Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 24, 2017

• Snapchat is raising more money around $20 billion valuation: Snapchat may have first made its name in the crowded world of mobile apps with an ephemeral messaging service, but the startup and its wildly popular app are not disappearing anywhere soon. TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that Snapchat is raising yet more financing at around a $20 billion valuation. Sources with knowledge of the deal say the social media giant is in the process of a round of about $200 million. This new financing, we understand, is a follow-on to the $175 million Series F round led by Fidelity. Snapchat was said to be valued at $16 billion in that round, flat on the year before. However, filings from earlier this month and embedded below, uncovered for us by market analysts VC Experts, show that the Series F was expanded.Expanding the Series F with a Series FP, as it’s described in the document below, would also fit in with a description we’ve heard more than once about Snapchat’s fundraising: The startup is “always raising” on a “rolling” basis, partly because investors are so interested. “They get offers all the time,” one investor close to the company said. “And once you start to grow on this path, many people come to give you money. You don’t know how to value the company, so the best way to do that is to do some kind of rolling funding. When you have a hot company and many people are approaching you, you do a market of discovery.” That may be different from other startups, but in a way it reflects Snapchat’s own fast growth and its taste for trying out new things like QR codes to connect to accounts and content, their crazy face-changing filters and more.

• Spotify revenue surged, losses grew too, but far more slowly -  which is great news for Spotify: Spotify lost more money in 2015.  And its managers and investors are probably very happy about that. That's because the music streaming service's revenue increased much faster than its losses — something it hasn't always been able to say.  Given that Spotify has told its investors it is headed for an IPO in the next few years, it's the kind of performance it will need to be able to replicate with consistency. Filings show that Spotify, based in Sweden and the U.K., generated revenue of $2.12 billion last year, up about 80 percent from the $1.18 billion it brought in the prior year (all prices in the story converted from euros to dollars at the exchange rate from December 31, 2015). Losses, meanwhile, hit $188.7 million — but that number was only up 6.7 percent from the previous year's total of $176.9 million. That's a much, much better performance than 2014, when Spotify's losses ballooned by 289 percent, and its revenue was only up 45 percent. As in the past, most of Spotify's revenue comes from its subscription service, which now boasts more than 25 million users worldwide. And most of that money goes right back out the door to music labels, artists and other music rights-holders. If Spotify can keep it up, then it will have pulled off something special by showing it can run — and grow — a streaming music service at scale. Traditionally, streaming music services have struggled because their music expenses increased at the same pace as their growth — or even faster than their growth.

• Amazon no longer offers price match refunds on anything but TVs: Amazon has quietly ended its price protection policy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when a handful of startups have launched to help consumers automate the process of requesting refunds when prices change on online sites, including Amazon and dozens of other e-commerce stores. For example, newcomer Earny recently debuted a mobile app that helps consumers get their money back on purchases after price drops. Earny co-founder Oded Vakrat says that, so far, around 50 percent of the refund requests the app handled were for Amazon purchases. Earny also competes with Paribus, which offers a similar service both online and on mobile. Meanwhile, older sites like camelcamelcamel allow consumers to track Amazon price drops and receive alerts. Prior to this policy change, Amazon’s price protection policy was already one of the least friendly to consumers, as it used to provide seven days of price matching on price drops. That means if you purchased an item from Amazon which the company later marked down, you could request a refund. However, unlike many stores, Amazon only matched its own prices for items, not competitors’ pricing — with the exception of TVs and cell phones. In comparison, other stores have more pro-consumer policies, including Best Buy, which provides price matching during its return and exchange period (15 days is standard) and Walmart, which offers 90 days of protection, for example. As for how this change will impact startups like Earny and Paribus? Vakrat optimistically referred to this blow as a “great opportunity” to show why consumers need startups like Earny to have their back. Amazon insists that its price policy has not changed — it says that its prices are dynamic and that its customer service agents have made exceptions in the past, but that wasn’t the rule. In addition, Amazon wants to caution its customers that sharing their credentials with third-parties puts their accounts at risk.

Daily Tech Snippet: March 30

• Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China: China’s government said on Monday that it would take steps to more strictly manage websites in the country, its latest push to set boundaries in the wider Internet. A draft law posted by one of China’s technology regulators said that websites in the country would have to register domain names with local service providers and with the authorities. It was not clear whether the rule would apply to all websites or only to those hosted on servers in China. Chinese laws can be haphazardly enforced and are usually vague, and because the new rule is only a draft, analysts said they expected the regulator, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, to specify later to whom the law would apply. If the rule applies to all websites, it will have major implications and will effectively cut China out of the global Internet. By creating a domestic registry for websites, the rule would create a system of censorship in which only websites that have specifically registered with the Chinese government would be reachable from within the country. If the law applies only to sites hosted in China, it would still represent a consolidation of power by Beijing. Forcing registration with Chinese entities is likely to create a new boom in domain-name service registrars. At the moment, Alibaba operates China’s primary domain-name service provider, called Wan Wang. The new rule would also enable the Chinese government to keep closer tabs on the real identities of website operators. It would also help Beijing assemble a registry of important websites if China wants to break away from the global registry that unifies the Internet, Mr. Creemers said. The new rules are the latest in a string of measures taken by the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping to assert control over the Internet. This year, regulators created rules to block foreign companies from publishing online content in China without the government’s consent. Regulators also shut down the social media accounts of the sharp-tongued tycoon Ren Zhiqiang.

• Google Fiber is officially adding phone service for $10 a month: Many people can already buy TV and Internet service from Google Fiber. Now, the company that brought gigabit speeds to Austin and Kansas City is moving deeper into the telecom industry by offering its own bundled telephone service. For $10 a month, Google Fiber customers soon will be able to buy an add-on known as Fiber Phone — a service that, according to a company blog post, appears to mimic much of the functionality of Google Voice. Voicemail on Fiber Phone can be automatically transcribed and sent to your email. You'll get unlimited domestic calling, as well as international calls at Google Voice's rates. And you'll have access to one phone number that can be set up to ring all of your phones — whether landline or mobile. A series of leaked emails in January first uncovered Google Fiber's plans to move into phone service. But now the decision is official: Fiber Phone will roll out gradually across all of the company's existing markets. The company declined to name the initial launch markets, saying those details will come later. The service comes with a little black box that sits beside your home phone. It has both ethernet and phone jacks, and will work with most handsets except for old rotary phones, according to Kelly Mason, a company spokesperson. Google Fiber's effort to draw in phone customers highlights how the company is becoming more like traditional service providers even as many telecom companies are looking to become more like Internet content firms. Even providers of cellphone service have been shifting their focus away from voice and toward the more lucrative provision of mobile data. Reports this week suggest T-Mobile may soon unveil new phone plan options that eliminate voice service entirely to give you a bigger bucket of data. Fiber Phone fits within these trends in that it would help customers add some cloud-based functionality to their home phones. But it's not immediately clear why consumers would pick Fiber Phone over Google Voice. The two services share many of the same features, but Fiber Phone carries a subscription cost and requires an at-home installation that you don't need with Google Voice. In this respect, Google Voice might be considered a "better" service.

