Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 6

• How Uber Drivers Decide How Long to Work: For nearly 20 years, economists have been debating how cabdrivers decide when to call it a day. This may seem like a trivial question, but it is one that cuts to the heart of whether humans are fundamentally rational — in this case, whether they earn their incomes efficiently — as the discipline has traditionally assumed. In one camp is a group of so-called behavioral economists who have found evidence that many taxi drivers work longer hours on days when business is slow and shorter hours when business is brisk — the opposite of what economic rationality, to say nothing of common sense, would seem to dictate. So who is right? That’s where Uber comes in. When one of the company’s researchers, using its supremely detailed data on drivers’ work time and rides, waded into the debate with a paper this year, the results were intriguing. Over all, there was little evidence that drivers were driving less when they could make more per hour than usual. But that was not true for a large portion of new drivers. Many of these drivers appeared to have an income goal in mind and stopped when they were near it, causing them to knock off sooner when their hourly wage was high and to work longer when their wage was low.Whatever the case, the result seems to have one very obvious implication: Anyone trying to make it in the gig economy should probably pick a favorite platform or two and stick with them rather than constantly jump around from one type of gig to another.

• Goodbye, Ivory Tower. Hello, Silicon Valley Candy Store. Silicon Valley is turning to the dismal science in its never-ending quest to squeeze more money out of old markets and build new ones. In turn, the economists say they are eager to explore the digital world for fresh insights into timeless economic questions of pricing, incentives and behavior. “It’s an absolute candy store for economists,” Mr. Coles said. The pay, of course, is a lot better than you would find in academia, where economists typically earn $125,000 to $150,000 a year. In tech companies, pay for a Ph.D. economist will usually come in at more than $200,000 a year, the companies say. With bonuses and stock grants, compensation can easily double in a few years. Senior economists who manage teams can make even more. Businesses have been hiring economists for years. Usually, they are asked to study macroeconomic trends — topics like recessions and currency exchange rates — and help their employers deal with them. But what the tech economists are doing is different: Instead of thinking about national or global trends, they are studying the data trails of consumer behavior to help digital companies make smart decisions that strengthen their online marketplaces in areas like advertising, movies, music, travel and lodging. Tech outfits including giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoftand up-and-comers like Airbnb and Uber hope that sort of improved efficiency means more profit.

• Satellite owner says SpaceX owes $50 million or free flight: Israel's Space Communication Ltd said on Sunday it could seek $50 million or a free flight from Elon Musk's SpaceX after a Spacecom communications satellite was destroyed last week by an explosion at SpaceX's Florida launch site. Officials of the Israeli company said in a conference call with reporters Sunday that Spacecom also could collect $205 million from Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the AMOS-6 satellite. SpaceX said in an email to Reuters that it does not disclose contract or insurance terms. The company is not public, and it has not said what insurance it had for the rocket or to cover launch pad damages beyond what was required by the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial U.S. launches, for liability and damage to government property. SpaceX has more than 70 missions on its manifest, worth more than $10 billion, for commercial and government customers. The space launch company is one of three major transportation and energy enterprises Musk leads. The others are electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc and SolarCity Corp, and Musk faces separate challenges at each of those money losing companies. Spacecom has been hit hard in the aftermath of the Thursday explosion that destroyed the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its payload. The Israeli company said the loss of the satellite would have a significant impact, with its equity expected to decline by $30 million to $123 million. Spacecom shares dropped 9 percent on Thursday, with the explosion occurring late in the last trading day of the week.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 2

• SpaceX Rocket Explodes at Launchpad in Cape Canaveral - Destroying Facebook Satellite: A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company. The blast is likely to disrupt NASA’s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agency’s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts. The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., intensified questions about whether Mr. Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities. This is not the first problem Mr. Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. Theowner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company’s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges. The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity. Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page “that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” a swipe at Mr. Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.

