Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 16

• Mattel Unveils ThingMaker, A $300 3D Printer That Lets Kids Make Their Own Toys: Autodesk was tasked with building this app which early testers, including those at Toyland, have already described as “fast,” “easy to navigate” and “ridiculously intuitive.”Called ThingMaker Design, the app includes a variety of built-in character templates and easy-to-use tutorials that help novices get started. But it also allows for designing characters from scratch, once kids get the hang of things. The toys can be customized with different colors and textures, and will bend and twist in the app so you can get a feel for how they’ll work after they’ve been printed. The creations can be saved as images to the mobile device’s Camera Roll, or uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox. When a design is complete, the app lets you export the STL print files wirelessly to your at-home printer, whether Mattel’s or otherwise. The idea isn’t just to print an object and be done, however – instead, kids will print parts that can be assembled to form larger creations, like dolls, robots, dinosaurs, scorpions, skeletons, bracelets or necklaces, for example. What’s interesting here is the potential for Mattel to tie into other children’s’ brands it already owns or licenses and bring them to life through 3D printing. That’s something the company says is on the roadmap, saying it will launch “additional design content, including branded options” at a later date. No actual brand names were announced, however, but there were hints that brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels were already being planned. The physical parts are printed in batches then assembled through ball-and-socket joints that snap together. This process can take anywhere from 30 minutes for a small item, up to overnight (e.g. 6 6 to 8 hours) for a larger toy.Mattel says its ThingMaker 3D will use a hard PLA filament, but also hasn’t yet announced the colors that will be available. According to reports from the Toy Fair, though, there were some two dozen colors on display. A spokesperson said the company may release other materials in the future.

• India's Snapdeal raises $200 million led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan:Indian online marketplace Snapdeal has raised $200 million in a fresh funding round led by Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, the company said. The latest fund-raising follows $500 million raised last August in a round led by Alibaba, SoftBank and Foxconn.

• SoftBank Rises the Most in Seven Years on Record Share Buyback: SoftBank climbed the most in more than seven years after the company said it will spend a record 500 billion yen ($4.4 billion) buying back stock. The stock rose as much as 15 percent to 5,040 yen as of 9:26 a.m. in Tokyo on Tuesday. SoftBank will purchase as many as 167 million shares, or 14.2 percent of its stock, using cash holdings and the proceeds of asset sales, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement Monday. The Japanese wireless carrier saw its shares drop to their lowest since buying Sprint Corp. in 2013 as Chairman Masayoshi Son struggled to persuade investors he can turn around the U.S. company. The shares were down 28 percent this year before the buyback announcement, putting SoftBank’s market value well below that of its own investments in companies including Sprint and Alibaba. “This is a good buyback, considering how low their valuation has fallen,” said Atul Goyal, an analyst at Jefferies Group LLC. “Nothing so bad happened with Sprint and Alibaba to justify the drop in SoftBank shares.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

• Singapore Post, Like Amazon, Tests Package Delivery by Drone: Singapore Post Ltd. is testing package delivery by drone, echoing attempts by Amazon.com Inc. to extend the commercial capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The company known as SingPost said a drone it developed with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore carried a packet containing a letter and T-shirt on a five-minute, two-kilometer (1.2 miles) flight. This marks the first time any postal service has successfully used a drone for “point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery,” it said in a statement Thursday. SingPost is looking to such unmanned aircraft as online transactions increase in the Asia-Pacific region and as Singapore plans to develop itself into a so-called Smart Nation through technology usage. There is “immense potential” in drone technology for last-mile mail and e-commerce delivery, Bernard Leong, SingPost’s head of digital services, said in the statement.

• An Amazon Rival, Jet.com, Eliminates Its Membership Fee: Just three months after its introduction, Jet.com, the much-hyped rival to Amazon and Costco, has done a 180-degree turn in its business model by making its members-only shopping club freely accessible. On Wednesday, Jet said it would eliminate its $50 annual membership fee, but continue to provide better prices on items, along with high-quality customer service and free shipping on orders of more than $35, among other benefits. The about-face raises questions of whether Jet was struggling to gain the traction it needed to expand its business. But Marc Lore, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said. While eliminating a membership fee may help expand Jet.com’s customer base, the move could diminish the company’s chances of turning a healthy profit. Mr. Lore had raised more than $200 million from investors to fund the site. In an interview with The New York Times, he had predicted that the company would take five years to grow to a point where it was not losing money on every shipment. The $50 membership fee would have been a major revenue stream contributing to Jet’s profit. Now Jet’s revenue will rely on raking in commissions on sales from retailers. Discounts for customers come from what Jet calls Smart Cart savings, which let shoppers lower costs by adding more products to their shopping carts, resulting in orders that are more efficient and cheaper to fulfill.

• Amazon Seeks Cloud Computing Growth With New Data Products: Amazon Web Services announced products Wednesday that give businesses new ways to transfer, manipulate and derive insights from data they store in the company’s cloud. The products span diverse areas of information technology from a business intelligence service named Quicksight, to security systems, to new tools to help people migrate databases from proprietary versions into free ones hosted within Amazon. The company also unveiled a new product, called Snowball, that is a hardware device that lets businesses securely transfer large amounts of data into the Amazon Web Services cloud. And Amazon announced a deal with consulting giant Accenture Plc to focus on corporate customers. The products and services shown at the company’s re:invent customer conference in Las Vegas represent a further expansion by Amazon into competitors’ territories, whether database vendors such as Oracle Corp. or business intelligence companies such as Tableau Software. The effort also keeps the pressure on traditional hardware providers, who are seeing their businesses slow as more of their customers opt for cloud computing offered by Amazon and others. Amazon’s Web Services division generated $1.8 billion in sales in the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarter and almost $400 million in operating profit. The e-commerce company created the AWS division almost 10 years ago, giving it a lead on competitors such as Microsoft, Google  and IBM. that were slow to release their own cloud services. In recent years that has changed. Microsoft is now a major competitor to AWS via its Azure service, and companies like Oracle are converting more applications to run in the cloud.

• Snapdeal invests $20M more in logistics firm gojavas: Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs online e-com marketplace Snapdeal, has invested $20 million (Rs 131 crore) more in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the gojavas brand, it said on Wednesday. Snapdeal had first invested in gojavas, which was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet, in March this year. It had not disclosed the investment amount but said it has picked a minority stake in the logistics firm. “The company’s average timeline for delivering Snapdeal orders has reduced by a full 24 hours in the last six months and our teams have worked closely to come up with innovative solutions that are enhancing customers’ shopping experience on Snapdeal. With the freshly infused funds, our aim is to help gojavas become more successful and expand their reach,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal. Snapdeal said it has invested $100 million in the last six months to improve it delivery timelines by 70 per cent and it will invest $200 million more in next 12 months to strengthen its supply chain. gojavas will be using the capital for expanding its operations to 100 more cities within 12 months. Vijay Ghadge, COO at gojavas, said the partnership with Snapdeal has helped it become one of the largest independent logistics players in the country with a revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore currently. gojavas currently manages over 1 lakh sq ft of fulfilment centres and helps more than 400 companies reach consumers in close to 350 cities and towns in more than 3,000 PIN-codes. It claims to deliver over 1.8 lakh packages every day and closed FY15 with revenues of over Rs 200 crore. It was originally an in-house delivery venture of Jabong but later spun out as a separate third-party logistics firm.

• Pandora Buys Ticketfly, a Competitor to Ticketmaster: Pandora Media, the biggest player in Internet radio, has moved into the ticketing business with an agreement to buy Ticketfly, an independent firm that competes with Ticketmaster and is popular with clubs and festivals in the United States and Canada. Pandora announced early Wednesday that it would acquire Ticketfly for $450 million, in a mix of cash and stock. The deal further expands Pandora’s interests in providing services to artists. Last year, it introduced a data system, the Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP, that shows musicians which songs are most popular on the service and where. And in May, Pandora bought Next Big Sound, another data service, which studies the listening and searching patterns of streaming music customers. Pandora, which has nearly 80 million regular listeners, said that its acquisition would benefit artists and listeners. The deal will also add a level of complexity to the sometimes delicate system of alliances in the ticketing world, which is dominated by Ticketmaster, a unit of Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketfly, which was founded in 2008 and was an early proponent of using social media and the web to market tickets, has become a popular choice for promoters that want to avoid the Ticketmaster system. Last year, according to its announcement with Pandora, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets worth more than $500 million. Among Ticketfly’s clients are the club Brooklyn Bowl and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. This year, the independent ticketing world was jolted when Ticketmaster bought Front Gate Tickets, another service popular with clubs, festivals and acts, a move that led some bands, like Wilco, to shift their alliances to other companies. Pandora’s control of Ticketfly could pose a challenge to Ticketmaster, particularly given Pandora’s history of using its user data for marketing. The company, which derives about 80 percent of its revenue from ad sales, has long pitched advertisers on its ability to identify its users based on their demographic data and listening habits — even going so far as to say it can predict its listeners’ political affiliation. “The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse.”

