Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 23

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 25

• Verizon to Pay $4.8 Billion for Yahoo’s Core Business: the internet is an unforgiving place for yesterday’s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an independent company. The board of the Silicon Valley company agreed to sell Yahoo’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon for $4.8 billion, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak about the deal before the planned announcement on Monday morning. After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents.That’s a pittance compared with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Founded in 1994, Yahoo was one of the last independently operated pioneers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking companies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom. But Yahoo, despite constant management turmoil, kept growing. Started as a directory of websites, the company was soon doing much more, offering searches, email, shopping and news. Those services, which were free to consumers, were supported by advertising displayed on its various pages. For a long time, the model worked. It seemed like every company in America — and across much of the world — wanted to reach people using the new medium, and ad revenue poured in to Yahoo.In the end, the company was done in by Google and Facebook, two younger behemoths that figured out that survival was a continuous process of reinvention and staying ahead of the next big thing. Yahoo, which flirted with buying both companies in their infancy, watched its fortunes sink as users moved on to apps and social networks. Verizon, one of the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, plans to combine Yahoo’s operations with AOL, a longtime Yahoo competitor acquired by Verizon last year. The idea is to use Yahoo’s vast array of content and its advertising technology to offer more robust services to Verizon customers and advertisers. 

• Google Races to Catch Up in Cloud Computing: When it comes to cloud computing, Google is in a very unfamiliar position: seriously behind. Google is chasing Amazon and Microsoft for control of the next generation of business technology, in enormous cloud-computing data centers. Cloud systems are cheap and flexible, and companies are quickly shifting their technologies for that environment. According to analysts at Gartner, the global cloud-computing business will be worth $67 billion by 2020, compared with $23 billion at the end of this year.For Google, a loss in cloud computing would be a rare misstep for a company that revolutionized media with its advertising business, and then made the world’s leading smartphone operating system.But it will be an uphill climb. Amazon Web Services, which began its cloud product a decade ago, remains the leader. The company took in $2.6 billion, 9 percent of Amazon’s sales, in the first quarter of 2016. Profits from the service made up 56 percent of Amazon’s operating income. Those numbers may well be higher when Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Microsoft styled itself a cloud company, too, and the company said last week that revenue from Azure, its cloud business, which was founded in 2010, rose 100 percent over the last year. Cloud technology also figures in crucial businesses like Office 365. In contrast, Google Cloud Platform does not even figure in the earnings reports of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. That has to sting, since the company owns perhaps the largest network of computers on the planet, spending close to $10 billion a year to handle services like search, Gmail and YouTube.the company said it has used artificial intelligence to cut the power use in its data centers 15 percent, a huge decrease considering how efficient these data factories were already. Power is probably the largest single cost for all three of the cloud companies. Google is almost certain to use its savings to reduce prices, much the way it won in search advertising by figuring out its competitors’ costs, then undercutting them. That ability to find energy efficiency may be a powerful tool to sell to others over Google Compute.

• Apple Watch Sales Fall 55% in Second Quarter, IDC Report Says: Apple Watch sales fell 55 percent in the second quarter of 2016, dragging the global market for such devices lower, as potential customers hold off for an update coming later this year, according to a report from market intelligence firm IDC. Apple Inc. sold 1.6 million watches in the second quarter of this year, down from 3.6 million units a year earlier, IDC said. Global smartwatch sales fell 32 percent to 3.5 million units. While Apple held on to its position as the industry leader, with 47 percent of the market, it was the only company in the top five to see a decline. Samsung Electronics Co. saw its market share more than double to 16 percent.“Consumers have held off on smartwatch purchases since early 2016 in anticipation of a hardware refresh, and improvements in WatchOS are not expected until later this year, effectively stalling existing Apple Watch sales," IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani wrote in the report. “Apple still maintains a significant lead in the market and unfortunately a decline for Apple leads to a decline in the entire market.”