• Instagram’s New Algorithm Means the Free Ride May Be Over for Brands: Instagram is testing a new algorithm, which means the company is (or soon will be) choosing which posts users see in their feed and in what order. That could be a good thing for users. It means that, if the algorithm works, you should see the best photos and videos every time you open the app. For brands, though, especially those that rely on the app to reach their customers for free, the algorithm news is less than stellar. Influencers are getting nervous too. That’s because an algorithm gives Instagram control over what you see, but also what you don’t see. The fear among some brands is that the new Instagram algorithm will relegate their posts to the sidelines. What happened with Facebook is this: It originally encouraged brands and businesses to build followings for their Pages, and even offered ad units specifically intended to acquire more “fans.” The idea was that more followers meant more people would see the company’s posts in their feed, so brands paid willingly to acquire them. Then Facebook slowly pulled the rug. Little by little it changed its algorithm until posts from brand Pages were seen by just a fraction of users who followed the Page. In 2012, Facebook announced organic posts only reached 16 percent of a Page’s fans, and encouraged brands to pay to sponsor their posts instead. Brands are bracing for a similar change with Instagram.

• No One Wants to Be ‘the Next Square’ Anymore: Makers of once-prominent credit card readers are retrenching or outright folding after Square’s disappointing IPO. A year ago, being known as the “Square of Canada” was a badge of honor. Payfirma Corp.’s smartphone-compatible credit card readers were in high demand, and local investors supplied the Vancouver startup with $13 million in funding. Like Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer of Square Inc. (and Twitter Inc.), Payfirma CEO Michael Gokturk said he was aiming for “hypergrowth.” Gokturk doubled his staff to 80, including a chief operating officer formerly of Intuit Inc., and started talking about an initial public offering. But by November, being the “Square of” anywhere suddenly wasn’t such a hot title. That month, Square sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at about $2.9 billion, less than half its private valuation from a year earlier. In the runup to the IPO, analysts began questioning whether the card-reader maker should really be priced like a high-flying tech company. Its stock price is hovering around $13, right where it was after its first day of trading. “Now that they started going through the rigors of a public market, you can see that their market is actually quite limited,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “It’s going to be much harder going forward for companies that try to emulate their model to raise capital.” 

• Snapchat Adds Voice, Video Calling to Mobile Messaging App:  Snapchat, operator of a popular social-messaging app, released an update that steps up competition with Facebook Inc., owner of rival mobile communication services Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Los Angeles-based Snapchat bolstered its chat function with multimedia features including voice and video calling and digital stickers. Called Chat 2.0, the feature emulates "face-to-face communication," while making it easier to switch between video chatting, texting and calling, Snapchat said Tuesday in a blog post. WhatsApp introduced voice calls last year, but users are still waiting for video calling. Facebook’s Messenger communications app added this video capability in April. Last week, Fortune reported Snapchat acquired Bitstrips, a Toronto-based maker of personalized avatars or "bitmojis." Snapchat declined to comment on the acquisition, which Fortune said was worth about $100 million. The deal suggests Snapchat will make its stickers more customizable in the future.

• Spotify Expected to Sign $1 Billion Financing Deal: Spotify is about to close on a $1 billion deal that would double the amount of financing the music-streaming company has raised since its founding a decade ago, people briefed on the matter said Tuesday. The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which allows Spotify’s investors to change their securities into equity at a future date, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet public. By using convertible debt, Spotify obtains the funds, without needing to change its valuation. The terms of the debt, however, may put pressure on the company to go public sooner. The company had an equity value of $8.4 billion last year. Funds associated with the private equity firm TPG as well as the investment firm Dragoneer put in $750 million of the $1 billion, with the rest coming from other institutional investors, the people said. The transaction, which was placed by Goldman Sachs, is expected to close on Friday, they said. The terms give the investors the ability to convert to equity at a discount to an initial public offering price, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The discount increases if Spotify waits longer than a year to do so, they said. The coupon payment on the debt would also continue to rise over time, the people said. The deal is similar to the one that Goldman Sachs arranged for Uber in January 2015. The ride-hailing company raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt. Should the company not go public within a certain time, the interest rate on those securities would climb. TPG Special Situations Partners, an $18 billion fund within TPG that does transactions other than leveraged buyouts, participated in the deal, as did TPG Growth, which has invested in other start-ups like Uber and Airbnb. Spotify may use the funds for acquisitions, investments and international expansion, the people said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 4th

• Amazon Introduces 2 Alexa Voice-Controlled Devices: Amazon’s Alexa is gaining new powers, and a couple of new looks, too. Amazon, the Internet retailer, on Thursday announced two new siblings for the Echo, the voice-controlled household assistant that people address as “Alexa” and that became a surprise hit for the company last year. One new product, Amazon Tap, is a slimmer, shorter, portable version of the Echo. Rather than requiring an electrical wall connection, the Tap runs off a rechargeable battery. It connects with phones and the Internet through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The Tap acts as an ordinary wireless speaker for a phone, but it also provides Alexa on the go. People can ask about weather and traffic, ask for the news, tell it to play a song from a streaming service, or do any one of dozens of other tasks. The device, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, will sell for about $130. Amazon also announced the Echo Dot, essentially an Echo without that device’s powerful speaker. The Dot, which will sell for about $90, looks like a hockey puck, and is meant to provide Alexa’s voice functions for existing speaker systems. The Dot connects to those speakers either through a wire or over Bluetooth; after that, it functions as another Echo. Dot shipments also willbegin at the end of March. Sales will initially be limited to people who already own an Echo or one of Amazon’s Fire TV devices — a Dot buyer will have to ask Alexa to order one. The new devices suggest that Amazon has an expansive vision for the Echo, which looked like an experiment for the company when it was introduced in late 2014. The company has not provided sales data for the device, but it has said that sales exceeded its expectations and that customer reviews are rhapsodic. Amazon appears to have increased investment in the device — it keeps adding new features and capabilities to Alexa, and this year it ran Super Bowl ads about the gadget.

• EBay Banks on Bar Codes for a Comeback: Hoping to outgrow its image as a glorified garage sale and move up in Google searches, EBay is turning to technology developed 70 years ago: the bar code. The machine-readable symbol that keeps supermarket lines moving is helping EBay manage vast amounts of data associated with the 6 billion products—from smartphones to video games, handbags to tires—listed at the online marketplace each year. Merchants will be able to enter a full description of a sales item by using a smartphone camera to scan its Universal Product Code. EBay reads the scan and automatically lists the item’s specifications. Before, every detail, including brand, model, and dimensions, was entered manually. UPCs are a central part of what EBay calls its “structured data initiative,” started in June, to organize items into a catalog that shoppers can easily search using filters such as price, features, and condition. The switch started with auto parts and accessories, one of EBay’s fastest-growing categories. The UPC is also used to call up consumer reviews and product images, which create a degree of permanence on EBay that search engines will reward with better placement. EBay says the code provides a sufficient baseline of information because 80 percent of all products sold there are new. A key goal is to standardize the amount and type of information that merchants list. The initiative will eventually expand to most items on the site.So far, some merchants like the change. Quick Ship Electronics, which sells consumer devices on EBay, had some desktop computers and laptops languishing in its inventory. Once the company entered the UPCs on EBay’s catalog, the items sold within days, CEO Jordan Insley says. 

• HP Enterprise's revenue, profit beat estimates: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co's corporate hardware and services division, reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit, helped by strength in its hardware business. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) shares were up 6.4 percent at $14.47 in extended trading on Thursday. Revenue in HPE's enterprise group business, from which it derives more than half of its total revenue, rose about 1 percent to $7.1 billion in the first quarter ended Jan. 31, from a year earlier. The company's revenue fell to $12.72 billion from $13.05 billion. 

