anyone who grew up on the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series. As the film plays, a viewer is prompted with questions about how to proceed — wear the black dress or the white one? — and the video seamlessly integrates each choice. The company is one of many challenging YouTube’s dominance of online video. Vessel, started by two former Hulu executives, recently revealed a plan to offer $3 subscriptions for early access to short videos. And in September, the Universal Music Group made a deal with Mirriad, a company that specializes in inserting new ads into old videos. Interlude’s success against a giant like YouTube — which is owned by Google and attracts more than a billion viewers each month — is by no means guaranteed. But it has already had some promising hits. more engaged audience yields higher ad rates, and Interlude’s narrative mazes also offer ways for producers to incorporate brands (for a fee, of course). In one illustration cited by Robert S. Wiesenthal, Warner Music’s chief operating officer, the viewer of a rap video could choose to have the star keep dancing at a party or hop into a BMW. “We are all on this hunt for monetization,” Mr. Wiesenthal said. “When someone makes a choice to learn about something, that is worth more than, say, a passive pre-roll ad or a guy just holding a bottle of Scotch in his hands.”

• Beacon-enabled mannequins are the latest in mobile app notifications: “We decided we had to work out a way to bring the good old-fashioned mannequin into the 21st century,” said Jonathan Berlin, the managing director of Universal Display, the company that is selling mannequins with electronic implants. About a year ago, Mr. Berlin and his partner, Adrian Coe, had an idea to outfit their product with electronic beacons, small transmitters that can communicate with your cellphone. Mr. Berlin and Mr. Coe created a separate company, Iconeme, just for the beacons, which interact with users through the company’s app. Shoppers can see what a store’s mannequins are wearing, who designed the clothes and how much they cost. But these can beckon you from outside the store, sending messages to your cellphones and beaming pictures of their outfits onto them. They are one of the latest efforts by the struggling retail industry to lure customers away from the Internet and back into brick-and-mortar stores. Don’t feel like going through the store to find an item? You can even buy it through the app. Iconeme is not the only business trying to use technology to help people shop in stores. A company called MyBestFit created kiosks that quickly scan people’s bodies, analyze a database of clothes and make suggestions. Iconeme’s first beacon mannequin began in Britain in August. Since then, about 3,500 people have downloaded the company’s app, Mr. Berlin said. Beacon technology is already popular with retailers along Regent Street, a high-end strip of stores in London, which already use beacons to ping shoppers with promotions and advertisements. He said three retailers in the United States were testing his products, but declined to disclose them, citing confidentiality restrictions.

• Xiaomi close to raising $1B, valuation seen at ~$45B: Xiaomi raises over $1B from All-Stars Investment, DST Global, others. The round, which is expected to be closed this week, would value Xiaomi at more than $45 billion, as per this report. Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, which also has a good presence in India, has netted over $1 billion in funding led by All-Stars Investment, an investment firm launched by former Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji, says a The Wall Street Journal report quoting an unnamed source. Russian investment firm DST Global, besides Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC also participated in the round.

• Flipkart raises $700M, valuation seen at ~$11B: Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, has raised $700 million in fresh investment from existing as well as new investors Baillie Gifford, Greenoaks Capital, Steadview Capital, T Rowe Price Associates and Qatar Investment Authority. The e-commerce powerhouse, which is on a fund-raising spree, has raised funding for the third time in 2014. In May, it had raised $210 million (about Rs 1,200 crore). It had raised funding worth $1 billion (about Rs 6,000) in July. The latest round of fund-raising has seen investment from existing stakeholders DST Global, GIC, ICONIQ Capital and Tiger Global. According to reports, the latest fund-raising has pegged Flipkart’s valuation at $11 billion.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

• India Post to launch real-time parcel tracking, shipped 85K units for Amazon in October : India Post, which has the biggest network and serves the last mile, is boosting its infrastructure for real-time tracking of parcels through satellites using a new technology. The Postal Department will also soon start an SMS facility to inform customers about delivery status of their parcels. India Post, which is already in tie-ups with e-commerce majors Amazon and Snapdeal, will also have security gadgets like CCTV and access control systems to ensure safety of articles. Amazon started booking parcels at one place with India Post in 2013 which has now expanded to five locations by October 2014. “Amazon shipped 7,000 parcels in January this year. By October, the number of article booked in a month by Amazon increased to about 85,000. Snapdeal sends 2000-3000 parcels per day. Naaptol is giving about Rs 25 crore business to India Post per annum,” the official said. India Post is offering cash collection on delivery facility of product to 200 customers. “Since December 2013 approximately India Post has collected Rs 280 crore as cash on delivery amount and paid to the e-commerce companies,” the official said.