• Nintendo shares plunge, company says Pokemon GO's earnings impact limited: Shares of Nintendo Co (7974.T) tumbled as much as 18 percent early on Monday after the company said smash-hit mobile game Pokemon GO would have only a limited impact on its earnings. Nintendo said after the market closed on Friday that it had already factored in anticipated revenues from its Pokemon GO Plus device - an accessory worn on the wrist to alert players of nearby monsters to catch - and that it had no plans to revise its annual earnings forecasts for now. Nintendo said its affiliate Pokemon Co receives licensing and fees from the game's developer, Niantic Inc, and that profits at Nintendo from those revenues would be limited. The company, which owns 32 percent of Pokemon Co, is due to report first-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares and even with Monday's decline, the shares are still up some 60 percent compared with levels prior to the game's July 6 launch in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, July 19

• Netflix Disappoints Wall Street as Subscriber Growth Slows: Netflix isn’t looking so invincible anymore. On Monday, the company disappointed Wall Street with the news that subscriber growth for its streaming video service had slowed significantly during the second quarter. Also disconcerting was that Netflix added far fewer subscribers over all during the period than expected, which the company blamed on news media coverage of its plans for price increases. Netflix added just 1.7 million new streaming members in the three months that ended June 30, about half the 3.3 million net additions from the same period the previous year. That anemic growth — for both United States and international subscribers — came in well below its forecast of 2.5 million new members. The development sent Netflix shares down as much as 16 percent in after-hours trading on Monday, representing the second earnings report in a row that has sparked a double-digit plunge in the company’s stock price. Mr. Hastings finds himself in a starkly different position from just six months ago, when he stood onstage at the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas and declared that Netflix would conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its world service map. At the time, the company’s share had been soaring, surging 135 percent in 2015 as the top performer on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. So far this year, Netflix’s share price has declined about 14 percent. Still, some analysts pointed to the company’s financials as proof that it would continue to deliver on its plans in the long term. Net income for the quarter was $41 million, up 58 percent from $26 million during the same period last year. Total revenue was $2.1 billion, up 27 percent from $1.6 billion in the same period last year.

• Yahoo Revenue Falls 15 Percent and Profit Drops 64 Percent: As Yahoo accepted the final bids for its core business on Monday, the internet company revealed just how badly that business was deteriorating. Yahoo said that its revenue in the second quarter fell 15 percent, after excluding accounting adjustments, and its operating profit fell 64 percent. Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr — its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer — was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013. But investors were not focused on the quarterly numbers or Yahoo’s vast overpayment for Tumblr. They were far more interested in whether Yahoo’s web, email, news and other businesses will finally be sold — and at what price.Yahoo has been conducting a prolonged auction for those assets since February, and final bids were due on Monday. Yahoo’s board is expected to evaluate the offers over the next week or two and decide whether to proceed with a transaction that would end Yahoo’s 20-year run as an independent, publicly traded company.Analysts expect the final bids to come in at $3.5 billion to $6 billion, including Yahoo’s land and patents.The write-off of most of the value of the Tumblr blogging network is emblematic of the failure of Ms. Mayer’s strategy to expand Yahoo by luring the mobile young users who drive the business of its chief rivals, Google and Facebook.In the second quarter, Yahoo’s revenue was $1.31 billion, up from $1.24 billion in the same quarter a year ago. But the most recent quarter’s revenue rose only because of a change in how Yahoo accounts for revenue from its search partnership with Microsoft. Excluding those changes, revenue fell 15 percent, and both search ads and display ads posted significant drops. The company reported a net loss of $440 million, or 46 cents a share, for the quarter, compared with a loss $22 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Excluding the Tumblr write-off and other adjustments, the company’s operating profit fell 64 percent. Shares of Yahoo were down slightly in after-hours trading Monday evening.