• Google shelves plan for phone with interchangeable parts - sources: Alphabet Inc’s Google has suspended Project Ara, its ambitious effort to build what is known as a modular smartphone with interchangeable components, as part of a broader push to streamline the company's hardware efforts, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The move marks an about-face for the tech company, which announced a host of partners for Project Ara at its developer conference in May and said it would ship a developer edition of the product this autumn. The company’s aim was to create a phone that users could customize on the fly with an extra battery, camera, speakers or other components.Axing Project Ara is one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Google’s various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones. Former Motorola president Rick Osterloh rejoined Google earlier this year to oversee the effort. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo Group in 2014.“This was a science experiment that failed, and they are moving on,” he said. Project Ara was one of the flagship efforts of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, which aims to develop new devices, but it had various stops and starts. Last year, the company shelved plans to sell the modular phone in Puerto Rico with Latin American carriers.

• When Things Go Very Wrong at a Start-Up: For many young engineers and business people, Silicon Valley is their version of Hollywood. If you want to make it big, go there, create your own company or sign on with a start-up on the way up, and get ready to make a fortune. Maybe you will even become famous. But Hollywood, it turns out, is not the only California destination with a boulevard of broken dreams. Last week, a Medium post about how things went south — badly — at an unnamed tech start-up drew attention to a side of Silicon Valley not many people talk about. For all the Googles and Facebooks and Oracles, there may be hundreds of companies that never make it. And in some cases, the employees who sign on may walk away poorer financially for their effort. As Katie Benner writes, it wasn’t long before online commenters figured out that the company in the Medium post was called WrkRiot. The unraveling of this company is, of course, a cautionary tale about the many things that can go wrong at a start-up, like questionable bosses and plain old bad ideas. Is it indicative of a larger problem in Silicon Valley? Industry veterans would probably say no. Some people view working for a dud of a start-up as a rite of passage — like a bad relationship that teaches you a lesson about what to avoid in a partner. Others figure that even if things go bad, there are so many good jobs in the area, you won’t be down on your luck for long. But just in case, do a little extra homework before you move across the country to take a start-up job.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 16

• Good VR is great — and bad VR is abysmal: VR is a powerful medium, but difficult to work with — because the developer is put in the position of creating a sense of self and presence, more is required of them, and while successes are almost impossible to describe properly, failures are conspicuous and easily dissected. It’s easiest to illustrate with actual examples. Easily the most interesting VR experience I’ve had at E3 (of a dozen or so) was an Oculus demo called “The Climb,” by a team at Crytek. Using the Touch controllers (a new innovation; previously a gamepad was used), you manipulate a pair of disembodied hands, gripping ridges and cracks to make your way up a cliff face. Like many VR games, it sounds rather… boring. In fact, it’s genius, but only within VR — and like so many other games, the only way to find that out is to play it. Nevertheless, It’s excellent for several reasons, and these act as sort of guidelines for content that fits VR’s strengths and avoid its weaknesses. Alas, I was disappointed by “Final Fantasy XV: The VR Experience,” despite being hyped for the game itself. Here, I found, was the worst possible outcome: a game that should and could be interesting, but does almost nothing right. Unlike “The Climb,” it sounds like a blast on paper. You and the other main characters from the game are in a battle with a Behemoth, one of the game’s most well-known monsters. You’re Prompto, the one who has a gun, supporting your buddies as they fight hand to hand. What it amounts to, however, and I’m heartily sorry to say it, is a disjointed and boring five minutes that may leave you less excited for the game than when you donned the headset.

• What are leveraged loans and why does Uber want one? Uber, fresh off $3.5 billion from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, is in talks to closeanother $1-2 billion in the form of leveraged loans. Over the last 24 hours, the term “leveraged loans” has been thrown around a lot, but few in the startup world have seen this term before.The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would like to settle on a 4-4.5 percent interest rate. This appears ambitious but let’s assume that it is accurate. While not completely applicable, Apple issued $12 billion in bonds at a 3.22 percent blended interest rate excluding floating rate debt. Yes, 4.5 percent is greater than 3.22 percent but junk bond references by the Wall Street Journal and Recode should be taken lightly. Junk bonds can generate upwards of 7 percent interest. Plenty of well-known publicly traded companies have issued bonds at rates higher than 4.5 percent and survived to fight another day. Yes, both leveraged loans and junk bonds have higher-than-normal interest rates. Unlike junk bonds, a 4-4.5 percent interest rate for Uber shouldn’t invoke images of the subprime mortgage crisis.