• Alibaba will sell its first-ever $8B bond offering on Thursday, attractively low yields of 110bp over Treasuries for the five-year tranche: It is looking to sell up to seven tranches, including five fixed-rate bonds ranging from three to 20-year maturities and two floating-rate notes with three and five-year maturities, which bankers and investors expect to be the most sought after of the year. "Alibaba will have no problem attracting the attention of every investor base around the world," said one bond syndicate manager. "They've done a good job of coming out with enough spread over what would be fair value to make sure they get the size done." Alibaba, highly rated for a Chinese corporate at A1/A+/A+, has been sounding out investors this week in Asia, Europe and the US and is believed to have a huge order book already in place before officially starting the marketing phase in Asia overnight. Two market sources said initial indications of interest were at US$10bn. Alibaba's high Single A ratings will help as the company pitches itself as a comparable to blue-chip names like Oracle, Amazon and Cisco, rather than its lower-rated Chinese internet peers Tencent Holdings and Baidu.

• Asian shoppers lead the world in 'showrooming': Implication: location-based targeting which is red-hot in the US (news here and here) could be even hotter here: Asia’s shoppers are experts at “showrooming” – the phenomenon of looking at items at a brick-and-mortar store whilst simultaneously checking the prices available online. According to data from Google’s Consumer Barometer survey (shown in a new post on Google’s APAC blog), this showrooming is most prevalent in less developed tech markets, where you might expect it the least. The top showroomers are Vietnam’s shoppers. 40 percent of them stand in a store whilst cross-checking the prices online. South Korea is second.

• Walmart Amends Price Matching Policy After Cheap PS4 Debacle, excludes marketplace vendors, third-party sellers, membership or auction sites: Yesterday, some individuals figured out that they could print out an $89.99 Amazon marketplace listing for a brand new PS4 and get the company to sell them the console for the bargain price, considering that it usually retails for $399.99. Price matching guarantees are a common marketing tactic, but Walmart's policy was especially lax, extending to any legitimate retailer including third-party companies.  The retailer said Wednesday that it is limiting its generous Walmart Ad Match Guarantee to just selected retailers, none of which include marketplace vendors, third-party sellers, membership sites or auction sites.  Walmart will continue to match the lowest price on Walmart.com and 30 selected retailers, including Amazon.com. However, for an Amazon product to qualify, it must be sold and fulfilled by the online retailer.

• A button for faster payment collection on e-commerce sites: PayUMoney (earlier PayUPaisa) has introduced a ‘Pay with PayUMoney’ button to let online shoppers complete purchases with just a few clicks. The new feature will basically let e-tailers embed a button within their websites and blogs so that users can make payments without having to navigate away. According to the company, the button’s look and design can be customised as per the website’s design to collect details of customers. Its design also enables the same button to work for both web and mobile. PayU India further claims that over 2,188 merchants have already created the button for collecting payments. E-tailers who want to add the PayUMoney button on their sites / blogs can do so by logging in to PayUMoney and in the merchant dashboard going to PayUMoney tools. Post that, they can click on the PayUMoney button in order to create new button. The e-tailers can then specify the amount and customise the look and feel of the button. They can also add a custom field to collect more information about the customer. Once that is done, e-tailers can embed the button into their website and start collecting payments.

Friday, November 7, 2014

• Amazon quietly launched Echo, a voice-controlled smartspeaker with integrated voice-ordering from Amazon: Initial reactions are mixed at best:  Echo is priced at $199, Amazon said on its website today. Members of Amazon’s Prime fast-shipping program can purchase the gadget for $99 for a limited period. With Echo, Amazon can plant a voice-activated device in homes that lets users easily order things from the Web retailer by adding it to their shopping lists via voice command and later confirming the purchase through a companion app. Yet it’s unclear if consumers will see enough benefits and convenience to embrace another piece of hardware. “It seems like an odd and not-very-useful product,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The consumer doesn’t need yet another device in their home that replicates what they already have on their phone.” Amazon introduced Echo with little fanfare, simply putting up a Web page about the device.