• Amazon considering online TV service: Amazon.com Inc is considering the creation of a live online TV service and has reached out to networks such as CBS Corp and Comcast's NBCUniversal to express interest in carrying their channels, Bloomberg reported. The e-commerce giant's talks with the networks are in preliminary stages, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Such a move would increase Amazon's already growing presence in online video. Amazon currently offers an on-demand video streaming service similar to that of Netflix. Amazon signed an exclusive deal with former "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson in July to present a new motoring show for its Amazon Prime subscription service. The company last month said it would launch six TV show pilots for its video streaming service in the United States, the UK, Germany and Austria for the 2015 fall pilot season.

• If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your Router: Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless connection in his bedroom. For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland, Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.” What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department. Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a router or try to decide which one to pick. So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal. The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too complex for their needs.

• Pure Storage Falls In Public Debut, CEO Optimistic: Pure Storage, the enterprise storage company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. After pricing at $17, shares traded down in its debut, closing the day at $16.01. CEO Scott Dietzen spoke to TechCrunch about why the company executed an IPO during what has been a lackluster year for tech stocks. “We were ready to be a public company,” said Dietzen. “We don’t worry about market conditions. Great companies can come out when it’s right for them.” The company’s IPO performance, slipping in its first day’s trading, isn’t big news. Other recent IPOs that have seen sharp declines in value following their flotation have performed more strongly. For example, Box, a tech company that went public this year, surged on its initial day as a public company. In the ensuing months, its shares have sagged. For industry watchers, any current public technology offering is a bellwether. The IPO cadence for technology firms has been infamously slow in 2015, causing concern among those both seeking liquidity for their investments, and executives worried about where their private valuation might square with the public markets. To underscore that point, Dropbox, a company that could formerly do no wrong, recently endured an embarrassing haircut. Pure Storage’s offering went off mid-range. It fell a modest 5.8 percent. These things are not the end of the world. But they may describe public investor uncertainty about the value of firms that are burning large quantities of cash to expand their top line. Box, MobileIron, and a host of others have endured related declines.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 19

Foxconn, Alibaba, others invest $500M in Snapdeal; eBay pares stake: Online marketplace Snapdeal raised $500 million in fresh funding led by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and existing investor SoftBank. Its other existing investors Temasek, BlackRock, Myriad and PremjiInvest also participated in this round, as per a press statement. Separately, e-commerce giant eBay said it has sold a portion of its holding in Snapdeal, 18 months after leading a $134 million funding round in the Gurgaon-based company. Snapdeal will use the money to expand geographical reach and enhance services in a bid to better compete with well-funded rivals such as US-headquartered Amazon and Bangalore-based Flipkart. The announcement confirms a previous report that said Snapdeal has raised $500 million, citing sources. With the latest funding, Alibaba is now backing two companies (Snapdeal and Paytm) who are directly slugging it out for supremacy in India’s consumer internet space.

Upstarts Raid Giants for Talent in Silicon Valley: The unicorns, a class of hot start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, are all aggressively pursuing the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley with promises of talked-about workplaces and eye-popping payouts. Amid a general scramble for talent, Google, the Internet search company, has undergone specific raids from unicorns for engineers who specialize in crucial technologies like mapping. In particular, Uber — the largest unicorn, with a valuation of more than $50 billion — has plundered Google’s mapping unit over the last 12 months, aiming to bolster its own map research. Airbnb, the popular short-term rental start-up, has gone on a more general hiring spree, poaching more than 100 workers. While the unicorns typically pick off small groups of engineers at a time, making little impression on a large company’s total employee numbers, the poaching attacks are often aimed at siphoning off the best talent in strategic technologies. That can sting the likes of a Google, where executives have said one skilled engineer can be worth many times the average. To snag employees from large rivals, unicorns have a simple recruiting pitch: They are on a path to success, as illustrated by their rising valuations. Many offer generous equity packages of restricted stock units that can later translate to big paydays for employees if the unicorn goes public or is sold — a lure that neither Google nor any other public tech company can dangle. Also, the unicorns say they are far more fleet-footed and cutting-edge than large organizations.

Alibaba Cash-Burning Buybacks Make Internet Bonds China’s Worst: China’s Internet bonds are lagging behind as disappointing earnings and plans for buybacks to shore up slumping shares fuel concern finances will deteriorate. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, announced a $4 billion share repurchase last week, while Baidu, its most-popular search engine, unveiled a $1 billion plan in July. Their bonds have contributed to a 0.4 percent loss on technology notes this quarter, the worst sector in a Bank of America Merrill Lynch investment-grade dollar note index for China that gained 0.4 percent. That’s a turnaround after Baidu’s 2012 debut in global debt markets gave it a self-proclaimed “war chest” and Alibaba’s $8 billion sale in 2014 became Asia’s biggest corporate dollar bond offering. The companies’ shares have slumped at least 9 percent this quarter as authorities tighten controls on Web content and crack down on fake goods online. “Companies such as Baidu and Alibaba came out with weaker results, and have announced cash-burning buybacks or acquisitions, which triggered a sell-off,” said Anthony Leung, a credit analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong, said. “In addition, regular negative headlines such as the sale of counterfeit goods, have hurt their bonds.”

Lenovo Joins Smartphone Compatriots for ’Make in India’: Lenovo started making smartphones in India, becoming the largest Chinese company to produce mobile devices there after the government raised import taxes. Lenovo will use contract manufacturer Flex’s factory outside the southeastern city of Chennai for its Lenovo and Motorola brands, Amar Babu, chairman of Lenovo India, said Tuesday in a phone interview. The brands will have a combined annual capacity of 6 million units, Lenovo said in a statement. Foxconn Technology Group this year began producing smartphones in India for China’s Xiaomi and OnePlus after the Indian government raised taxes on some foreign-made goods to attract investment in manufacturing. Lenovo’s announcement marks the largest Chinese name yet to be lured by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India campaign as competitors vie for a share of the world’s third-largest smartphone market. “Output from the plants is focused mainly on serving the Indian market,” Babu said. Lenovo has no immediate plans to develop phones specifically for India, he said. Lenovo considered adding smartphone manufacturing to its own personal-computer plant in Puducherry in the southeast before deciding to outsource to Flex’s existing factory in Sriperumbudur, Babu said.

Airbnb partners with China Broadband, Sequoia to expand in China: Online home-rental marketplace Airbnb Inc said on Tuesday it was partnering with investment firms China Broadband Capital and Sequoia China to expand into the Chinese market and find a chief executive for its operations in the country. The company, which was recently reported to have completed a $1.5 billion private funding round, said in a blog post it was also working with a larger group of investors, including Horizon Ventures, GGV Capital and China-based Hillhouse Capital. Airbnb, which matches people wishing to rent out all or part of their homes to temporary guests, has grown quickly and is valued at more than $20 billion. Airbnb said the number of outbound Chinese travelers using its service grew 700 percent in the past year. China Broadband and Sequoia China will help it customize technology for the Chinese market and establish a "localized presence" in the country, it added.

Twitter to accelerate push for content partnerships in Asia: Twitter said on Tuesday it plans to accelerate its push for content partnerships in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It has appointed a Singapore-based executive, Rishi Jaitly, to boost teams in major markets such as Australia, India, and Japan as well as to expand into Greater China and Southeast Asia, the company said in a statement. Jaitly was previously Twitter's market director for India and Southeast Asia. Twitter has been aggressively expanding its capabilities to carry pictures, video and interactive content.

Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation: Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation. The app has 240 million registered users and claims that 40 percent of American teenagers are actively on Kik. The deal doesn’t mean the two apps are planning to integrate, but they will have a strategic partnership moving forward, according to Kik co-founder Chris Best. That means sharing things like data and app information, he added. He also said that Kik won’t be targeting China anytime soon (seems obvious now given WeChat’s foothold there) but plans to use the money to grow the company’s employee base.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, August 3

Microsoft Said to Invest Big Sum in Uber; Latest Round Values Firm at $51 Billion: Microsoft has agreed to invest in Uber, according to people with knowledge of the matter, as part of a funding round that values the ride-hailing company at around $51 billion. If the deal is finalized, Microsoft’s contribution would be a substantial amount of the financing, which totals about $1 billion, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the fund-raising are not public. This new round cements Uber’s place as one of the most richly valued private companies ever, along with other start-ups like Xiaomi, the Chinese electronics company valued by investors at around $45 billion, and Airbnb, the short-term lodging service valued at more than $24 billion. It is also the latest fund-raising spree undertaken by Uber, which has added billions of dollars to its surging war chest. Uber has earmarked significant money for expansion into new markets like China, India and greater Southeast Asia. On Thursday, an Uber representative said the company had set aside $1 billion to spur growth specifically in India, where the company has faced stiff competition from local ride-hailing services. Uber has a history of bringing in important partners during funding rounds. In December, Baidu, the Chinese search giant, invested hundreds of millions in Uber. And in March, Times Internet, the digital venture of the Times of India Group media conglomerate, said it had agreed to a strategic investment in Uber.

Google, Amazon Show Investors Cost Control Is Key for Tech: Investors have started to reward Internet companies that can show both financial discipline and a path to long-term growth, making Amazon and Google the clear winners of the technology earnings season. Google kept costs in check in the second quarter, and shareholders cheered with a 16 percent stock gain after the search giant released better-than-expected results. Amazon also surged after posting a surprise profit, demonstrating that the Web retailer is capable of making money when it puts a brake on spending. By contrast, Facebook , which vowed to keep its brisk pace of investments to lure users and advertisers, fell as Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg was short on details about money-making plans for the company’s newer initiatives, like WhatsApp and Oculus. LinkedIn and Twitter slumped over concerns that user growth is slowing. Microsoft Corp. posted its largest-ever quarterly loss. And Apple failed to meet analysts’ predictions for iPhone sales and growth for the current quarter.

India’s Snapdeal, an Amazon Competitor, Raises $500 Million From Alibaba, Foxconn and SoftBank: Alibaba finally has its ally in India, perhaps the world’s hottest e-commerce market. The Chinese e-commerce giant has invested in Snapdeal, an India-based e-commerce startup, as part of a $500 million round, according to multiple sources. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company best known as a manufacturer of Apple’s iPhones, also invested, alongside existing Snapdeal investor SoftBank. Snapdeal had previously raised more than $1 billion from investors including SoftBank, eBay, BlackRock, Bessemer Ventures and Indian venture firms such as Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Alibaba and Foxconn were considering the investment earlier this year, which would value Snapdeal at $5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported in June. The company has undergone several iterations since Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal founded it in 2010, including one as a Groupon clone. Today, it’s an online shopping marketplace that sells a wide range of products, from cameras to jeans to toys — pitting it against Flipkart, a homegrown competitor currently valued at around $15 billion, and Amazon, which is investing billions of dollars into its Indian business. In the past year, Snapdeal has started to develop an ecosystem of sites by acquiring companies focused on different areas of online commerce. It bought FreeCharge, a popular service in India that allows people to add money to prepaid phone plans and prepaid TV plans. It also acquired RupeePower, a comparison shopping site for credit cards and loans. The approach is not all that different from Alibaba’s, which runs a host of different marketplaces focused on different types of buyers and different regions. While Flipkart has more market share in India, Snapdeal CEO Bahl thinks that company and Amazon are thinking too narrowly by being focused mainly on the sale of physical products, he told Re/code during an interview at Snapdeal’s Indian headquarters in April. Snapdeal, on the other hand, is going after what Bahl believes will eventually be a $250 billion opportunity — bringing all kinds of other transactions online in addition to the sale of products. “What’s the delta between retail and consumption?” Bahl asked rhetorically, referring to the difference between the two. “It’s things like financial services, education, utilities, health care. But today, all everyone is doing is products.” “Others are building aircraft carriers,” he added. “We are building an army of speedboats.”

Why Some Start-Ups Are Called Tech Companies and Others Are Not: these days, every company is at least a little bit of a tech company. Some Wall Street banks employ more tech workers than all but the biggest Silicon Valley companies. And large manufacturers like General Electric are leading the way in efforts to put Internet-connected sensors on things as varied as streets and turbines. So why then are some start-ups called tech companies and others just … companies? “Tech means more than just producing hardware or software,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It is synonymous with innovation, research and development, long-term thinking.” The label is a signal that “you want to work for me. You want to buy things from me at a higher price. You want to give me capital at a lower cost,” Mr. Zandi said. It is difficult to say what the financial windfall of the tech label is to today’s start-ups since most of them are still private companies, though no doubt they benefit from being close to the tech industry’s deep-pocketed financiers. But toward the end of the dot-com boom at the turn of the century, Raghavendra Rau, now a professor of finance at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, was the co-author of a study that documented the temporary surge in the stock prices of companies that added the dot-com suffix to their names. Those temporary dot-coms took advantage of an investor behavior called “categorization,” said Mr. Rau. Categorization helps us understand something if we’re not familiar with it. “We build up a story in our heads on what we think we are going to see,” he said. “Even if the firm has no cash flows or no profits, we think we know what the story is. And firms are good at seeing what is popular and trying to fit in with that mental map.” Today’s happy adopters of the tech label, however, should note the follow-up research by Mr. Rau and his co-authors after the dot-com bubble popped early last decade. He found that double-switchers — companies that added and later dropped their dot-com identity — saw their stock prices over one month move 38.5 percent ahead of companies that kept the dot-com name. In a few years, maybe being labeled a logistics company won’t be such a bad thing.

Yahoo to Acquire Polyvore in Shopping-Advertising Push: Yahoo is buying shopping-service Polyvore Inc., seeking to improve its online fashion content and boost shopping-related advertising. Polyvore, which combines social and e-commerce tools for apparel and accessories, will initially be integrated into Yahoo’s magazines that focus on beauty and style, according to Simon Khalaf, senior vice president at Yahoo. Terms of the deal, subject to customary closing conditions, weren’t disclosed in a statement Friday by the companies. Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is pushing to add more news, entertainment and shopping information to the Web portal in order to draw a bigger audience and sell advertising. Polyvore lets users put together themed collections of items, like those seen in fashion magazines. People can browse through the collections and then buy the items. Polyvore will add more than 350 retailers to Yahoo’s advertising platform, the companies said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 26

• Audio version of this post on SoundCloud (experimental)

• Smartphone ‘Cold War’ Seen in Asian Moves on Patent Licensing: South Korea and China are adopting antitrust policies that may require companies such as Apple and Qualcomm to license inventions to rivals more easily and cheaply, potentially giving Asian companies a leg up against foreign competitors. Brazil and India are considering similar paths. The clampdown on patents has the potential to alter the balance of power in the global mobile-phone industry, which generated $412 billion last year, according to IDC. These new rules may weaken the ability of Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Qualcomm -- typically among the top 15 U.S. patent recipients each year -- to compete in China, the world’s largest mobile-phone market, and other countries that follow. “We’re going back to the Cold War and the domino theory,” said Bradley Lui, an antitrust lawyer with Morrison & Foerster in Washington. “The authorities in China see the potential use of patents that might affect companies in China, including state-owned enterprises. It might be an impetus for drawing rules more broadly than we would in the U.S.” Asian regulators were spurred by the smartphone wars, in which tech giants battled over billions of dollars on four continents for more than four years. Foreign governments including Korea and China have been looking more closely at their patent policies, emboldened by debates in Washington over whether patents hinder rather than spur innovation. Qualcomm, which got 63 percent of profit from patents last year, has been investigated on three continents for its licensing practices. It struck a deal with China in February that gives domestic Chinese manufacturers a discount on the royalty charges while fining the company $975 million. Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia Oyj’s handset business has been approved by every country except Korea, which is looking for concessions on some of Nokia patents. In China, Microsoft had to accept lower royalties for patents that read on Google's Android operating system, which runs most of the world’s phones including those made by Chinese manufacturer ZTE. The Redmond, Washington-based company simply excluded Korean assets -- where it didn’t have many sales anyway -- from the Nokia deal.