• SpaceX’s latest rocket landing ended in a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’: Elon Musk's SpaceX failed to complete what would have been its fifth landing of a reusable booster rocket Wednesday, a down note on what appeared to be an otherwise successful mission to deliver two Boeing-built communication satellites to high orbit above the Earth. "Falcon 9 was lost in this attempt," the company said in its webcast. As the satellites headed on their way Wednesday, the booster rocket began its descent toward the ocean for a landing on a special floating platform. Video footage of the attempt seemed to show the booster touching down, then flames, before the picture froze.As with previous attempts, SpaceX had said landing the reusable booster rocket would be made more difficult by the fact that it would be falling from higher up. And, the company said, the rocket would have less fuel than normal to control its descent. SpaceX founder Elon Musk later tweeted that it appeared the the thrust in one of three landing engines was insufficient, causing the rocket to come in far too fast. In what he said may have been SpaceX's "hardest impact" ever, the booster ultimately suffered an RUD, or "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Upgrades to compensate for the problem could come by year's end, said Musk.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 15

• Uber Sets Sights on Leveraged Loans for Even More Money: Uber has raised more than $14 billion using all sorts of creative funding sources. Now it may add something new to the list: the leveraged loan market. The ride-hailing start-up is looking to issue as much as $2 billion in securities to investors, said a person briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are managing the process, said the person, adding that the deal has not begun yet and may still fall apart.By tapping leveraged loans, Uber is adding to its trove of billions made up of many types of securities, which the company has been spending as it expands worldwide. Uber has raised equity from traditional venture capital sources, strategic corporate investors and private equity. This month, the company said that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Uber has also raised billions in convertible debt, which can be exchanged for equity at a future date. Uber has redefined private fund-raising, drawing hundreds of millions in new cash or debt at a rapid pace of once every few months. The company needs financing as it now operates in at least 69 countries and is fighting an expensive battle in China against a rival, Didi Chuxing, which is also raising money to expand. Leveraged loans are rarely used among start-ups. A leveraged loan is a security issued to a company that has a lot of debt on its books already, and thus is perceived by investors as being a higher risk. The loans are typically used for leveraged buyouts and are seldom seen in Silicon Valley. Uber has been able to tap less traditional funding sources because investors think its size and scale make it a safer bet than other Silicon Valley companies. Uber’s valuation of $62.5 billion — making it the highest valued venture-backed start-up in the world — would not change with this new investment. Leveraged loans also allow Uber to raise money without diluting the holdings of its many equity investors — some of which have been through more than a dozen rounds of financing.

• Twitter has invested in music streaming service SoundCloud: Two years ago Twitter thought about buying SoundCloud, but ended up walking away from the music service. Now Twitter has bought a piece of SoundCloud instead. Twitter has invested around $70 million in the music service, as part of a round that should end up in the $100 million-range, according to sources familiar with the deal. The round is expected to value SoundCloud at about $700 million — the same value that investors placed on the company in 2014, when it raised $60 million; since then it has also raised a debt round. It’s unclear whether the Twitter investment is part of a strategic partnership, but that would make sense: Twitter might view via an integration with SoundCloud as a way to increase growth and engagement, and SoundCloud may look at Twitter as a way to promote its newly launched subscription service, which is crucial to the company’s plans. And both companies could use some help. Twitter has been punished by Wall Street for its inability to add users at a rapid clip; SoundCloud’s flat valuation indicates that investors are also worried about its own growth prospects.

• Alibaba Tries to Shore Up Investors’ Confidence: The Alibaba Group of China has disappointed investors since its record-breaking American stock listing nearly two years ago, as volatile financial results and regulatory run-ins have driven the price of its shares down almost to where they began. Now the e-commerce giant is trying to reassure. For the first time, Alibaba on Tuesday offered investors financial guidance for the coming year, saying that it expected revenue growth to accelerate from last year’s pace. At a meeting at its Hangzhou headquarters, Alibaba cited strength in its core business, despite China’s slowing economic growth, as well as benefits from new ventures that have raised eyebrows among some investors The forecast comes as Alibaba seeks to demonstrate that its strategy, which has long focused on growth, is good for business. In China, Alibaba operates online sales platforms that connect consumers with mom-and-pop stores, as well as with global brands like Burberry and Zara. It has been showing sales growth on its platforms using a measure called gross merchandise volume, a yardstick for transactions across its platforms. Alibaba said on Tuesday that it would de-emphasize that figure, saying it would no longer report it quarterly. It will continue to report an annual figure, and offered a target for 2020.