• Apple supplier Broadcom to slash 1,900 jobs globally: Chipmaker Broadcom Ltd, the company created following the merger of Avago and Broadcom, said it would cut about 1,900 jobs globally across its businesses. Shares of Broadcom, which also supplies to Apple Inc, were up 8 percent at $148.20 in extended trading on Thursday. The company said it expects to take charges of about $650 million related to the job cuts through 2018.  Avago completed its $37 billion deal for Broadcom last month. Revenue for the legacy Avago business fell 4 percent to $1.77 billion in the three months ended January 31.

• Snapchat Raises $175 Million From Fidelity at Flat $16 Billion Valuation: Snapchat has raised $175 million in new venture funding from Fidelity at the same $16 billion valuation it raised at back in May, according to a source familiar with the deal. That means Snapchat has now raised around $1.4 billion in total. The Wall Street Journalfirst reported the new funding. A flat valuation isn’t usually a great sign, but the raise comes at a time when lots of tech companies — including Jawbone and Foursquare — are raising down rounds, or taking money at a lower valuation than their last fundraising. In that vein, this investment doesn’t look bad.

• Facebook Messenger adds music, starting with Spotify song sharing: First came the Transportation hub with Uber, and now Facebook Messenger is launching “its very first music integration” with Spotify. Inside the Messenger “More” section in chat threads, all iOS and Android users will now find a Spotify option. Tap it and they’ll be shuttled into Spotify’s app where they can “Search for something to share.” Once they select a song, artist or playlist, they’ll be popped back to Messenger with the option to share the photo of the cover artwork. When a friend taps that photo, they’ll be bounced over to Spotify to listen.If Messenger can become a richer social layer connecting Spotify users, it could inspire deep conversations about music, boosting its engagement. That generates platform lock-in and potential monetization opportunities for Facebook. And for Spotify, Messenger will provide virality that could help it fend off Apple Music and convince more non-streamers of its value.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 5

• LinkedIn Shares Plummet 30% After Sales Outlook Trails Estimates: LinkedIn Corp. shares lost almost a third of their value after the professional networking site forecast a year of slower revenue growth amid signs of weakness in sales of advertising and marketing tools. Revenue will be about $820 million in the first quarter, and $3.6 billion to $3.65 billion for 2016, the company said in a statement Thursday. That missed analysts’ average estimate for $867.1 million and $3.9 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. LinkedIn had 414 million users in the fourth quarter, up from 396 million in the prior period. While Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner has made investments to diversify the business, like acquiring education website Lynda.com for $1.5 billion last year, it will be a while before those efforts contribute meaningfully to revenue. In the meantime, LinkedIn is facing a slowdown in its marketing-services business, which companies use to find potential customers, show them ads and relevant information and generate sales leads. Sales to recruiters, who use LinkedIn to find candidates for jobs, are also slowing. LinkedIn is narrowing its focus in some areas, which is hurting sales. For example, it’s discontinuing a tool that helps marketers find leads, incorporating the technology into its sponsored content business instead, contributing to a slowdown in its marketing solutions business. Revenue in the marketing solutions division rose 20 percent in the fourth quarter to $183 million. The professional-networking website is also facing slower economic growth in Europe and Asia, though it said China is its fastest-growing country for new members. The company has a standalone app for Chinese users and has devoted much of its efforts over the past year to push deeper into that market. For the fourth quarter, LinkedIn reported a loss attributable to common shareholders of $8.43 million, compared with the average estimate for $50.2 million. Revenue climbed 34 percent to $862 million, topping the prediction for $857.4 million. 

• Spotify Links Up With Amazon’s Echo: It took a while, but Spotify and Amazon have started playing nicely: The streaming music service is now integrated into the Echo, Amazon’s connected speaker/shopping stimulator/robot spy machine you willingly install in your own house. Previously you could get Spotify working on Echo, but only if you worked at it. Now you can ask Alexa, Amazon’s AI assistant, to play Spotify, or you can control it from the Spotify app on your phone. The only catch is that the integration only works for the 20 million to 25 million people who are paying Spotify subscribers, not the ones using the free, ad-supported version of the service. That sort of makes sense, since the Echo doesn’t have any place to show the display ads that run on the free version of Spotify; on the other hand, Echo is integrated with Pandora, which also has display ads.

• Software maker Atlassian's revenue up 45 percent: Australian Atlassian reported a 44.7 percent increase in quarterly revenue as more customers purchased its software that help companies collaborate and manage their operations. Net income inched up to $5.1 million in the second quarter ended Dec. 31 from $5.0 million a year earlier. On a per shares basis, profit was flat at 3 cents. Atlassian, which listed on the Nasdaq in December, said revenue rose to $109.7 million from $75.8 million. The company added more than 2,600 net new customers in the quarter.

• Indian IT services growth seeng slowing: Indian IT services exports are likely to grow at a slower pace next fiscal year than in the recent past as global clients rein in technology spending, an industry lobby group said on Thursday. The cutback on routine IT services is likely to push firms including Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Ltd to sharpen their focus on high-margin digital services, analytics and artificial intelligence to cushion the impact on earnings. India's IT and software services export revenue is likely to grow by 10-12 percent in the fiscal year beginning on April 1 to as much as $121 billion, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said. Exports in the current fiscal year ending March are estimated to grow 12.3 percent to $108 billion, at the lower end of Nasscom's projection, with digital services seen up 19 percent. IT services growth seen slowing as clients curb spending. The shift towards new services could also trigger a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the sector, after Indian IT companies spent $2.4 billion on digital deals in 2015 - three times higher than the year before, Nasscom said. "To acquire digital skills companies will have to re-skill employees and acquire new technologies and that is likely to continue," it said. Including domestic sales, total revenue of the Indian IT sector, which accounts for 9.3 percent of the country's economic output, likely rose 8.3 percent to $143 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, Nasscom said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 16

• Netflix falls 9% as weak subscriber additions at odds with lofty valuation: Investors questioned Netflix Inc's premium valuation after the video-streaming service reported U.S. subscriber additions below its own expectations, a sign that competition from the likes of Hulu is intensifying. Netflix shares fell more than 9 percent to $100.11 in early trading on Thursday. While Netflix blamed the disappointing numbers on the mandated transition to chip-based debit and credit cards, some analysts said the reason seemed unconvincing since these cards have been around for a while. "The Netflix excuse is laughable," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who is rated four stars on a scale of five on StarMine for the accuracy of earnings estimates of Netflix. "Credit cards expire all the time, and people know how to deal with it. Netflix is seeing declining demand, and churn is a part of that," he said. Netflix doesn't disclose churn or subscriber attrition numbers. The video-streaming service provider had forecast a net addition of 1.15 million subscribers in its home market in the quarter, but ended up with just 880,000. Netflix's stock has more than doubled this year. It trades at 356.6 times forward 12 month earnings, versus a peer median of 12.9.

• Tesla Adds High-Speed Autonomous Driving to Its Bag of Tricks: It is not every day you get to open a door and step into the future. But to pull the handle on a newly updated Tesla Model S this week and slide into the driver’s seat was to catch a glimpse of the auto industry’s plans to soon let cars drive us, rather than the other way around. The updated Tesla, an already high-tech electric car that starts at about $75,000, was equipped with what the company calls Autopilot — a semi-autonomous feature that allows hands-free, pedal-free driving on the highway under certain conditions. The car will even change lanes autonomously at the driver’s request (by hitting the turn signal) and uses sensors to scan the road in all directions and adjust the throttle, steering and brakes. It is the first time that a production vehicle available to consumers will have such advanced self-driving capabilities. Or more to the point, the first time they will be unleashed for driving 70 miles per hour along twisty, though clearly marked, highways for long stretches. (Other manufacturers like Volvo and Mercedes-Benz recently introduced their own semiautonomous features, but limit the functions to lower speeds or require the driver to constantly touch the wheel.) And it’s perfectly legal. Among the states, only New York has any law prohibiting hands-free driving.