• Despite splashy new investments and Alibaba, SoftBank is hurting from its Sprint investment: A 15 percent drop in SoftBank’s shares this year suggests investors have concerns about its shorter-term prospects. The company this week reduced its annual operating profit outlook by 10 percent, citing mounting losses at Sprint. Its 80 percent ownership of Sprint is worth about $15.5 billion, less than the $22 billion SoftBank paid last year. Sprint’s shares have slumped 54 percent in New York this year. After the company reported its 11th straight quarter of subscriber losses this week, the stock fell 21 percent in the last two days alone. In addition to Sprint, and the the 32% stake in Alibaba, SoftBank owns 36%  of Yahoo Japan Corp. (4689) and 40% of GungHo. Those stakes are worth $8.6 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, according to its website.

• Location-based audience targeting is used by 18% of US mobile retailers (set to double in a year);  Geo-location could turn help offline retailers fight back against online: In category after category, Amazon has steadily eroded the market share of traditional bricks-and-mortar retail chains, which seem to be in a state of irreversible decline. Much of the online giant’s competitive advantage is based on its access to and mastery of rich customer data. Traditional retailers know relatively little about their customers, unless they have a loyalty card and actually buy something – and even this knowledge comes late, after a purchase is made. They have no way to cross sell, recommend new products, or target advertising. Unlike Amazon, they can’t tell if a potential customer visits the store or passes by it without buying anything. But all that is about to change because traditional retail is starting to wake up to the potential of geolocation, which is giving the new wave of data analytics companies ways to help bricks-and-mortar retailers make up for the data deficit. A separate analysis finds that 18 percent of US mobile marketers plan to use iBeacon technology to target consumers this year. "We expect that to double next year," she said.  

Thursday October 23, 2014

• Xiaomi is moving user data out of China - possibly in response to security concerns, including some from the Indian Air Force: User data for those based outside of China is being moved to servers operated by Amazon.com in California and Singapore, Xiaomi Vice President Hugo Barra wrote today on his Google+ page. All shopping data for international users is expected to be moved out of Beijing by the end of the month, while profiles, text messages and other services should be completed by the end of the year, Barra wrote. In August, security firm F-Secure alleged that Xiaomi's devices were collecting and transmitting personal data to Beijing. The Indian Air Force made similar accusations, according to a report from the New Indian Express newspaper. Apart from privacy, Barra also said the moving data to overseas servers has significantly boosted speed in markets such as Singapore, India and Malaysia. Xiaomi is targeting India and Brazil as its next big markets. This, while Apple CEO Tim Cook met with Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai to discuss protecting user data two days after a report that (possibly Chinese-backed) hackers targeted its iCloud services.

• Offline Retailers should use smart programmatic strategies to make in-store purchases more competive to  'showroomers'  consumers visit stores to see products in person, only to turn around and purchase those products at better prices online from other sellers. That's the recommendation of a study - see the image below for how this would work.

• Tumblr's 4 means of monetizing traffic:On Tuesday, Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer told investors that Tumblr would likely make more than $100 million in 2015. In our series this week, we learned that the social platform's millennial-leaning user base has grown 33 percent since Mayer and her team purchased it for $1.1 billion. This revenue is achieved via four main ad products:
• Sponsored Posts: Tumblr charges a cost-per-engagement (CPE) rate for Sponsored Posts, an offering for Web and mobile marketers that includes Yahoo.com properties in addition to Tumblr's. ("Engagements" entail likes, reblogs, clicks, etc.)Targeting options entail gender, location and interests.
• Trending Blogs: Brands pay for every follower picked up on the social platform when it comes to the mobile- and Tumblr-only Trending Blogs.
• Sponsored Radar: Two-year-old Sponsored Radar ads are Web- and Tumblr-only, while entailing a cost-per-thousand (CPM) pricing model.
• Sponsored Dot promos: And then the one-month-old Sponsored Dot promos are negotiated at a flat fee.