• India's Space Program Takes On Elon Musk: India’s space agency will launch a record 22 satellites on a single rocket as it tries to ease a global backlog and demonstrate the ability to compete with commercial spaceflight companies run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.Satellites from the U.S., India, Canada and Germany will enter orbit after a scheduled June 20 liftoff from the Sriharikota barrier island along the southeast coast, the agency’s chairman, A.S. Kiran Kumar, said in an interview in Bengaluru.The 22 machines being launched next week include an Earth observation satellite to capture light invisible to the naked eye. It is the biggest single launch by India, trailing Russia’s 33 in 2014 and NASA’s 29 the year before. India last month successfully launched a scale model of a reusable spacecraft, a project that in time could pit the nation against Bezos and Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The country also injected a probe into Mars’ atmosphere in 2014 for just $74 million, about 11 percent of the cost of the U.S.’s Maven probe.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 23

• To halt smartphone slide, Samsung rewrites playbook: From the way it chooses smartphone components to the models it brings to market, Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has undergone a painful process of breaking from its past to reverse a slide in its handset business. For example, the world's largest smartphone maker agonized over camera specs for its flagship Galaxy S7 until the last moment - ultimately defying industry convention by opting for fewer pixels in exchange for improved autofocus features and low-light performance, a move that contributed to early success. It also pared back its product line-up, overcoming internal resistance, enabling it to streamline production, an executive said. The handset business has now stabilized, and had its best profit in nearly two years in January-March, though historically low smartphone industry growth still leaves Samsung looking for the "next big thing". After peaking in 2013, a sharp drop in mobile profits exposed Samsung as slow to adjust to the changing market: its budget devices were overpriced and unappealing versus Chinese offerings, and the 2014 version of its Galaxy S flopped. That prompted a cull among executives and stoked investor worries Samsung might not be able to recover as rivals including Apple, Huawei  and Xiaomi gained market share at its expense. There was no sweeping, across-the-board fix. Rather, Samsung embarked two years ago on an overhaul that included a shift from a phone-for-all-needs approach towards a line-up that emphasized economies of scale. It revamped design, using metal frames and curved screens, and gave high-end features such as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens to its low- and mid-tier products. The product cull paid off; the revamped models helped Samsung recover in big markets such as India. "There was a feeling the sheer number of phones in the market was confusing for customers," said a Samsung India executive, declining to be identified as he was not authorized to speak with the media.Samsung's Kim says his focus now is on premium-end smartphones - those costing $600 and above - where not all industry players have the muscle to compete.