• Snapdeal buys mobile commerce platform MartMobi: In a bid to strengthen its mobility platform for merchants, Snapdeal has acquired Hyderabad-based technology startup MartMobi for an undisclosed amount. The MartMobi platform enables e-commerce businesses, brands and retailers to have an instant mobile presence without writing a single line of code. A self-service platform, MartMobi can be used to create custom applications for retailers across all major mobile platforms, thus ensuring a new source of revenue for online ventures. MartMobi was founded in December 2012 by Satya Krishna Ganni (CEO) and Pramod Nair (CTO) – both serial entrepreneurs, who had earlier co-founded LearnSocial, aP2P learning platform that brings together people who want to teach something they are passionate about. Snapdeal has been on an acquisition spree as it seeks to compete with players such as Flipkart and Amazon for a slice of the $3 billion Indian e-commerce industry. In the recent past, Snapdeal has acquired payments and mobile recharge startup FreeCharge in a cash-and-stock deal while picking up stakes in digital financial services platform RupeePower and logistics venture GoJavas.

• Apple Names Jony Ive ‘Chief Design Officer’: Apple’s Jony Ive, the design genius often credited for Apple’s innovative and unique industrial design language over the past couple of decades, has taken on a new role at the company: Chief Design Officer. The new role elevates him above his previous SVP status, and also installs Richard Howarth as the new head of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye as head of User Interface. Ive’s new role should actually give him more time to actually design, the newly minted C-level executive told the Telegraph. He’s shedding some administrative and management duties to his two new lieutenants, he told the newspaper, and will instead be in charge of both UI and ID, as well as take direct control over retail store design around the world. In a book detailing Ive’s life and work at Apple, Leander Kahney has noted that the British designer has sometimes been uncomfortable with the administrative side of business, and instead prefers to focus on the craft of the actual design process. Ive also notably remains off-stage during Apple’s signature press events, and instead often narrates passionate paeans the company offers during the show in the form of video on the process of designing the products announced by other execs at the events.

• Baihe, a Chinese dating site where users flaunt their financial standing, bags $241M: Chinese dating site Baihe has announced it recently raised RMB 1.5 billion (US$241 million) in series D funding, according to Sina Tech. The investors have not been disclosed. Baihe approaches dating from an empirical and practical – some might say materialistic – perspective, with the end goal being marriage. Users are required to use their real names and are encouraged to share information like their property status and education. In other words, does this person own a home and have a good degree? Posting videos is also encouraged as they are more difficult to manipulate than photos. Members can verify their marital status to prove they aren’t seeking affairs. Recently, the site added a feature wherein users can post their credit score, as rated by a third-party private agency, to show they are in good financial standing. A member can only see information on other people’s profiles that they have shared themselves.

• As Facebook Sweeps Across Europe, Regulators Gird for Battle: Move over, Google. Facebook is the latest American tech giant that Europeans love to hate. For decades, European policy makers have taken aim at America’s giant tech businesses, trying to force them to play by European rules. In the past, Microsoft and Intel were found guilty of abusing their dominant positions to shut out rivals. Google has most recently been under the microscope, and it now faces accusations that it unfairly promoted some of its search products over those of competitors. In recent months, though, regulators’ gazes have turned to Facebook, raising questions about whether the social network has learned from the past mistakes of companies like Intel, Microsoft and Google when dealing with Europe’s policy makers and its legal system. And as Facebook runs into an increasing number of regulatory hurdles here, the scrutiny could potentially distract the company from its ambitions of becoming a one-stop shop for Internet messaging, online publishing and digital advertising. Facebook’s core business, its social networking service, is especially popular in Europe. The company has almost doubled its number of European users to the service, to around 260 million, since 2010. Facebook also has more users in Europe than in the United States, according to eMarketer, a research company. Regulators in Europe, however, are especially focused on how the company collects and handles those users’ data. The region has some of the world’s toughest data protection rules, and policy makers from France, Germany and Belgium are investigating whether Facebook broke Europe’s laws after the company announced a new privacy policy this year. If found to have breached the privacy rules, Facebook may face fines or demands that it change how the company handles people’s data, though the company says it complies with the region’s data protection laws. Taking a page from the playbooks of other American tech companies, Facebook has not stood idle as regulators steadily lined up against it. The company has hired a number of prominent former lawmakers and regulators, including Erika Mann, a former German member of the European Parliament. This month, the company also chose Kevin Martin, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to champion its cause in Washington, Brussels and beyond. Facebook increased spending on lobbying 25 percent, to roughly $570,000, in 2013 compared to the previous year, according the latest figures available from the European Union’s voluntary database of lobbying interests, which may not include all of Facebook’s activities in the region.

• Chinese E-Commerce Giant JD Leads $70M Round In Online Produce Retailer FruitDay: Chinese e-commerce site JD.com is putting its money into fresh fruit and vegetables after it led a $70 million Series C round in FruitDay, a company that sells fresh produce across China. The investment in six-year-old FruitDay, which claims to be China’s largest online produce firm, also included participation from previous backers Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and ClearVue. FruitDay imports over 80 percent of its produce from overseas, and it claimed to be on course to hit 10 million customers before the end of the year — up fourfold from last year. The company said in a statement that it will use the new capital to develop its infrastructure and logistics, hire new management and for general business development. It stands to benefit from more than just JD.com’s money through this alliance, however, since the duo have agreed to “a strategic cooperation” which will allow FruitDay to tap into JD.com’s own logistics and fulfilment network across China to help widen its service in the country. JD.com is commonly thought of as a lesser rival to Alibaba. That’s a pretty hard comparison to shake when you consider that Alibaba was responsible for the largest IPO in U.S. history last year — its current market cap exceeds $230 billion — but JD.com is different in key areas. The company, which is listed on the Nasdaq, and has attracted investment from Alibaba’s fierce rival Tencent, is building out an Amazon-like delivery model which includes its own warehouses — something that Alibaba does not — as this recent New York Times piece points out. Things start to get even more interesting if you pair JD.com’s infrastructure efforts with WeChat, the dominant messaging app in China which is owned by JD.com investor Tencent. JD.com already has a store on WeChat were customers can make purchases without leaving the app, and it could be an interesting medium for fresh fruit and vegetable orders — that’s something Line, another chat app, is pioneering in Southeast Asia right now.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 8

• Twitter shares up on takeover bid rumors, unusual options activity: Is Twitter facing a takeover bid? Some investors hope so. Twitter shares are way up in Tuesday trading, and not because people really like the new design of its tweet-quoting feature. Rumors are flying after numerous press reports, including one from Barron's citing "chatter" that Twitter is fending off a takeover bid. According to Barron's Tiernan Ray, that "unsubstantiated chatter" has also identified Goldman Sachs as the advising firm Twitter's hired to keep takover offers at bay. Twitter declined to comment. The company's shares closed nearly 4 percent up to $52.87 per share. The stock opened at $51.01 and went as high as $53.28 on the admittedly sketchy reports. This is not the first time there's been talk of a Twitter takeover. It's been batted about for years, well before Twitter went public, and the idea resurfaced as recently as January that Google might be the suitor in question. Google has again been named as a possible buyer in this latest round of rumors; the company declined to comment on rumor and speculation. Twitter's had some problems growing its audience since going public, which it's addressed by revamping the site's design to make it easier for newcomers to understand. Unusual options activity: Twitter options active on deal chatter: Twitter Inc's (TWTR.N) shares jumped 5 percent and activity in its options surged on Tuesday on unsubstantiated market chatter about the company fending off a takeover bid. The microblogging service provider's shares rose to $53.28, the highest they have been since October, on market chatter that the company has hired advisers to rebuff a takeover bid. Twitter's options were unusually active on Tuesday with total volume more than 250,000 contracts, or twice the average daily volume, according to Trade Alert data. Call options, usually used to place bullish bets on shares, outnumbered puts by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The reading is about the highest it has been in favor of calls since the beginning of March.