• Yahoo Mail Eliminates Passwords as Part of a Major Redesign: Seven months after replacing traditional passwords with single-use SMS codes, Yahoo is taking the next step toward blowing up the password altogether. The company today announced Yahoo Account Key, which links your account to a mobile device and then asks you to approve new logins through push notifications. It’s part of a broad redesign of Yahoo Mail designed to make the service faster and easier to search, and also lets you use the app with accounts from Outlook, Hotmail and AOL for the first time. (No Gmail, though, at least not yet)

• Twitter Courts Direct-Response Advertisers With New Reporting Tools (Claims early tests show Promoted Tweets lift conversions) Twitter today unveiled an analytics feature called Conversion Lift that lets marketers regularly measure how Promoted Tweets perform in terms of conversions, which entail clicks, app installs or sign-ups for services. Interestingly, the feature also susses out if the ads persuaded someone to switch phone carriers, something T-Mobile's social team is likely particularly interested in. To determine how effective an ad is, Conversion Lift splits a marketer's target audience into two groups: people who saw a news feed-style ad and those who didn't. The reporting then compares the conversion rates of both groups, including whether the action took place on desktop or mobile. Twitter said the tests, utilizing Conversion Lift, revealed that people who see Promoted Tweets are 1.4 times more likely to interact with a brand than those who don't see an ad. What's more, it said people who visit a brand's website after seeing a Promoted Tweet are 3.2 times more likely to convert than those who visit the website without seeing one. Based on the data, Twitter then recommends ways for advertisers to more effectively target. For example, Twitter may advise an athletic brand that initially only zeroed in on sports enthusiasts to also target casual sports fans.  The Conversion Lift represents Twitter's latest step toward convincing direct-response advertisers that it's a good place to spend money. Late last month, Twitter rolled out its 'Buy' button to all retailers and added video to its conversion-driving app installs in July.

• Google Express Loses Another Exec as Wildfire Co-Founders Exit: Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, the couple behind social ad startup Wildfire, are leaving Google three years and three months after the search engine scooped up their company. Talented people leave, join and stay at Google all the time. But Ransom’s departure is noteworthy because hers marks the third major exec exit from Google’s commerce arm in the past year. Ransom took over product duties at Google Shopping Express, its delivery service, after its director, Tom Fallows, decamped for Uber last November. Their boss, Sameer Samat, left for Jawbone in May. Then, in August, Google reshuffled the deck again, appointing its business development lead, Brian Elliott, as general manager for the entire Express operation, which has since expanded service across the Midwest as it aims to compete with Amazon and other delivery companies. The married couple arrived at Google in 2012 to some fanfare with the purchase of Wildfire, a startup that helped marketers manage spending on social platforms. It came amid Google’s feverish push to compete with Facebook on social. (The price tag was between $250 million and $350 million, depending on whom you asked.)

• Dropbox Announces Paper, A Google Docs Competitor: Dropbox is going head-to-head against a very popular web app, Google Docs. Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document editing platform in your browser. It lets you edit a document in real time with your Dropbox contacts. Here’s how it works. Paper users can create a document and type text right away. Compared to Google Docs or Quip, it has very few rich-text editing features. If you want to format your document, you’ll have to use another word-processing app. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Etherpad. What if you want to add images and videos? You can browse your Dropbox and add a Dropbox link directly in the document. Paper will automatically change these links into images and videos. It also does the same with other web content, such as YouTube videos, SoundCloud songs and more. You can write todo lists, @mention people in the document to notify them when you need someone else’s feedback and also leave comments next to a specific paragraph. I called Paper a Google Docs competitor, even though it seems quite different with the smart embeds and mostly plain text approach. It looks like a white board more than a document creation platform. But then again, many Google Docs users already use the service to quickly draft something. So it’s unclear whether Google Docs users will switch to Paper to do something they can already do with Google Docs without the nice embeds. Paper isn’t available just yet. You have to sign up to a waiting list first.

• Music-streaming site Deezer files for $345M Paris IPO: Deezer SA is seeking at least 300 million euros ($343 million) in a Paris share sale, valuing the music-streaming site at as much as 1.1 billion euros as it tackles Spotify Ltd.’s bigger and better-known service and Apple Inc.’s more recent products. The initial public offering would value the French company at 900 million euros to 1.1 billion euros. Started in 2007 by Marhely, who quit school at 16 to work as a developer for Internet startups, Deezer had 6.3 million subscribers at the end of June, according to the IPO filing. The company, whose largest shareholders also include Leonard Blavatnik’s Access Industries, is smaller than Swedish rival Spotify, which has more than 20 million paying subscribers and was said to be valued at $8.5 billion in its most recent financing round.  As the competition in music streaming intensifies, companies are branching out into events and merchandising to make their services more appealing to consumers and artists. Last week, Pandora Media Inc., the world’s leading online radio service, paid $450 million for Ticketfly, a ticketing service. Deezer said Thursday it will partner with BandPage Inc. to include concert listings in artist profiles and alert fans to upcoming offers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 20

Uber Gets Investment From Tata Fund to Expand in India: Tata Capital said a fund it advises will make a “significant investment” in Uber. to help the ride-sharing service expand in India. The investment by Tata Opportunities Fund will allow Uber to benefit from its network in the country, Tata Capital said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday, without elaborating. Tata Capital is part of the $109 billion coffee-to-cars conglomerate with over 100 group firms. The fund typically invests up to $100 million in its deals, its managing partner Padmanabh Sinha said. Uber in July said it would spend $1 billion to fan out to more Indian cities as the ride-hailing company targets to reach 1 million trips per day in the next six to nine months. Microsoft Corp. is said to have agreed to invest about $100 million in Uber valuing it at about $50 billion.

Taxi app GrabTaxi raises $350 million from CIC, others: Taxi-booking app GrabTaxi said it raised over $350 million from investors including sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation, in the Southeast Asian company's largest ever fundraising round. Other investors include hedge fund Coatue Management LLC and China's mobile car-ride hailing company Didi Kuaidi, GrabTaxi said in a statement, adding that it would use the funds to expand its private vehicle hire and motorbike booking services and invest in technology. Singapore-headquartered GrabTaxi competes with the likes of Uber and Rocket Internet's Easy Taxi in the city-state and some of the other Southeast Asian markets in which it operates.

Hacker's Ashley Madison data dump threatens marriages, reputations: Love lives and reputations may be at risk after the release of customer data from infidelity website Ashley Madison, an unprecedented breach of privacy likely to rattle users' attitudes towards the Internet. Hackers dumped a big cache of data containing millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations late on Tuesday, the latest cyber attack to raise concerns about Internet security and data protection. The hacker attack has been a big blow to Toronto-based assignation website firm Avid Life Media, which owns Ashley Madison and has indefinitely postponed the adultery site's IPO plans. The data dump began to make good on the hackers' threat last month to leak nude photos, sexual fantasies, real names and credit card information for as many as 37 million customers worldwide of Ashley Madison, which uses the slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair." The hackers' move to identify members of the marital cheating website appeared aimed at maximum damage to the company, which also runs websites such as Cougarlife.com and EstablishedMen.com, causing public embarrassment to its members, rather than financial gain.