• Selling Uber Shares May Be Tougher Than You Think: SharesPost Inc., a broker of private technology stocks, approached investors with what seemed like an alluring offer: a potential investment in a fund that would hold Uber Technologies Inc. shares. In exchange for exposure to the high-flying ride-hailing startup, they were asked to part with at least $100,000 each and agree to hold the stake until the company goes public or gets acquired, with no vote in business decisions or visibility into its operations or finances. But SharesPost said it called off the proposed deal. The plan was to purchase as much as $10 million in preferred shares from Uber’s most recent round of financing and package them in an investment fund to be sold at a premium, according to offering documents obtained by Bloomberg. SharesPost said it wouldn’t pursue the transaction, citing a “lack of investor interest.” “It became clear that the minimum funds would not be collected for this deal, and as a result, the sales team began to inform interested clients of this fact,” Greg Berardi, a spokesman for SharesPost, wrote in an e-mail. The erstwhile offering shows the complexity of giving investors the chance to gain shares in a startup that wants to tightly control who gets a sliver, no matter how small. Like many startups, Uber limits sales of its shares. Such transactions can distort a company's valuation, leave control in the hands of unknown investors and result in tax liabilities for the company, its employees and other shareholders. Uber declined to comment on the SharesPost proposal, but a spokeswoman said when Uber learns of potential unauthorized shares on the market, the company contacts the people involved. SharesPost's role in share sales has drawn regulatory scrutiny. The broker settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012 to resolve claims that the online marketplace for private-company shares acted as an unregistered broker. SharesPost paid $80,000 and Greg Brogger, then the company’s president, paid $20,000, without admitting wrongdoing. Brogger is now SharesPost’s chief executive officer and chairman, and the company is registered with the SEC. SharesPost's spokesman called the 2012 settlement “completely irrelevant to a 2016 fund that never got off the ground.” Speaking to a Silicon Valley audience in March, SEC Chair Mary Jo White cautioned that secondary transactions could amplify “errors or misconceptions in valuation.” She highlighted the lack of transparency in such deals as cause for concern. For the proposed Uber transaction, the documents said a fund managed by a member of SharesPost’s board of directors would buy the shares at a 2 percent premium to their price in last year’s funding round, which valued the company at $62.5 billion, and then resell them for 5 percent more. It’s unclear where the SharesPost fund would acquire the Uber stake from. VC Experts, a private-market research firm, estimated that the transaction would give Uber an implied valuation of more the $70 billion.

• Modi’s Mini-Shuttle Set to Blast Into Elon Musk’s Race for Space: India is set to launch a scale model of a reusable spacecraft on Monday, a project that in time could pit the nation against billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The winged vessel -- one-fifth of full size -- is due to blast off on a rocket from Sriharikota base on the southeastern coast, reach an altitude of 70 kilometers (43 miles) and glide back at supersonic speeds to Earth for a splashdown in the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.India put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014 for just $74 million, demonstrating a combination of technological capability and low costs that chimes with the goal of more frequent space travel being championed by Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC. Both companies seek to curb costs by making rockets reusable and are conducting test launches more often.India plans to spend about 75 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) on its entire space program in the year through March 2017, a fraction of the yearly $19-billion-dollar budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S.  The reusable space vehicle is supposed to provide a cost-effective and reliable option for operations such as launching satellites, according to the Indian space agency. Mock-upson government websites resemble the long-defunct NASA space shuttles.The nation remains about eight years away from a full-scale version of the reusable space vehicle, and still has to cross the hurdle of steering the vessel safely back to land rather than water, according to the Indian space agency. Musk’s SpaceX in December pulled off a soft, vertical touchdown after the two-stage rocket propelled its payload. Less than month earlier, Bezos sent one of his test rockets to the edge of space and landed it safely back on Earth. "India has to start somewhere, sometime," Lele said. "That time is now."

• Start-Ups Once Showered With Cash Now Have to Work for It: The balance of power is shifting across tech start-up land. Not long ago, entrepreneurs had the upper hand. With investors eager to get a piece of the next Uber or Airbnb, entrepreneurs often just lifted their little fingers to get financing. Some investors let the entrepreneurs choose their own terms, while others gave multimillion-dollar paydays to start-up founders long before their companies were a success. Now investors have the advantage. Instead of venture capitalists begging to be allowed to invest, entrepreneurs are coming to them begging for cash. Investors are exerting their newfound power by asking more questions about a start-up’s prospects and taking more time to invest. Some are pushing for management changes or for financing terms that would help cushion any losses they might face. “Venture capitalists are putting founders through everything short of a proctology exam before they invest,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The changing balance of power is evident in the numbers. Venture capitalists have put less money into start-ups in the United States in the last two quarters, according to the National Venture Capital Association; funding dropped 11 percent to $12.1 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier. With a smaller capital pie, entrepreneurs have to work harder for a piece. Investors have also been better able to negotiate financing terms that benefit them. According to a survey from the law firm Fenwick & West, investors of richly valued start-ups have been getting more provisions such as guaranteed payouts and minimum investment gains. Such terms are still relatively rare, but tend to become more common after the number and size of deals decline, said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick & West partner. Above all, investors are no longer paying any price to invest in a start-up. Since the beginning of this year, about 30 companies have had to settle for lower valuations than they previously received when they raised money, according to the research firm CB Insights. That is nearly as many as in all of 2015. “Investors have materially more time to do diligence than before,” said Ben Ling, a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. “Across our portfolio, even for the best companies, fund-raising is a longer process.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 11