• India startup action #1: Quikr gets $150M funding as it battles global giants for India’s classifieds market: Quikr, a classifieds site that’s one of India’s best-funded startups, today revealed that it has secured a further US$150 million in funding. This is its eighth major round of funding, which now totals nearly US$350 million. “The big things for us going forward are to continue to innovate for India, innovate for mobile, and go deeper in key categories where we already are leaders,” said Pranay Chulet, founder and CEO of Quikr, in a statement. The fresh investment will go towards Quikr’s push for smartphone users and to help build an upcoming, spin-off real estate portal, reports NextBigWhat. More here: Quikr raises $150M from Tiger Global, Kinnevik & Steadview Capital: Online classifieds site Quikr.com, has raised $150 million (over Rs 900 crore) from existing investors Tiger Global and Sweden’s Kinnevik besides a new investor Steadview Capital Management, it said on Tuesday. The venture essentially competes with Naspers-backed OLX in the P2P classifieds business in India. This fresh round of funding will be used to further invest in Quikr’s fast growing mobile business and in its key categories such as cars, real estate, jobs and services. Founded in 2008 by Chulet and Jiby Thomas (who quit the firm later), Quikr was originally started as Kijiji India. The firm later rebranded to Quikr. It is a large scale cross-category classifieds business with over 30 million consumers. These consumers come to Quikr to sell, buy, rent or find products and services in a variety of categories such as electronics and household goods, real estate, cars, bikes, jobs and services. The firm claims that small businesses across 1,000 cities are using the site. It recently announced the launch of a new classifieds website for real estate called quikrhomes.com to allow B2C as well as C2C discovery of properties up for sale as well as those available for rent. For new investor Steadview Capital, this marks another large deal in India. Last year the Hong Kong-based alternative assets manager had backed marquee firms in the digital commerce space in India—e-com venture Flipkart and online cabs aggregator Ola.

• Apple to Push Watch Buyers Online to Avoid Long Lines at Stores: When it comes to buying the Apple Watch, it’s time to think different. Angela Ahrendts, Apple Inc.’s sales chief, wants to scrap the company’s tradition of having customers wait in line, sometimes for days, to get their hands on the latest gadget. Apple has instructed its sales force to prod shoppers to the company’s website to purchase the new smartwatch, which can be pre-ordered Friday. “The days of waiting in line and crossing fingers for a product are over for our customers,” according to a memo to Apple sales staff. “This is a significant change in mindset and we need your help to make it happen.” Business Insider earlier reported on the memo. The approach is the first indication of where Ahrendts is taking the Apple buying experience since joining the company about a year ago from British luxury retailer Burberry Group Plc. While the Apple watch starts as low as $349, its top-end $17,000 gold version pushes the Cupertino, California-based company into a new, lofty realm. “This is not simply a consumer-electronics good -- it’s a luxury good,” J.P. Gownder, an analyst with Forrester Research, said. “There are a lot of good reasons to” to change “but there is that danger that it maybe a little bit, literally, buzz killing.” Apple on Friday begins taking pre-orders online after 3:01 a.m. New York time. Shoppers also will be able to try on the device starting Friday, by appointment. Apple hasn’t begun accepting appointments yet. The watch officially goes on sale April 24 in eight countries and Hong Kong. Encouraging Apple Watch shoppers to make appointments may help the company explain the complicated pricing and options and sell customers on why they would really want it, Gownder said. The watch is being offered in two sizes and three styles as well as different options for bands. The iPhone 6, for example, has three memory and three color options. The watch -- which aims to provide new ways to communicate, track fitness goals and give directions, among other things -- is the first new gadget from Apple in five years. The visibility may help bring greater attention to the total market for wearable devices, such as offerings from Samsung Electronics Co. The global market for all smartwatches may rise to 28.1 million units this year from 4.6 million, according to researcher Strategy Analytics. Sales of the Apple Watch may reach almost 14 million in the fiscal year through September, according to the average estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

• Square Is Using Customer Data to Create Targeted Email Campaigns for Brands Leaping from mobile payments to marketing: Linking online and offline marketing is the ultimate challenge for bricks-and-mortar retailers these days. And after years of powering credit card transactions and mobile payments for small businesses, Square thinks it has found a solution. Today, the San Francisco-based payment company launches Square Marketing—a marketing tool that lets small businesses target customers who shop in stores through email promotions. Since launching in 2009, the mobile payment company has helped merchants and businesses electronically accept credit card payments, collecting a trove of data in the process. Now, the goal is to help brands take action on that data. "The first big step is to empower these small businesses with tools that help them deepen their relationships with their customers," said Kevin Burke, head of customer acquisition at Square. "For the first time, small businesses can now deliver a message to the right person at the right time with the right context, which will increase the likelihood for that customer to value that engagement and also act on it." Merchants that use Square get monthly reports that break down anonymous payment data. Now, businesses will be able to see which sales came from new customers versus returning shoppers. They'll also find out how often customers visited their stores each month. With that data, businesses can target shoppers through email marketing. Emails are targeted based on three groups of customers: those that make three, two or fewer than one visit to a store every six months. Businesses either pay 10 cents per email or $15 a month for unlimited emails. Square has templates brands can use to push out promotions, events and announcements. After sending out an email blast, Square compares email recipients with credit card swipes to show marketers how it drove actual sales. During the tool's pilot program, Square claims merchants doubled their email open rates and redemptions, generating $1 million in sales. Still, Square has a number of competitors that are all going after small businesses. "By getting into this space, they are officially becoming a small business platform, similar to where GoDaddy is trying to go," said Abid Chaudhry, a senior analyst at BIA/Kelsey. "It's a really saturated market, so they have to differentiate themselves with data." Jeanne Jennings, managing director of digital marketing at Digital Prism Advisors, went so far as to say that connecting offline data to email marketing could be a game-changer that puts Square ahead of big-name email service providers like ExactTarget and Silverpop. "If they're going to tie in data, I would suggest that it's more powerful than a Silverpop," Jennings said of Square. "[The opportunity] is huge and is something not a lot of people are doing successfully." But Christopher Donald, a strategist at Inbox Group, predicted larger email service providers like Square won't crush Silverpop and ExactTarget because Square primarily works with small brands, like mom-and-pop coffee shops and clothing boutiques. Small business owners aren't as well versed as big brands in digital marketing, which means Square may need to teach them the ins and outs of email marketing. "They have a chance with small businesses, but most small businesses have little experience with email marketing and even less with targeted messaging based on data collected," Donald noted. "So they'll need to make it really simple, automated and easy, or the small business owner won't take the time to learn anything that has a large learning curve."

• Xiaomi ends exclusive arrangement with Flipkart, will sell on Amazon, Snapdeal, others in India: When Xiaomi first launched in India last July, the Chinese gadget maker did so with online-only sales through one ecommerce store – Flipkart. That ends today as Xiaomi’s India boss, Manu Kumar Jain, announced a wide array of new ways for Indian consumers to buy its smartphones or tablets. Xiaomi has tapped Airtel India’s stores for sales before with the Redmi Note 4G, but the sales channels through Amazon India, Snapdeal, and The Mobile Stores are brand-new. The Mobile Stores has 300 outlets across the country. In addition to that, Jain announced today that Xiaomi would do away with its pre-registrations for flash sales of its Redmi 2 and Mi Pad in a sign that the company is better able to produce supply to meet demand. Xiaomi’s flash sales have been criticized by some users for proving frustrating.

• India startup action #2: Indian mobile wallet MobiKwik scores $25M from Sequoia, Amex, Tree Line, Cisco: Tree Line Asia, Cisco Investments, American Express, and Sequoia Capital are betting on MobiKwik. The firms gave close to US$25 million to the mobile wallet startup. Based in India, MobiKwik is a mobile payment solution. MobiKwik wants to be the only payment service people need. Since the startup has partnered with the major credit cards and 51 internet banking providers as well as 25,000 merchants, users can pay bills and buy products with the service. With partner companies, there is no need to input data like a credit card string. Users just need to sign in and pay, similar to rival Paytm. Cash can be added to your accounts at physical retail stores. Though a browser version exists, the company is best known for its Android, iOS, and Windows apps.