Chinese Consumers are skipping straight from cash to mobile finance: Financial innovation is bubbling up around the globe, but China is where digital banking, investing, and lending have gone mainstream. Technology companies armed with financial apps are challenging banks and other intermediaries for a market with 1.3 billion people and $7.8 trillion of deposits. Tencent’s WeChat (called Weixin in Chinese), Alibaba’s Alipay arm, and Baidu are leading the way with digital wallets that let consumers manage their money via their phones. Traditional banking in China is balky, backward, and inefficient—creating ample opportunities for nimble tech companies such as Alibaba and Baidu. The huge, state-owned banks do some lending to consumers and private businesses, but they typically prefer making loans to state-owned enterprises that provide implicit government guarantees. For consumers, the government banks offer low interest rates on savings accounts, making new online funds and financial products with higher rates attractive. Regulators have indicated they are open to innovation. For one thing, digital banking leaves a trail that cash doesn’t. And it might help the Chinese government get a clearer snapshot of economic activity.

Mood-based playlists: How Spotify reinvented the playlist: Increasingly, music listeners are shifting away from genre labels like Hip-hop, R&B and Jazz, according to Spotify. What they really want is a set of tunes to fit their mood. It took Spotify a great deal of testing and data-crunching to arrive at that revelation. And it isn't stopping there. It's taking what it's gleaned from millions of users' listening habits to craft a new kind of song entirely: One that intensifies along with your running workout, matching its beats to your precise pace. When you speed up, it speeds up. When you slow down, it does, too. When Spotify began mixing its own playlists and tagging them ("Focus" for people who needed music to work to, or "Dinnertime Acoustic" for unwinding) it noticed a big uptick in interest, particularly when mood-based playlists were displayed right beside a traditional genre, according to Mark Silverstein, Spotify's head of product, tech and policy. Mood-based playlists aren't just different collections of songs; in the case of Spotify's commuting playlists, the company will occasionally mix in news, weather reports, even audio clips of Jimmy Fallon for some comedic diversity. As a result, fewer people began selecting genre playlists, and many more began opting for the mood-based playlists. And that carried over into the playlists people were making for themselves. That prompted Spotify to begin thinking about running more closely. For years, scientists have theorized about a link between music and exercise. One 2007 study suggested that fast, loud music was associated with faster running speeds and an increased heart rate. Another found in 2011 that music helped triathlon runners stave off exhaustion and run nearly 20 percent longer than their peers who ran in silence.

Snapchat’s leaked financials show just how big a bullet Facebook dodged: Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.: People are all abuzz about Snapchat's financials, which were leaked online Wednesday. If you haven't seen them, the outlook isn't good: Snapchat lost $128 million during the first 11 months of 2014. And it took in just $3 million in revenue over the same period, according to records obtained by Gawker. It's clear whom the leaked numbers hurt the most: chief executive Evan Spiegel and his investors. But if there's a winner in all this, it's Mark Zuckerberg. Snapchat, of course, was the company that famously rebuffed Facebook's offer of a $3 billion acquisition. Spiegel could have walked away with a huge sum of money. Instead, he's managing a struggling business that — almost four years, a big data breach and a Federal Trade Commission settlement later — still lacks a clear road to profitability. There's also nothing particularly surprising about a startup losing money; it would be unreasonable to expect massive profits right out of the gate. But of course, Snapchat has been out of the gate for some time now, and it's part of an ecosystem that's only grown more crowded and less compelling as a representation of The Future. Snapchat is also struggling because it's working in a market that's grown increasingly commoditized. There's an app for everything these days. Tell the average consumer you've come up with a hot new app and they're as likely to roll their eyes as to download it. Snapchat may be valued at $15 billion, but it's also part of a recent explosion in so-called "unicorns" (companies valued at $1 billion or more) that some venture capitalists think is unsustainable. Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.

Adoption of ad blockers is rising steeply, and could have serious consequences for the online advertising industry: Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.But in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail. In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast, increasing 41 percent globally in the last year. Today ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to see ads on the iPhone’s version of Safari and possibly in other apps that open web links. PageFair also sells technology that allows web publishers to determine if users are running blocking software — and then serves them ads anyway, going around the blockers. PageFair’s software, which Mr. Blanchfield said is currently being tested with a number of large websites, circumvents ad blocking by using “low-level networking” technology that he declined to detail in order to stay ahead of ad companies. Showing ads to people who have downloaded ad blockers sounds a little spammy. But in a twist, it may also lead to better ads. Here’s how: PageFair’s canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. That means the ads won’t feature animations, they won’t block content, and they won’t load “trackers” that monitor and report back to some unknown server what you do on a web page.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 24

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• Gloves Off in China as Banks, Alibaba Invade Each Other’s Turf: This week, Alibaba is launching MYbank, an online lender that will tap into Chinese savers’ record $7.8 trillion of deposits and a banking revenue stream that’s forecast to double by 2020. Banks have been striking back by pushing into the business Ma pioneered in China, online malls. The moves are blurring the lines between banking and e-commerce as China’s government continues encouraging competition in the finance industry and as Chinese increasingly use computers and mobile phones to bank and shop. “China’s banks have woken up and realized that the challenge from Alibaba’s entry into banking is for real,” said David He, a Hong Kong-based partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group Inc. “For them, doing e-commerce is a defense as well as a counterattack.” Banking giant ICBC, which as the world’s most profitable company dwarfs Alibaba’s net income by more than 10 times, set up a platform allowing retailers to sell the bank’s customers wine, shampoo, appliances and more. China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and others are also getting into the action. ICBC’s site, called Easy to Buy, is forecasting sales of 300 billion yuan this year, after tallying 130 billion yuan so far since January. By comparison at Alibaba, its Tmall logged 763 billion yuan in sales last year. JD.com ranked second at 260 billion yuan.


• Google launches free streaming service ahead of Apple Music debut: Google launched a free version of its music streaming service on Tuesday, as it sought to upstage the debut of Apple's rival service next week. Google Play Music has offered a $9.99 per month subscription service for two years but Tuesday's launch is the first free version of the streaming service. It is available online and will be available on Android and iOS by the end of the week, Elias Roman, Google product manager, said. Apple said earlier this month it would launch a music streaming service on June 30 for $9.99 per month along with a $14.99 per month family plan, with a free three-month trial. As with other streaming services, such as Spotify and Rhapsody, Google Play Music curates playlists. Users can tailor playlists based on genre, artist or even activity, such as hosting a pool party or "having fun at work. Unlike Google's subscription music service, the free service will carry ads, be unavailable offline and exclude certain songs.


• Instagram Overhauls Search Feature to Surface More Trending News: Instagram unveiled a massive overhaul to its search feature on Tuesday in an effort to bring users into the app more often, particularly during breaking news events. The new feature lets users search for images by location and includes a section for trending places and hashtags, none of which was available before. The trending places feature will surface both local and national trends so topics will differ based on your location. Instagram is also getting into the curation game that has become popular with other social networks like Snapchat and Twitter over the past few months. Instagram will feature two themed, rotating categories at a time with titles like “Extreme Athletes” or “Towering Rocks.” The images in these feeds will be selected based on a mix of computer algorithm and human curation by the company’s community team. Instagram is often lauded for its simplicity. But in the case of Instagram’s old search feature, simplicity may have actually been holding the app back. The old version of the app allowed for hashtag and people searches, but required different tabs for each. The new search feature will return hashtags, people and locations all from the same search bar in addition to the new trending sections. A useful search tab should benefit Instagram in multiple ways. For starters, it’ll help people find more content they want to see and make the app more useful in the process. More importantly may be the trending places and hashtags feature. Systrom says that Instagram can be a place for news, where people go to learn about and follow along with the day’s important trending topics.