• IBM Rises After Sales Beat Estimates on Software Unit Gains: IBM second-quarter revenue beat analysts’ estimates, boosted by the unit that includes its Watson artificial intelligence platform, in an early indication that the company’s transition to cloud-based software and services is beginning to pay off. Sales were $20.2 billion, compared with the average analyst estimate of $20.1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue in cognitive solutions, which includes Watson, increased 3.5 percent to $4.7 billion. This is the first time since IBM reorganized its segments that the cognitive solutions portion has registered growth, after declining the previous five quarters in a row. Adjusted earnings, excluding some items, was $2.95 a share, beating the $2.89 average estimate of 19 analysts. The shares rose 3.2 percent in late trading to $165. They are up 16 percent this year through the end of Monday, compared with a 6 percent gain on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

• What is ARM and why is SoftBank spending $32 billion on it? SoftBank’s $32 billion deal to buy chip designer ARM had many people scratching their heads Monday. It’s not that ARM isn’t important in tech. Indeed, its processor designs are used by nearly every chipmaker and, by extension, find a place inside nearly every piece of tech from cellphones to hard drives to networking gear. Rather, it is the fact that the chipmaker is so far removed from SoftBank’s other businesses. The Japanese conglomerate has a wide range of tech holdings, including a controlling interest in Sprint, its own mobile carrier business in Japan and investments in Alibaba, OlaCabs and Snapdeal. “SoftBank would have been one of the least likely I thought to buy ARM,” said longtime chip analyst Kevin Krewell of Tirias Research. “They are not in the semiconductor business in any significant way.” Krewell says he suspects that SoftBank looked hard at buying other companies in the chip business and decided that ARM was the strongest play, especially for the very long term.It’s worth taking a second to understand how ARM’s business works and what it does. ARM doesn’t make any products. Not only does it not manufacture chips, it doesn’t even design the ones that are eventually sold. Rather, it designs the core engines that get built into others’ chips — chips from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia as well as processors like Apple’s A9 and Samsung’s Exynos. For its efforts, ARM gets a small license fee from every chip that uses its design. Because it is in so many products, that small license fee adds up to a pretty healthy business. Its 2015 revenue was nearly one billion British pounds. And its sphere of influence is growing, both in terms of the number of chips using its design as well as the kinds of products. Last year nearly 15 billion chips using its designs were sold, up from about six billion in 2010. Cars, servers and internet-of-things devices are all seen as big expansion areas for ARM chips.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 16

• Why a staggering number of Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to: Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday. This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities. The survey showed that nearly 20 percent of the survey's respondents had personally experienced some form of identity theft, an online security breach, or another similar problem over the year before the survey was taken last July. Overall, 45 percent said their concerns about online privacy and security stopped them from using the Web in very practical ways. The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.

• Uber China Rival Didi to Consider U.S. IPO as Soon as 2017: Apple may not need to wait that long before it reaps the benefits of investing $1 billion in Chinese car-hailing service Didi Chuxing. Didi is targeting an initial public offering in New York next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The timing will depend on how its battle with Uber Technologies Inc. in China plays out, said the people, who requested not to be named because the matter is private. Such a move may put the Chinese app ahead of its U.S. rival in going public, with Uber having said it wants to hold off as long as possible. China’s biggest ride-hailing app is in the process of raising about $3 billion of funding, including Apple’s $1 billion contribution, which has swelled the company’s valuation to about $26 billion, people familiar have said. Didi, already backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., has reached break even in about half of the 400 Chinese cities it operates in as Uber spends heavily to win both drivers and riders. At Didi’s current valuation, a U.S. IPO could be the biggest by a Chinese company since Alibaba’s record offering in 2014. The company is among a list of ride-sharing apps including Uber and Lyft Inc. that could conduct a public offering. Didi hasn’t decided on which exchange and which banks to hire yet, the people said. Didi was created last year when separate apps backed by Tencent and Alibaba merged after brutal competition drove up losses. The company now has 14 million registered drivers in China, delivering more than 11 million rides a day, and last month said it’s on track to turn an operating profit “soon.”