• HP Comes to Terms With the Cloud: A year ago, Hewlett-Packard thought it was going to change cloud computing. Now it looks more as if cloud computing is changing HP, just as the company enters one of the greatest attempts at reorganization in the history of technology. Meg Whitman, HP’s chief executive, will at the end of October split HP into two companies. One will be generally focused on business technology and one on consumer-friendly areas of personal computers and printers. HP thought it would compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for business rentals of computing power via so-called public cloud assets. Companies like Netflix, Snapchat and 3M now run significant parts of their businesses in such clouds, and the field is growing rapidly. After looking at the market, however, HP is now ceding the public cloud. “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us,” said Bill Hilf, the head of HP’s cloud business. “It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.” HP is still selling servers, but increasingly it looks like its biggest customers will be cloud companies themselves, or other computing behemoths, like Facebook. For thousands of other customers, Ms. Whitman hopes to build smaller cloud systems, while figuring out ways these companies can also use Amazon or Microsoft. One such buyer, the Fox Entertainment Group, uses HP computers to create content, but it looks to Microsoft to run its email or handle heavy workloads of noncritical information It uses a cloud run by Salesforce.com for sales management, and others to share things like the latest film both with artists inside Fox and with outside special effects and marketing companies. HP has some business in selling equipment, and more in the related businesses of management and security software, among other things, to hold the disparate parts together. “We have to balance decisions about the content we’re creating that we have to control, with security, financial and work-flow decisions,” said John Herbert, the chief information officer at Fox. “We’ve pushed HP to give us a lot of automation and flexibility.” That is a big change after an understandable mistake. HP dominated the sales of computer servers to business, so it probably looked like an easy transition to selling computing in a new way. In fact, the scale of the big public clouds, each with more than one million servers, is hard to learn, and the field is a tough place for newcomers to profit.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 1

• Amazon unveiled a WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. Coverage here, here, here, here, and here: Amazon.com on Tuesday unveiled its latest effort to bring more speed and convenience to online shopping: A WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. The adhesive buttons are meant to be hung in convenient places around the home — so, for example, you might stick the Tide-branded button on the washing machine or the Huggies button in the nursery. When it's time to restock that item, you push the button, and Amazon will soon ship it to your doorstep. At launch, the Dash button is only available for a limited number of household staples, such as Cottonelle toilet paper, Bounty paper towels and Glad trash bags. Using the Amazon smartphone app, consumers will configure the button to order exactly what they want — such as a four-pack of Gillette razors or a 12-pack. Dash buttons are free and are available now to Amazon Prime customers on an invitation-only basis. Amazon has been packing more and more perks into its Prime memberships, including same-day or even one-hour delivery and the ability to stream its exclusive TV programming. All of these efforts are aimed at more deeply entwining Amazon with its customers’ everyday lives, and in turn, boosting Amazon’s sales. Amazon has set up the Dash Button system so that it’s difficult to, say, end up with a shipment of 20 bottles of laundry detergent if your toddler discovers the bright orange Tide button and finds it really fun to press. Once a Dash Button is pressed one time, it won’t be able to accept another order until the first one has been delivered. You can also opt to receive notifications of Dash Button orders on your phone and can quickly cancel them, if necessary. The Dash button is a powered by the same technology as Amazon's new Dash Replenishment Service. Appliance and device manufacturers can incorporate DRS technology into their products so that an Internet-connected coffee maker is able to order more beans, or a water filtration pitcher can order more filters. Gadget-makers can use DRS in two different ways: They can make it so that their products include a button that allows the consumer to choose when to place an order, or they can set it up so that orders are filled automatically when something is running low. The first DRS-powered devices will hit stores this fall.

• Jack Ma is in India again and met the Indian PM: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s Chairman Jack Ma today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as he came on a visit to India for the second time in just about four months. In his meeting with Modi here today, Ma discussed how Alibaba can help empower small businesses in India, the ecommerce major said without elaborating further. “Had a very good meeting with Jack Ma,” Modi tweeted.

• Snapdeal buys RupeePower, a financial services marketplace, for an undisclosed sum: Snapdeal.com, has acquired a majority stake in Gurgaon-based digital financial products distribution startup RupeePower for an undisclosed amount, the company said in a statement. Post the acquisition, Snapdeal will offer its customers a financial services marketplace. The marketplace will include a wide range of financial services like personal loans, educational loans, credit cards, auto loans, home loans and extended warranties, etc. Financial services companies will be able to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach across more than 5,000 towns and cities. Founded in 2011, RupeePower matches borrowers and lenders in the retail loans space for products like credit cards, personal loans, home loans, auto loans, and consumer loans. Customers are shown the best loan and card offers for comparison and matched with the bank’s criteria. The service is free for customers and the company gets paid by the financial institution upon loan disbursal. The company claims to have enabled Rs 1,500 crore of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial year. Snapdeal.com is on a buying spree. Earlier this month, the company bought a minority stake in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the GoJavas brand. GoJavas was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet. Before that, it had acquired Indian designer wear and accessories e-tailer Exclusively.com (formerly Exclusively.in) for an undisclosed amount. In January 2015, Snapdeal picked up a stake in Smartprix Web Pvt Ltd, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix. The e-commerce firm is also expected to close the acquisition of online mobile recharge platform Freecharge for $450 million (Rs 2,800 crore). This is being regarded as the biggest deal in India’s consumer internet industry.

• After a spectacular start, Apple Pay is beset with problems; survey finds 2/3 of users reported problems: Apple Inc.’s new mobile-payment system is failing to capture all of its potential business, according to a survey, with two-thirds of users reporting problems using the service at the checkout counter.While 66 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners surveyed had signed up for Apple Pay, repeat usage is being hurt, the study by Phoenix Marketing International said. Almost half of users visited a store listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to find they couldn’t use the service because the location wasn’t actually accepting the system or wasn’t ready to do so, according to the survey, which drew about 3,000 respondents. “They’ve created demand, but it can’t be fulfilled,” Greg Weed, Phoenix’s director of card research, said in an interview. “To make it more difficult to use or to create any uncertainty in your customer base as to whether it’s going to work is just going to slow it down.” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is relying on the new system to help expand Apple’s reach by offering new services for iPhone users. The biggest U.S. banks and credit-card networks are using Apple Pay to help accelerate U.S. adoption of mobile payments and keep in control of their transactions. At stake is a market that’s likely to process $67 billion worth of sales this year, according to Forrester Research. Apple declined to comment on the survey, which was conducted at the end of February, four months after Apple Pay was introduced. Apple Pay, which uses short-range wireless signals known as near-field communication, essentially turns an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus into a digital wallet. The system works only at stores that have upgraded their cash registers to accept chip-embedded credit cards. It’s now supported by 2,500 banks in the U.S. and about 700,000 locations accept it, Cook said this month. “It’s gotten off to the most amazing start,” Cook said at an event to unveil features of the company’s Apple Watch. Samsung Electronics Co. earlier this month unveiled its own mobile-transaction system, Samsung Pay, which will be available in the third quarter in the U.S. and South Korea. The technology works at checkout terminals that use older, magnetic-stripe technology, as well as NFC. Google Inc., which already has a mobile wallet, has also said it plans to expand in the business and is working on a new service called Android Pay. The average Apple Pay user made 2.6 in-store transactions using the system in its first four months, the survey by Rhinebeck, New York-based Phoenix found. Almost half used it to purchase something inside an Apple store, while almost a third used it at Macy’s Inc. Thirty-six percent of Apple Pay customers used it at McDonald’s Corp. The majority of people who used Apple Pay said they did so because it was faster than a traditional credit card. Almost 60 percent they were using it because “it’s new, stylish or cool,” while 58 percent said they thought it was safer than a normal credit card. About half of users said it was good for medium-sized purchases. Of the problems that occurred at merchants, 48 percent of those surveyed said it took too long to record the transaction, while 42 percent said the cashier was unfamiliar with Apple Pay and unable to help. Other complaints included transactions that incorrectly posted, or were counted twice. The complaints are just some of the challenges Apple faces as it brings out a new payment system. Apple Pay has also been hit by fraud. Some banks have made changes in how they activate customers’ credit-card accounts after reports that criminals were typing stolen credit-card numbers into Apple Pay and trying to make purchases with their iPhones. Some issuers have found that up to 8 percent of Apple Pay transactions were fraudulent, compared with 0.1 percent on traditional payments cards, said Julie Conroy, an analyst at Aite Group.