• Report suggests millions of Uber rides in China are fakes reported by drivers in order to collect Uber’s high driver subsidies.: A new report on Chinese tech site Tencent Tech suggests that millions of Uber’s booked rides in the country are fakes – fraudulent fares reported by drivers in order to collect Uber’s high driver subsidies. Faking fares – which some drivers refer to as “acupuncture” – works like this: first, you buy an Uber driver account. There are plenty available for sale on sites like Taobao, and many even come with helpful “how to fake rides” guides. Once you’ve got your account, you partner up with a passenger using the consumer Uber app. With location services turned off, the passenger submits a fare from point A to point B. You drive the fare with no passenger, return the money paid by the passenger, and then split the driver subsidies Uber will pay you – which may be several times the price of the fare itself. This “acupuncture” phenomenon it doesn’t only affect Uber. But drivers told Tencent Tech that because Uber’s subsidies are the highest, virtually all of the faking right now is taking place on Uber’s platform because it is the most profitable. Uber reportedly does have the technological capability to shut down fake rides entirely, but is concerned that doing so would slow its genuine organic growth because being overly strict could result in false positives, banning real drivers and passengers who aren’t cheating the system.


• Qualcomm in Venture With Chinese Chip Maker: China’s largest maker of chips has a new plan to help it close a wide gap with rivals, and the company has found some unlikely partners to help. The company, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, also known as S.M.I.C., said on Tuesday that it would form a new company with a leading Belgian microelectronics research center and Qualcomm, the American chip giant, to help it develop and produce new generations of advanced semiconductors that work as the brains of numerous electronics products, like smartphones and servers. Four months ago, China imposed a $975 million fine on Qualcomm, saying it violated anti-monopoly law, and forced it to reduce sharply the licensing fees it charges Chinese smartphone makers for its communications chips. This really is Qualcomm playing nice with the Chinese government,” said Mark Hung, a semiconductor analyst with Gartner. Chinese companies like SMIC. have greatly lagged behind rivals like Samsung Electronics and Intel, partly because of export restrictions on the sophisticated tools and machines required to produce the most advanced chips. In 2013, China imported $232 billion worth of semiconductor materials, more than it spent on petroleum. To close the gap, Beijing has pledged a huge amount of resources. “The Chinese government has been very persistent and insistent in their policies. They want local chip manufacturing there, and this is another leak in the dike. It’s another part of the steady progress on their side.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 23

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• India's government proposes tax benefits for merchants for promoting card payments: Government today proposed income tax benefits for people making payments through credit or debit cards and doing away with transaction charges on purchase of petrol, gas and rail tickets with plastic money. In a draft paper for moving towards cashless economy and reduce tax avoidance, the government also proposed to make it mandatory to settle high value transactions of more than Rs 1 lakh through electronic mode. In order to incentivise shopkeepers, it has proposed tax rebate to them provided they accept a significant value of sales through debit or credit cards. The proposals are aimed at building a transactions history of an individual to enable improved credit access and financial inclusion, reduce tax avoidance and check counterfeiting of currency. “Tax benefits in terms of income tax rebates to be considered to consumers for paying a certain proportion of their expenditure through electronic means,” said that draft proposals for facilitating electronic transactions on which the government has invited comments till June 29. The paper said the tax benefits could be provided to merchants for accepting electronic payments. “An appropriate tax rebate can be extended to a merchant if at least say 50 per cent value of the transactions is through electronic means. Alternatively, 1-2 per cent reduction in value added tax could be considered on all electronic transactions by the merchants,” it added.


• Facebook gaining ground on YouTube in video ads: Facebook is gaining ground on Google's YouTube as an outlet for big companies to market their products via online videos, the fastest growing category of Internet ads, a report published on Monday said. London-based Ampere predicts a new advertising "arms race" between the two rivals, neck and neck in terms of audience sizes with around 1.4 billion to 1.3 billion monthly active users, respectively for Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is morphing from a platform most advertisers use for building general brand awareness to one that can deliver "pre-roll" advertisements that marketing companies prefer for ensuring their messages are actually viewed. Currently, YouTube remains a more flexible marketing platform, offering advertisers the full range of video ads which run before, during or after a video program is shown. Differences in ad formats translate into the rates the Internet platforms can charge advertisers. While YouTube charges advertisers when an advertisement has been viewed, Facebook offers the less advertiser-friendly model of charging once three seconds of the video have been delivered, Ampere noted. Most content providers now use Facebook for branding and awareness purposes, but trial revenue-sharing deals with the National Football League and Fox Sports in the United States pose a serious challenger to YouTube's lead. Online video is now growing faster than any other digital category or subcategory, rising 33 percent in 2014, and is forecast to grow 29 percent a year through 2017, Zenith said.


• Oracle extends cloud offerings, looks to compete with Amazon: Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition with Amazon. "We're prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price," said Ellison in a webcast presentation on Monday, after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle's cloud. The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud. Oracle, which calls its cloud offering the Oracle Cloud Platform, will provide a cost-effective alternative to Amazon, said Ellison. "Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it's one-tenth their price," said Ellison. Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. Oracle's cloud business is growing quickly, running at a rate of about $2.3 billion a year in revenue, based on last quarter's figures. By comparison, Amazon and Microsoft get about $6.3 billion each in cloud revenue per year.


• Tech Titans Come Together To Develop Common Container Standard: Docker, CoreOS, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are now working on a new standard for software containers with the help of the Linux Foundation. Docker may have become synonymous with containers, but it’s not the only container format around and not everybody agrees that it should become the standard format. Docker and CoreOS had looked like they were on a collision course, and having even more container formats wasn’t likely going to help the overall ecosystem. Now, however, the two companies are going to work together with other stakeholders on the Open Container Project (OCP), which will be housed under the Linux Foundation. The OCP is a nonprofit organization that is “chartered to establish common standards for software containers.” The Docker container format and runtime will form the basis of the new standard, and Docker is donating both the draft specifications and the code around its image format and runtime engine to get the project started. The main idea here is that developers should be able to package their applications in a container and be confident that it will run in any runtime, whether that’s Docker, CoreOS’s rkt, or projects like Kurma or Jetpack. That standard should be vendor neutral and development should happen out in the open. Containers are isolated user instances that allow applications to be deployed easily; Docker uses resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces to allow independent "containers" to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines.


• As Quick as a Taylor Swift Tweet, Apple Had to Change Its Tune: Taylor Swift’s victory in a one-day battle against Apple this week showed she has a rare power to influence the music business itself, at a time of deep anxiety among artists big and small about the value of their work. On Sunday morning, Ms. Swift wrote a diplomatic but stern Tumblr post taking Apple to task for not paying royalties on test drives of its new streaming music service, set to open on June 30. “We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she wrote. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” By midnight Sunday, Apple — one of the most powerful companies in the world — had capitulated to the 25-year-old pop star, saying it would pay royalties on all music for the three-month trials. One of its senior executives, Eddy Cue, even said he called Ms. Swift personally to give her the news. The backdrop to that decision was much more complex than the quick exchange might have indicated. For more than a week, independent labels around the world had been complaining about Apple’s proposed terms, saying that even for 90 days, a big drop in revenue from Apple — by far the music industry’s largest sales outlet — could be devastating. But even though Mr. Cue carefully noted in interviews that the company’s decision had been made with those labels in mind, its hurried announcement late Sunday suggested that it was Ms. Swift’s shaming that led Apple to change its tune. “She is the most powerful person in the music industry,” said David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and an advocate for artists’ rights. “She is able to bring the debate to the mainstream.”