• Exclusive: Warren Buffett, Quicken Loans founder in Yahoo bid - sources: Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chairman Warren Buffett is backing a consortium vying for Yahoo Inc's internet assets that includes Quicken Loans Inc founder Dan Gilbert, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. While there is no certainty that the consortium will prevail in the auction, the interest of Buffett and Gilbert is a boost for the Sunnyvale, California-based company, which has been surpassed in recent years by rivals such as Alphabet Inc in the race for internet users and advertising dollars. The consortium's participation in the sale process also represents a challenge to U.S. telecommunications carrier Verizon Communications Inc, whose deal to acquire AOL last year for $4.4 billion has made it a favorite to prevail in its bid for Yahoo's assets among industry analysts.

• Amazon is going to sell its own lines of food, detergent and diapers, and it's going to be a really big deal: Amazon is going to start selling its own brands of snacks, diapers, detergent — a move lots of traditional retailers have already made. But Amazon isn't a traditional retailer, so this move could be very meaningful for Amazon, and its competitors. The e-commerce powerhouse will soon begin selling its own packaged goods, exclusively to Amazon Prime members under brands like Happy Belly and Mama Bear, the Wall Street Journal reports. While some people will point out that so-called "private-labeling" is nothing new -- grocery stores and big-box retailers have been increasingly pushing their in-house brands -- this is a much bigger deal. That's because the growth in retail is all going to be online, and Amazon owns online. It already accounts for half of all sales growth in U.S. e-commerce. So Amazon's move into consumer packaged goods gives it even more opportunity to flex its muscle with suppliers. That means giving its own products better placement on its site, and undercutting competitors on pricing. The move also offers Amazon the chance to pad its bottom line -- something Jeff Bezos hasn't traditionally been willing or able to do. Private-label brands typically carry higher profit margins , in part because the companies selling them don't put big marketing campaigns behind them. Think of the damage Amazon already does its to competitors as a low-margin business. Now imagine what happens when if it starts generating real profits on stuff like cereal and soap. The move is also a way to increase the power of Amazon Prime, the $99-a-year unlimited shipping program that fuels Amazon's retail growth. Prime customers spend more on Amazon than non-members and are more loyal, too. By adding another perk, Amazon can make its best customers even even more loyal. There's risk here, of course. Some Amazon-branded products have already flopped, including its Amazon Element diapers, which were pulled for design flaws shortly after launch.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 20

• Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs as PC Demand Slumps: Intel, the world’s largest maker of semiconductors, said on Tuesday that it was laying off 12,000 people, about 11 percent of its work force, as it continues to reel from a long downturn in global demand for personal computers. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, lowered its revenue forecast for the year. It now expects revenue to rise in mid-single digits, down from its previous forecast of mid- to high-single digits. Intel's shares were down 2.2 percent at $30.90 in extended trading. Net revenue rose to $13.70 billion from $12.78 billion. Non-GAAP net revenue came in at $13.80 billion, compared with analysts' average estimate of $13.83 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Adjusted earnings of 54 cents per share topped Wall Street forecasts of 48 cents. Up to Tuesday's close, Intel's shares had fallen 8.4 percent this year. Yet Intel still gets 60 percent of its revenue from chips supplied to PCs, and its profit margins there are not as good as in data center chips, its other major business. The company’s other businesses have small profits, or else lose money. That means PCs are still core to what Intel does. Most of the layoffs, along with things like consolidating facilities and cut projects, are expected to be inside the PC business. Employees who are affected by the restructuring will be notified in the next 60 days, the company said. The layoffs are the largest since 2006, when the company let go 10,500 employees.

• Verizon set to make Yahoo's bidder short list, as Yahoo reports tepid earnings: Verizon Communications Inc was set on Tuesday to advance to the second stage of bidding for Yahoo Inc's core assets, as the U.S. internet company went through offers to put together a short list, people familiar with the matter said. The field had whittled down ahead of Monday's first-round bid deadline as several companies that were mulling an offer, including Comcast Corp and Time Inc, decided to opt out, the people said. Meanhile, Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, said revenue fell 11 percent to $1.09 billion, and its net loss was $99 million, or 10 cents a share, in contrast to revenue of $1.23 billion and net income of $21 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago.