• Ubiquity of Malware: Google Says 5% Of Visitors To Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed: According to a study Google conducted with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 5 percent of people visiting Google’s sites and services now have at least one ad injector installed. When it comes to malware, ad injectors may seem relatively benevolent at first. They put an ad on your Google Search page that didn’t belong there, for example. That’s annoying, but doesn’t seem dangerous. But ad injection was pretty much what Lenovo’s Superfish was doing and that created plenty of security issues for users. Indeed, the research, which is based on the analysis of 100 million pageviews across Google’s sites from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, classified about a third of these injectors as “outright malware.” Given that these kinds of ad injectors are often bundles with legitimate software — and desktop developers and download sites often see them as a relatively easy way to make a bit of extra money with their installers and download wrappers — it’s easy enough to install one of them inadvertently. Google and the Berkeley researchers found that ad injectors are now available on all major platforms and browsers. Out of those 5 percent of users that have at least one installed, one-third actually had four of them running simultaneously and half were running two. Clearly, there is a group of users that is a bit more prone to catching one of these than others Google says it has already banned 192 Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users based on this research and it is now using the same techniques the researchers used to scan all new and updated extensions in the Chrome Web Store. Google’s advertising and browser extension policies pretty much ban deceptive ad injectors — as do most other ad networks — but most of the companies that build them aren’t exactly about following the rules. It’s also worth noting that ad networks often also don’t know that their ads are being used in this way. Unless Google and other browser and advertising vendors find a technical solution to this problem, chances are it’ll never fully go away.

• GoDaddy Said to Price I.P.O. Above Expected Range: Nearly four years ago, GoDaddy was an Internet registration company with a history of risqué advertising. Now, as it prepares for new life on the public stock markets, the company is eager to let everyone know that it does a lot more than register website addresses — and doesn’t rely on racy commercials with scantily clad spokeswomen, either. That new vision of GoDaddy appeared to resonate with investors. The company raised $440 million after pricing its initial public offering at $20 a share late Tuesday, above its expected range of $17 to $19 a share, according to a person close to the transaction. At that price, the company has a market value of just more than $3 billion. Under the ownership of the investment firms that bought the company in 2011 for about $2.25 billion — Silver Lake, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Technology Crossover Ventures — GoDaddy has sought to transcend its long-established roots and promote itself as the guide to the Internet for small business. That is a much bigger vision than the one the company had when it was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons as a way for customers to register domain names and host websites. Eventually, it became the biggest Internet registrar, thanks in large part to Mr. Parsons’s unabashedly attention-seeking advertising, which frequently revolved around spokeswomen like the racecar driver Danica Patrick. Among GoDaddy’s most familiar tactics was creating versions of Super Bowl commercials that would never be shown on broadcast television. After the company’s new owners took over, the business tried to change its tone along with its business model. The private equity firms brought in Blake Irving, a former chief product officer at Yahoo, to help transform GoDaddy into what it described in its I.P.O. prospectus as “a leading technology provider to small businesses.” Internet site registration remains GoDaddy’s biggest source of revenue, accounting for just more than half of its sales last year. According to the prospectus, the company now oversees 59 million domains, or about 21 percent of those worldwide. Website hosting services and tools, a natural complement to the domain business, made up 39 percent of its bookings last year. The company believes it still has room to grow in its main market. A study it commissioned found that more than 50 percent of American small businesses did not have a website as of early 2013. But GoDaddy has also become one of the biggest resellers of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity and email services, with that operation making up about 10 percent of its sales last year. GoDaddy has also expanded abroad, going from one English-language website to an array of offerings in 37 countries and 17 languages. About one-quarter of its revenue now comes from international business. Over all, the company’s sales have climbed consistently in the last three years, up to nearly $1.4 billion in 2014. It lost $143.3 million during that period, according to generally accepted accounting principles, though the company points to what it calls adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, which strips out certain accounting charges. Using that measurement, GoDaddy earned $271.5 million.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 18

• Facebook continues edging into commerce - introduces free friend-to-friend payments through messages: (More here and here) Facebook‘s instant messaging service isn’t just for sending smiley faces and photos anymore. Now you can use it to send money instantly to your friends. Facebook, the social networking company, announced Tuesday that American users of its Messenger app would be able to link their debit cards to the service and use it to message money to one another just as easily as they send a snapshot or text. Given Facebook’s huge size and reach, the introduction of its payments feature — which has been highly anticipated by Wall Street — is likely to cause tremors in the nascent market for instantly sending money to individuals, known as peer-to-peer payments. And analysts said that if the payment system succeeded, Facebook would extend it to other types of purchases, such as consumers’ buying of products directly from advertisers. “Facebook could use this as a back door to get people’s debit cards to enable the buy button,” said Robert Peck, an Internet analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. WeChat, which is essentially the Facebook of China, and other Asia-based communications services like Alipay already allow their hundreds of millions of users to send money via instant message. But the technology is only beginning to appear in the United States, where email payment services like PayPal have long been more popular. As messaging has begun to eclipse email as the preferred form of electronic communication, especially among younger users, Facebook has sought to dominate that market much as it dominates social networking. The company’s Messenger app is one of the largest platforms in the world, with more than 500 million monthly users. And last year, Facebook spent nearly $22 billion to buy WhatsApp, a separate messaging platform that now counts more than 700 million active users globally. In the United States, a host of peer-to-peer money transfer services have emerged and are trying to capture the wallets of messaging enthusiasts.

• "Insights as a service" - IBM introduces twitter-fueled data services for business: IBM is betting a fair share of its future on exploiting large troves of data for its business customers, and Twitter is a big-data fire-hose with 6,000 tweets a second, more than half a billion each day. And Twitter’s data-licensing business, though still a small part of the company, is growing rapidly. IBM and Twitter are bringing out the first products on Tuesday, developer tools and cloud-based data analysis services that mine Twitter data. The data services run on IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence technology and on its flavor of Hadoop, the open-source software for processing big data across computer clusters, IBM BigInsights. The developer tools will allow people to write applications that pull in Twitter data. In recent months, IBM has trained more than 4,000 engineers and consultants on using Twitter data in business projects. Its goal is to have 10,000 IBM employees with Twitter data-handling skills. And IBM has worked with more than 100 corporate clients so far, in a range of industries and projects. “We thought the early interest would be in consumer products and marketing, but it has turned out to be much broader than that,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager of IBM’s analytics business. The early work, he said, included companies that want to tap the Twitter data to help guide product development and plan manufacturing schedules. IBM is not naming the companies that have tried out its Twitterized technology, but it did describe a few examples of what it calls “insight as a service.” It combined tweets with hyper-local weather data to help predict where disgruntled telephone or cable customers, whose service might be impaired by severe weather, were most likely to switch suppliers. Using the data-fueled predictive models, customer churn was reduced by 5 percent, IBM says. Another case involved an unnamed drink and food retailer with thousands of shops. IBM blended Twitter data with sales tracked on loyalty cards and smartphone apps, as well as employee data. It found that the company’s best customers were the ones most influenced by turnover in the chain’s sales associates. In short, the human touch matters most to your most loyal customers. IBM has plenty of competition in mining social media data for insights. Rivals include big companies like SAS Institute, Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce, and start-ups like Crimson Hexagon and DataSift. IBM’s deal with Twitter is not exclusive. But David Schubmehl, an analyst at IDC, said that more than its competitors, IBM was focused on applying the Twitter data to a wide range of uses, beyond marketing to tasks like churn analysis, talent management and product development. IBM, Mr. Schubmehl said, is ahead of most of its rivals in its knowledge of many industries. “And it’s the combination of internal corporate data and external data from sources like Twitter where the real payoff is going to come from,” he said.