• Uber Is Negotiating a $2 Billion Credit Line With Banks: Uber is negotiating a $2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks. The car-booking company that has roiled transportation markets worldwide by letting people hail rides from their smartphones, had initially sought a $1 billion revolving loan before boosting the size as more banks sought to participate, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. San Francisco-based Uber raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt at the beginning of the year from Goldman Sach’s wealth-management clients

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 11

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• Facebook expands its Buy Button test; ties up with Shopify. With the news that Google and Pinterest are introducing their own Buy buttons, Facebook has a message: We’re still working on our own version, too. The company on Wednesday announced it is working with e-commerce software company Shopify, which helps companies set up digital storefronts, to expand its Buy button test to a larger number of small businesses that already work with Shopify. Since July, Facebook has been testing the Buy buttons with a few hundred small- and mid-sized businesses.

• Spotify Value Tops $8 Billion as Investors Bet on Streaming: Spotify Ltd. received a valuation topping $8 billion in its latest round of funding as the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service said its number of customers exceeded 75 million. The company raised $526 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Discovery Capital Management, Lansdowne Partners, Rinkelberg Capital and Senvest Capital for a valuation of $8.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. Phone carrier TeliaSonera said Wednesday it invested $115 million. In comparison, Pandora, which runs an ad-supported Web radio, and reported 79.2 million active listeners at the end of the first quarter, has a market value of $3.6 billion. Spotify continues to amass funds as it tries to boost its subscription service before Apple Inc. gains more customers for its updated music offering, unveiled this week. Both Apple and Spotify give users access to more than 30 million songs, and each service costs $9.99 a month. With music purchases shrinking in stores and online, streaming has emerged as the industry’s primary source of growth. Record labels acknowledge its significance, while complaining streaming has failed to replace lost retail sales. Spotify now has more than 20 million paying subscribers and more than 75 million active users, it said in a statement on its website Wednesday. The company said it has paid more than $3 billion in royalties to artists and record labels since its start over six years ago.

• Twitter Advertisers Can Now Target You Based on the Other Apps on Your Phone. For the past six months, Twitter has been collecting data on which smartphone apps its users download. Now, the company is using that data to make some money. Twitter announced on Wednesday that its advertisers can use that app information to target users with ads. Marketers will be able to target you based on the different categories of apps you have downloaded onto your phone as well as how recently you downloaded them. Twitter first announced in November that it was collecting this data, but until now, it wasn’t using it for anything. It’s easy to understand the draw from Twitter’s perspective: If Twitter knows you like Candy Crush, it may assume you like other similar games as well. It’s also easy to understand why this type of targeting may freak some users out. You can block Twitter from collecting this data in settings, but the feature is opt-out, which means the company will gather this information unless you tell it to stop. Twitter won’t, however, have access to information within the apps you download. For example, the company may know you’ve downloaded WhatsApp, but it won’t have access to your messages.

• Microsoft Launches Giant Smart Whiteboard - Picks Unusual Place to Manufacture it - the U.S.: There is nothing ordinary about Surface Hub, a gargantuan touch-screen computer that Microsoft is about to start selling to companies as a high-tech replacement for conference room whiteboards. People in a meeting can scribble on the screen with a stylus and pan around an image using their hands. Everything on the screen, along with video images of meeting participants, can be shared over the Internet with people in other locations. The largest Surface Hub, measuring 84 inches diagonally, looks like an iPad that has gone through a growth spurt. The 4K resolution of the screen produces dazzling images. At $20,000 apiece, a price Microsoft plans to announce on Wednesday, it should. Just as unusual is where Microsoft is building the Surface Hub: Wilsonville, Oregon, just outside Portland and about 200 miles south of the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. That puts the Surface Hub in a rare category, since most of Microsoft’s better-known devices, like the Xbox game console, are made overseas.In recent years, there has been a surge of optimism about the prospect of high-tech manufacturing jobs returning to the United States after some headline-grabbing moves, like Apple’s decision to build its Mac Pro computer in Texas starting in 2013. But they remain outliers in an industry that has outsourced to Asia the making of everything from game consoles to smartphones. The Surface Hub, though, is an illustration of an exotic tech product that its makers believe can be manufactured cost-effectively in the United States. The product is so unusual — representing one of the largest touch screens of its kind — that Microsoft could not find existing assembly lines in Asia to build it on, the company said. At 220 pounds, the largest Surface Hub is expensive to ship long distances. And its already hefty price means any additional labor costs associated with making it in the United States will be harder for customers to detect.

• Hackers May Have Obtained Names of Chinese With Ties to U.S. Government. Chinese hackers who attacked the databases of the Office of Personnel Management may have obtained the names of Chinese relatives, friends and frequent associates of American diplomats and other government officials, information that Beijing could use for blackmail or retaliation. Federal employees who handle national security information are required to list some or all of their foreign contacts, depending on the agency, to receive high-level clearances. Investigators say that the hackers obtained many of the lists, and they are trying to determine how many of those thousands of names were compromised. “They are pumping this through their databases just as the N.S.A. pumps telephone data through their databases,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It gives the Chinese the ability to exploit who is listed as a foreign contact. And if you are a Chinese person who didn’t report your contacts or relationships with an American, you may have a problem.” Officials have conceded in the briefings that most of the compromised data was not encrypted, though they have argued that the attacks were so sophisticated and well hidden that encryption might have done little good.

• Box Spikes 9% On Strong FQ1 Revenue Growth, Narrowing Losses. Cloud storage provider Box raised its full-year forecast as more customers subscribed to its content-sharing platform. Box raised its full-year forecast to $286 million-$290 million from $281 million-$285 million earlier. Shares of the company, whose customers include AstraZeneca, General Electric and Chevron , rose about 8.7 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company said it surpassed 37 million registered users, compared with 34 million at the end of the fourth quarter. The number of paying users grew 70 percent from a year earlier, and now accounts for more than 10 percent of total users, the company said. The online file-sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses leverages a "freemium" business model, providing up to 10 GB of free storage for personal accounts and charging for additional space. In April, Box launched its premium security service, which lets businesses control their encryption keys, the encoding tools used to keep data safe. The company's main competitors include privately held Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive, Citrix Systems ShareFile and Google's Drive.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 21

• API-for-payments Startup Stripe In Talks For Up To $500 Million In New Funding That Could Value the Firm at $5B: Stripe is raising a new round of funding, according to sources with knowledge of the talks. One source with direct knowledge of the talks tells us that one of the leading investors in the deal is Yuri Milner’s DST Global. While all sources maintained that the round was “big,” there wasn’t a consensus on how much Stripe is looking to raise. The aforementioned source said that the round could be as big as $500 million and another source said the financing round would raise Stripe’s valuation to $5 billion. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment on rumors and speculation. Stripe has seen rapid growth and is known for being very developer-friendly, having impeccable customer service, and being easy to implement. Processing payments can be quite a headache for young startups, and Stripe tries to make the process as easy as possible so that they can focus on what’s important: building a company. So far, the company has raised $190 million from some high-profile investors, including PayPal cofounders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital. Stripe has been adding products and high-profile partners over the past year as it expands across the globe. Earlier this week, Stripe announced a private beta program for Japan, and there are rumors that the company is looking to move to Singapore as well. It also added a new product called Stripe Connect to help marketplace companies — like Lyft, which needs to accept payments from customers and send payments to drivers —and partnered with Twitter and Facebook to power the respective companies Buy buttons. Stripe also inked a deal to support AliPay, which might be coming to the US soon. The fundraising round could be used to further spur global expansion. Milner has invested in social media giants Facebook and Twitter, and more recently turned his focus to international e-commerce and marketplace companies, like FlipKart and Ola Cabs. International expansion costs money — Stripe currently operates in 20 countries, while competitors like Braintree support worldwide coverage. That being said, Stripe will be facing some increased competition from an independent PayPal when the latter spins off from parent company eBay sometime during the Q3 of this year. PayPal acquired payment processor Braintree in 2013 for $800 million, which has some big clients, like Uber and Hotel Tonight, and launched v.zero, a new payment API to help developers. Smaller competitors are itching to go abroad as well — WePay raised $40 million to expand marketplace payment processing across the globe.