• Credit Suisse Says Instagram Is Going to Have a Huge Year: Facebook Inc.'s purchase of Instagram Inc. continues to look smarter and smarter. After buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, analysts at Credit Suisse Group AG now expect Facebook will get more than triple that price tag in revenue from the photo sharing app this year alone. "We are now forecasting $572.5 million and [circa] $3.2 billion in revenue contribution from Instagram in [the first quarter of 2016] and 2016, respectively," analysts led by Stephen Ju said in a recent note. Instagram and premium video will be a big driver for mobile and desktop ad revenue, the team writes. "Our projection for consolidated ad revenue of $5.24 billion in [the first quarter] reflects our projection for $573 million and $260 million in contribution from Facebook's Instagram and premium video ad product, respectively."  When Facebook acquired the startup, it had roughly 30 million users. Monthly active users have now ballooned to 400 million as of September 2015, topping that of Twitter Inc. Much of the recent expansion has been outside of the U.S.
 

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 14

• Regulators plan to revoke Theranos’ federal license and ban founder Elizabeth Holmes: Theranos might find itself homeless soon. A federal agency plans to force founder Elizabeth Holmes out of her blood analysis startup for two years and take away the California lab’s federal license. First reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a letter dated March 18 proposing sanctions barring Holmes and company president Sunny Balwani from owning or running operations in labs for at least two years – including in  both California and Arizona – and taking away federal licensing for Theranos’ California facilities in Newark and Palo Alto after Theranos’ continued failure to correct major problems with accuracy and competence. These actions would be a major financial blow to the startup valued at $9 billion. Theranos has the runway to keep working with approximately $700 million in the bank but the two labs make a good portion of the money for Theranos’ operations and a loss of the founder and president would strangle any hope of recovery.


• Artificial Intelligence for Everyday Use: How four programmers with almost no knowledge of Japanese designed software to read handwriting. Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places—and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That's how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games. "Just a few years ago, you had to be a genius to do this," said David Malkin, who has a Ph.D. in machine learning but can barely string two Japanese sentences together. "Now you can be a reasonably smart guy and make useful stuff. Going forward, it will be more about using imagination to apply this to real business situations." While handwriting recognition might be considered deep-learning 101, Japanese is a whole other ballgame. That's because the language includes symbolic characters such as kanji, which is composed of elements that can be read independently, making it difficult to know where one ends and another begins. There are also more than 2,000 common pictograms made up of dozens of strokes. The trick is to tackle one squiggle at a time. Reactive’s algorithm queries the neural network for a match, adds another stroke and repeats, all the while refining the probability of an accurate hit. The startup trained its model on about 1.8 million characters. Unlike a typical program built around rigid rules, deep-learning AI is modeled on how humans process information. Given enough data as inputs and a set of desired outputs, neural networks figure out what goes in the middle. This allows them to find solutions that have bedeviled traditional approaches, like interpreting speech or tagging images. And once built, a neural network doesn’t have to be limited to language applications. In their spare time, the four Reactive engineers showed the program 5,000 dresses downloaded from Google Images, then gave it a picture of a woman in a revealing outfit. "Sexy clothes," the software responded.