• Apple, banks at odds over who is to blame for high fraud rates on Apple Pay: A raft of headlines over the last week about unusually high fraud rates from thieves using stolen credit numbers on Apple Pay has exposed what many of the banks privately acknowledge they have been trying to fix for months. An industry consultant, Cherian Abraham, put the fraud rate at 6 percent, compared with a traditional credit card fraud rate that is relatively minuscule, 10 cents for every $100 spent. Mr. Abraham wrote in a blog post, one of the first to spotlight the issue, that the Apple Pay fraud “is growing like a weed, and the bank is unable to tell friend from foe. No one is bold enough to call the emperor naked.” It is not clear, however, that Apple is the naked emperor. More likely it is at least as much the banks’ fault, if not more. Apple Pay itself should, in theory, cut down on fraud because it makes stealing credit card information almost impossible. Each time a transaction takes place, Apple generates the equivalent of a new credit card number so the merchant never actually sees a customer’s information. The vulnerability in Apple Pay is in the way that it — and card issuers — “onboard” new credit cards into the system. Because Apple wanted its system to have the simplicity for which it has become famous and wanted to make the sign-up process “frictionless,” the company required little beyond basic credit card information about a user. Nor did it provide much information to the banks, like full phone numbers and addresses, that might help them detect fraud early. The banks, desperate to become their customers’ default card on Apple Pay — most add only one to their iPhones — did little to build their own defenses or to push Apple to provide more detailed information about its customers. Some bank executives acknowledged that they were were so scared of Apple that they didn’t speak up. The banks didn’t press the company for fear that they would not be included among the initial issuers on Apple Pay. Within weeks of Apple Pay’s introduction, a second set of banks joined: Barclays, Navy Federal Credit Union, PNC Bank, USAA and U.S. Bank. It also appears that banks set up a flawed process to deal with the credit cards that it did flag. Affected users were directed to a customer care phone center, not a fraud prevention center. A customer care center’s mission is to help customers use their cards, leading more fraudulent cards to be approved for use on Apple Pay. Call centers are a poor approach for two reasons,” Mr. Abraham wrote. “One — fraudsters are better at social engineering than call center reps are at sniffing out fraud. In some cases, fraudsters are calling the call center themselves to ‘alert the bank about a trip out of town’ so that fraud rules looking for transaction anomalies (like a customer living in California and transacting in Miami) do not trip them up.” Some Apple supporters have sought to discredit Mr. Abraham based on his affiliation as an adviser to a company that is based on Apple’s main competitor, Android. While he may indeed be conflicted, he has rightfully raised an important security issue that all sides have acknowledged is a problem, though perhaps not to the extent he has contended. All of this has led to a thriving black market in which thieves enter stolen credit card numbers into iPhones, essentially turning the devices into physical credit cards, which they in turn take to stores and walk out with merchandise. Thieves have even used Apple Pay at Apple Stores. In a statement, Apple put the problem squarely on the shoulders of the banks: “During setup, Apple Pay requires banks to verify each and every card and the bank then determines and approves whether a card can be added to Apple Pay. Banks are always reviewing and improving their approval process, which varies by bank.” Apple has now begun providing additional information to the banks that should help deter some of the fraud. The banks, which are responsible for the costs of the frauds, have toughened standards to review customer sign-ups on Apple Pay. No bank executive would speak with me on the record for fear of upsetting their company’s relationship with Apple. If you’re asking yourself, “Why are criminals more inclined to use Apple Pay than just use stolen credit cards at an online retailer?” it’s a good question. It is apparently much easier for banks to catch thieves using stolen credit cards with online retailers because of the delay in shipping a product — it can often take days — as well as the extra information that every online retailer requires, like an address where the product is to be shipped.

• Oracle quarterly earnings: revenue $9.33B, 0% Y/Y. Shares up 1.7% on dividend hike, strong PaaS revenues: Oracle Corp. reported fiscal third-quarter sales that missed analysts’ estimates, hurt by a rise in the U.S. dollar and weak corporate demand for cloud software. Revenue in the period that ended Feb. 28 was little changed from a year earlier at $9.33 billion, and profit before certain costs was 68 cents a share, the Redwood City, California-based company said Tuesday in a statement. On average, analysts projected $9.47 billion in sales and profit of 68 cents, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Without the effect of the stronger dollar, revenue would have gained 6 percent, Oracle said, sparking optimism that the company is making headway with its push into corporate cloud services and sending the shares up in extended trading. The software maker also boosted its dividend by 25 percent to 15 cents a share, up from the prior payout of 12 cents. The company last raised its dividend in 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Oracle shares rose 1.7 percent in late trading following the report and dividend increase. The stock fell 1.2 percent to $42.87 at the close in New York, leaving it down 4.7 percent this year. Third-quarter net income fell to $2.5 billion, or 56 cents a share, from $2.57 billion, or 56 cents, a year earlier. Combined sales in Oracle’s cloud software, platform-as-a-service -- known as PaaS -- and infrastructure businesses were $527 million, up 29 percent from $408 million a year earlier. The company started disclosing cloud revenue in June. In the long term, Oracle’s transition to the cloud should benefit the bottom line, Catz said on the conference call. “For every million dollars of license we sell, we expect to collect another million dollars of support over five years for a total of $2 million,” she said. “While for every million of PaaS we sell, we actually expect to collect $5 million over five years.”

• Adobe quarterly earnings: revenue $1.11B, shares slide 3.8% on weakness in cloud sales: Adobe shares fell late Tuesday after the company reported lower-than-expected subscription growth for its Creative Cloud service and forecast second-quarter earnings and revenue below analysts’ estimates. Adobe increased its Creative Cloud subscriptions 28 percent to 517,000 in the fiscal first quarter, missing the 575,000 average of two analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company projected second-quarter sales of $1.125 billion to $1.175 billion and profit, excluding some items, of 41 cents to 47 cents a share. Analysts expected $1.18 billion and 48 cents, according to the average of 19 estimates. Adobe has introduced cloud-based marketing and creative-design tools as part of its push to generate more sales from subscriptions instead of software installed on computers. Revenue and profit declined in 2013, the year after the transition began, but have recovered as customers are getting used to the new way of buying software. “People are realizing they don’t necessarily need the full suite,” said Norman Young, an analyst with Morningstar Inc., who has a hold rating on the stock. “Our worry is, how are they going to raise prices over time and get people to move over from the point solutions to the full suite?” To encourage people to buy more products, Adobe will add more services, such as stock photos from Fotolia, a company it acquired last quarter. The new offerings should lead to a boost in revenue per user “this year” from that integration, Chief Financial Officer Mark Garrett said in an interview. Adobe fell 3.8 percent to $76.66 in extended trading at 7:25 p.m. New York time. The San Jose, California-based company had gained 17 percent in the past 12 months through the close. Sales were $1.11 billion and profit, excluding some items, was 44 cents a share in the period ended Feb. 27, Adobe said Tuesday in a statement. Analysts had on average projected revenue of $1.09 billion and profit of 39 cents, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• Rumor negates rumor: Alibaba may not invest in Snapdeal: Alibaba may scrap plans to invest in Indian online marketplace Snapdeal, technology website Recode reported, citing a person who was familiar with the matter. Last week, a person informed about the deal had told Reuters that Alibaba was in talks with Snapdeal over a potential cash investment in what could have been the Chinese e-commerce giant's first direct investment in India. Alibaba has held discussions with Snapdeal about a possible investment, but the Chinese company is leaning away from investing in Snapdeal right now, Recode said. Snapdeal competes in India with bigger rivals Flipkart.com and Amazon.com, and media reports had said it was seeking $1 billion in its latest funding round to fuel growth. Alibaba and Snapdeal's talks, however, did not involve a deal close to the $1 billion number reported, Recode cited the source as saying.

• Pinterest valued at $11B on new round of fund-raising: Less than a year after being valued at $5 billion, Pinterest has joined the 11-digit valuation start-up club. Pinterest, an online scrapbooking service, disclosed on Monday that it raised about $367 million in a new round of financing from new and existing investors. It valued the company at $11 billion, putting the start-up in roughly the same range as the Silicon Valley darling Dropbox and the data analysis company Palantir Technologies. In a regulatory filing, Pinterest disclosed that it could raise as much as $211 million in additional financing, bringing its potential haul to $578 million. That would be on top of the $764 million that the nearly five-year-old start-up has raised in previous rounds. Interest has been so ardent that the start-up has nearly tripled its valuation in just about a year and a half. Pinterest has shown strides in expanding and developing revenue, especially with so-called promoted pins that advertisers can buy. Advertising will continue to be a main focus this year, company executives have said.