• Spotify Takes on Apple and YouTube: to start offering videos: Spotify just laid out its plans to be more than a streaming music service, moving to add videos and podcasts in a new service that will now be available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Sweden. The changes chart a path that puts Spotify into direct competition with YouTube at a time when Apple is planning to relaunch its own streaming service. Spotify touted a wide roster of content partners that include Comedy Central, Vice News, NBC, ABC, ESPN, and MTV The focus is on short clips. Digital video is a much bigger business than streaming music. Subscription revenue from audio service will top $5 billion in 2020, according to Generator Research, and by that date 100 million users will be paying for streaming music. This year, however, advertisers are already set to spend $7.8 billion on digital video, according to market research firm EMarketer. By adding video, Spotify is asking users to interact with its service in a new way: Stare at the app on your phones; don't just press play and stick it back in your pocket. Podcasts are an easier connection. While the podcasting industry can hardly match the financial heft of online video, it is having a bit of a moment. Spotify is launching with a number of high-profile partners in podcasting and radio. Slate, Radiolab, and American Public Media have all signed on. Spotify will also offer some original programming in both video and audio, including radio shows hosted by the rap group Odd Future, a video series showing a new dance move each day, and a podcast about new music. Spotify is taking a cue from Songza, an online radio startup acquired by Google last June, and will offer playlists that correspond to specific moods or activities (such as “chill” or “travel”). The company also announced a new feature that will use the sensors in a user’s phone to determine their pace when they’re out on a jog and then play music with beats that complement the workout. The timing of Spotify’s announcement isn't an accident. Next month Apple is expected to unveil its own streaming service built on its $3 billion acquisition of Beats. Sure, Spotify faces plenty of competitors already, but it hasn’t faced a serious rival since it broke away from the streaming music pack several years ago. Apple is hardly guaranteed success. It launched a music-based streaming service, Ping, which failed. Then it tried a Pandora competitor, iTunes Radio, which has been underwhelming. Nor is it clear how Apple can fundamentally improve on music subscription services that are a pretty good deal for serious music fans. “Subscription music is a good category. There really isn’t a problem here for Apple to fix,” says Andrew Sheehy of Generator. “The only actual advantage that Apple has is the install base and its market power.”

• Canadian eCommerce software maker Shopify valued at $1.27 billion at IPO price: Canadian e-commerce software maker Shopify Inc said its U.S. initial public offering was priced at $17 per share, valuing the company at about $1.27 billion. The company's IPO of 7.7 million class A subordinate shares raised about $131 million, after it was priced above the top end of the expected range of $14-$16. The offering was earlier expected to be priced at $12-$14. The company sold all the shares in the offering. "Pricing reflects big enthusiasm for these type of deals. It's a unique company in a hot area with lots of growth," said Josef Schuster, founder of IPO investment firm IPOX Schuster LLC. "There's going to be a big pop coming tomorrow." Ottawa-based Shopify, which is also expected to debut on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday, makes software that helps small and medium-sized retailers to set up online storefronts. Shopify charges a monthly subscription fees of $29-$179. The company has also created online stores for a variety of retailers ranging from tattoo companies to fashion boutiques and vintage book sellers. Shopify said 162,261 merchants had subscribed to its platform from about 150 countries as of March 31. Shopify's biggest investors are venture capital firms Bessemer Venture Partners, with a 30 percent stake, and FirstMark Capital LP, which has a nearly 12 percent stake.

• Cinematic Pins: Pinterest has launched a new ad format - a new kind of Promoted Pin—one that is animated. The ad updates come more than a year after Pinterest first started selling Promoted Pins, and the changes are a big step for its ad technology. Brands will be able to target about a dozen audience types from foodies to gardening enthusiasts to millennials. The new animated ads are called Cinematic Pins, and they are a bit different from the moving ads developed by rivals like Facebook and Twitter. On those platforms, videos start when you stop scrolling over them and stop when you scroll away. On Pinterest, the opposite happens. The Cinematic Pins are seen in motion as the user scrolls, but the motion stops when the scrolling stops. "Users want to feel like they're in control, and we've done a bunch of user testing—users are delighted by this experience," said Tim Kendall, Pinterest's gm of monetization. "They wind up scrolling back and forth. They love controlling the motion." A number of brands already have tested the feature, including Unilever, The Gap, L'Oreal, Nestlé, Walgreens, Target, Visa and Wendy's. The Cinematic Pins and audience targeting are part of Pinterest's new three-stage advertising offering that starts with awareness marketing. The advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-view basis. Then there's a marketing model based on consumer intent—when they're still deciding on a potential purchase. This type of marketing lets brands buy ads based on a cost-per-click or cost-per-engagement basis—they pay when users click on or share a Promoted Pin. In the third phase, ads are sold on a cost-per-action basis when an app is installed or a sale completed. "We only want them to pay us when the ads create that value," Kendall said. "It takes the risk out of it for marketers." Kendall said Pinterest is showing brands impressive engagement rates—for every 100 Promoted Pin impressions, brands see 30 free views thanks to repinning. "That's a really high rate of earned media," he said. Pinterest does not say how much revenue it generates in ad sales annually, and it still is a private company. But, it gets about 76 million monthly visitors, according to comScore. The platform, which lets people curate digital pin boards for projects and wish lists, is seen as an accurate marketing window into consumer behavior.

• Salesforce Earnings: Quarterly Revenue $1.5B, +23% Y/Y Despite Dollar Strength: Shares Up 3%: Salesforce today reported adjusted profit of $0.16 per share on revenue if $1.51 billion in the first quarter of its fiscal 2016. The market had expected the SaaS firm to report $0.14 in adjusted, per-share profit on revenue of $1.5 billion. Shares of Salesforce are up around 3 percent in after-hours trading, a gain that is tempered by the firm’s 1.85 percent decline in regular trading. For the current quarter, the second of its fiscal 2016, Salesforce expects revenue of $1.59 billion, generating adjusted profit of between $0.17 and $0.18. A $7 billion run rate implies fourth-quarter revenue of $1.75 billion, or around $250 million more than in the now-past period. Salesforce’s revenue grew 23 percent in its most recent quarter. For the full fiscal year, Salesforce expects revenue of between $6.52 billion, and $6.55 billion, numbers that it calculates to include $175 million to $200 million in “FX headwind.” In short, the company is taking a hit, as is nearly every U.S.-based tech shop that sells abroad. The strong dollar can hurt revenue growth, given that top-line earned overseas converts more weakly into dollars. All told, it seems that Salesforce is on solid footing.