• Some Online Bargains May Only Look Like One: Amazon has some unbelievable bargains on its virtual shelves. A cat litter pan with a list price of $2,159 can be yours for a mere $28. A bag of doggy treats, normally $822, is only $8. A windshield wiper blade, which the unwary pay $1,504 for, has been knocked down 99 percent. You say you don’t believe that a plastic cat pan could ever have been sold to anyone for a couple of thousand bucks? Or that a six-ounce bag of Zuke’s Lil’ Links pork and apple sausage bits ever cost more than dinner at a five-star restaurant? It’s all part of the bizarre world of Internet “discounts,” which let retailers and brands assert that you are getting a stupendous deal because someone somewhere else — exactly where is never explained — is being charged much more. Boomerang Commerce, a retail analytics firm, compared the list prices of dozens of pet items on Amazon and the specialist pet site Chewy.com. In only a handful of cases did the retailers even agree on what the list price was. So a 22-pound bag of Blue Buffalo Basics Limited Ingredient Grain-Free Duck and Potato dog food had a list price of $131 on Amazon and $84 on Chewy. Yet the retail price at both sites was the same: $49.49. “A perceived deeper discount creates a higher conversion event — in other words, more buyers,” said Boomerang’s chief executive, Guru Hariharan, who previously worked at Amazon. Another consultant, Ripen eCommerce, analyzed 746,000 product searches on Amazon. Ripen’s goal was to help third-party clients who sell on the giant retailer jockey for a better position — say, on the first page of results rather than further back. A little over 44 percent of the products — some sold directly by Amazon, others by third parties — were billed as discounted, Ripen said. “It’s less than I expected, actually,” said Dave Rekuc, Ripen’s director of marketing. “Considering you can basically name your own list price.”

• Verizon bets on Armstrong, M&A savvy in Yahoo bid:  Verizon is the clear favorite in the upcoming bidding for Yahoo's core Internet business, according to Wall Street analysts, in large part because the telecommunications company's efforts to become a force in Internet content have gone relatively well under the leadership of AOL Inc Chief Executive Tim Armstrong. Verizon acquired AOL last June for $4.4 billion - its first big foray into the advertising-supported Internet business - and it is not yet clear how well the unit is performing financially. Subsequent moves, including the takeover of much of Microsoft Corp's advertising technology business, a deal to buy Millennial Media for about $250 million and the recent launch of the mobile video service go90, are also too recent to assess. Yet analysts have given the big phone company high marks for allowing AOL to operate independently and folding in other recent acquisitions without much drama. And they said Armstrong seems to be driving Verizon's recent moves in go90 and recent acquisitions. Verizon showed interest in Yahoo's core business as early as December, when Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said the company would "see if there is a strategic fit" for Yahoo's holdings, which include mail, news, sports and advertising technology. Yahoo, under pressure from activist investors, launched an auction of its core business in February after it shelved plans to spin off its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The first round of bidding is slated for next week, and Verizon plans to make a bid, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters. Verizon is already working on increasing revenue through its ad-supported mobile video service go90, targeted at millennials and built on video streaming technology acquired from Intel in 2014. The app, which launched in October, offers videos from Comedy Central and Vice, among others, as well as basketball and football games. However, analysts cautioned that even a combined Yahoo-AOL would lack the unique data, such as user interests and tastes, that powers its rivals in online ads, chiefly Google and Facebook. Armstrong, who made his name leading sales at Google, is highly regarded in the advertising community - in contrast to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, another former Google high-flyer, who has been struggling to revive Yahoo. Mayer would likely leave after a Verizon-Yahoo deal, analysts sa

• More Startups Are Getting Lower Valuations Than Joining the Billion-Dollar Club: According to a new report from KPMG International and CB Insights, 2016 has seen a larger number of startups taking new lower valuations than those earning the billion-dollar badge. “The first quarter of 2016 has borne witness to high-profile unicorn company issues, layoffs, down rounds and mutual fund valuation markdowns,” according to the report. Only five venture capital–backed companies entered the $1 billion club in the same period, less than half the number from any quarter since the first quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, CB Insights’ Downround Tracker shows there were 19 "down events"—or companies raising new money or being acquired at a lower valuation—during that same time frame, including big names such as Foursquare Labs Inc., Gilt Groupe Inc., and Jawbone Inc. Those downgrades may also cause other startups to wait to raise new money if they anticipate having to take cuts themselves.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 7