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX nails landing at sea: After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football field-sized floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled off the dramatic feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year. The landing, the first ever of a rocket’s first stage at sea, was heralded as a breakthrough for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry, and its leader, SpaceX. The companies’ efforts to recover their rockets is part of what Bezos calls the “Holy Grail” quest of lowering the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments. Typically, the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a second stage, or a capsule, to space. But if the commercial sector can build innovative rockets that can be reused, many think that would dramatically reduce the costs, a key step toward making space travel more routine. SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform. The first stage was hurtling toward space when it started a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning itself around and heading back toward Earth. As it approached the platform, the booster was tilted into the wind but was able to right itself just before touching down, about nine minutes after liftoff. Crews were expected to board the ship and secure the rocket to the platform.

• Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing’s Giants Take In Billions: Imagine building an enormous beach resort, maybe the best in the world. Instead of renting the rooms, you charge guests based on the grains of sand they touch. You charge very little per grain, but if they lie on enough of them, it adds up. That is one way to think about what is going on at the world’s biggest cloud-computing companies. Instead of grains of sand, think about computing cycles, the activity that goes on in a computer server that is running software. For a price, think about one line of software code for two one-millionths of a penny. When tolls that tiny are paid often enough, they can make a billion-dollar business. At Amazon Web Services, which pioneered this method late last year, there is no charge for the first million times a customer runs code. Thereafter, A.W.S. charges by the million times, or for the hundreds of milliseconds the computer is used. “The scale at which we operate allows us to do innovative things,” said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy at A.W.S. “When we get better economies of scale, we’ll use that to our advantage.” This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often. In other words, you have to be really big to worry about making money off things that are really tiny.

• China's $6 Billion Tech Funding Boom Signals Flight to Quality: If the startup funding party is finally breaking up, somebody forgot to tell China. The second-largest economy is avoiding the pitfalls affecting venture capital elsewhere, as investors around the world rein things in after an unprecedented technology financing boom. Ride-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate and online property service Homelink are close to raising at least $6 billion, people familiar with the separate deals say. The operator of Alipay, Alibaba’s affiliate, is targeting more than $3.5 billion alone, which would mark the technology industry’s largest single round of financing. All those numbers emerged over the space of just three days last week. In China, larger startups like them are attracting major backers and garnering the lion’s share of the money even as smaller operators are left to struggle. The frenetic pace is remarkable at a time venture investment globally is plateauing: there were fewer U.S. deals in the first three months than at any time in the past four years, according to research firm PitchBook Data. “China’s VC market is becoming very polarized," said Jarod Ji, an analyst at Beijing-based research firm Zero2IPO. “There’s not a lack of money in the market, but investors do feel that there’s a lack of good projects and that’s why companies like Didi are getting so much money.” The top 20 percent of Chinese startups could get 80 percent of the funding, he added.

• SAP quarterly results fall short as U.S. market slows: Europe's largest software company, SAP (SAPG.DE), warned late on Friday that first-quarter results would be weaker than expected due to slower sales of software licenses to corporate customers, particularly in Brazil and the United States. Software license revenues fell 13 percent while the company's newer, but lower-margin cloud software business grew 33 percent. Business customers are shifting to cloud-based software delivered over the Internet instead of relying on older software packages they install and run on in-house computers. "America was a little more lumpy in terms of the signing of contracts," Chief Executive Bill McDermott told reporters on a conference call, noting that U.S. revenue from its classic on-premise software business grew more slowly than expected. First-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose 5 percent to 1.10 billion euros ($1.25 billion). Analysts, on average, had been looking for a first-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, of 1.15 billion euros, with 12 estimates ranging from 1.09 billion to 1.25 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. The company also reported revenue of 4.73 billion euros, shy of the I/B/E/S average forecast of 4.83 billion euros.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 4

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 23

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

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

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

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