• After 10 Years, Amazon’s Cloud Service Is a $10 Billion Business: Amazon’s cloud computing business is bigger after 10 years of operation than Amazon itself at the same milestone, and is on its way to being a $10 billion annual business this year, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders today. Amazon Web Services “is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate, and — most noteworthy in my view — the pace of innovation continues to accelerate,” Bezos wrote, adding that the unit added 722 new features in 2015, which amounted to a 40 percent increase over the prior year. Last month AWS observed its 10th year of operations, and was the bright spot in an otherwise disappointing fourth-quarter report in January. The unit clocked $7.9 billion in revenue in 2015, amounting to more than 7 percent of Amazon’s overall sales, with an operating margin of 24 percent. “Many characterized AWS as a bold — and unusual — bet when we started,” Bezos wrote. “We could have stuck to the knitting. I’m glad we didn’t.”

• Yahoo Paints Grim Financial Picture as Deadline for Bids Nears: As Yahoo asks potential bidders to submit first-round offers for its core business next week, it is also warning them about a troubling decline in revenue and profit while obscuring the costs and cash flow of various business units. Yahoo is projecting revenue of $4.4 billion this year, down from $5 billion last year, according to two people close to the bidding who have seen the confidential data the company has shared with potential bidders. That figure is on the low end of the revenue estimate the company shared publicly with investors in February. Even that revenue is coming at a cost, with Yahoo expecting to pay other sites about $1 billion this year for sending traffic to its advertising services. The company’s cash flow is also declining. Yahoo has reaffirmed to bidders its February projection that adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization would be about $750 million this year, down from $952 million in 2015. Initial bids are due at the end of next week, but that deadline might be pushed back. Starboard Value, an activist hedge fund that is seeking to replace Yahoo’s entire board of directors at the next shareholders’ meeting this summer, has repeatedly accused the company of running a halfhearted sales process. That sentiment has been echoed by some potential bidders. For example, Yahoo has told private equity firms and other financial players considering a bid that it considers them to be second-tier bidders, compared with so-called strategic bidders like Verizon and AT&T that would integrate Yahoo into their existing businesses.

• Twitter is basically a cable company now: Twitter is basically becoming a cable company. The social network's paid deal with the NFL to show Thursday night football games gives Twitter exclusive rights to stream the matches over the Internet. What this means for sports fans is access to another channel to watch the most popular professional sport in the country, presumably so long as they're willing to see a slew of promoted tweets on Twitter's website. It's akin to what the television industry has done for decades: Provide live events in hopes of growing an audience while making tons of money in advertising doing it. Twitter isn't about to stop there. It's considering expanding from live sports coverage into political news and other types of video content, the company's chief financial officer, Anthony Noto, told Bloomberg News. If that happens, Twitter will have built a bundle that isn't much different in style from what you get from Comcast, Verizon or many of the heavyweight TV distributors that currently dominate America's entertainment ecosystem. It might be a skinnier one, but it's a bundle nonetheless.

• The surprising thing that got the biggest share of online shopping dollars in 2015: In a new report from the online metrics firm ComScore, researchers aimed to capture the ways our online shopping habits did (and did not) change in 2015, and the results contain some surprises. ComScore analyzed which shopping categories drew the biggest online sales in 2015. Computer hardware — a category that includes personal computers and tablets — has been the leader for at least a decade. But last year, for the first time, spending on apparel and accessories took the e-commerce crown. In three of out of four quarters in 2015, apparel and accessories pulled down the most dollars. For the year, clothing generated $51.5 billion in online sales, slightly edging out $51.1 billion spent on personal computers and tablets. In some ways, this might seem logical: Tablets sales growth has slowed overall as shoppers instead opt for smartphones with bigger screens. But recall, too, that 2015 wasn’t exactly a banner year for the apparel industry: Retailers from Macy’s to Gap reported gloomy sales results as shoppers chose to spend their money on things like travel and dining out. So the fact that online clothing sales surpassed computer hardware sales is likely telling us something bigger about customers’ online shopping patterns. For starters, it probably reflects retailers’ efforts to make it feel less risky to shop for clothes online. In other words, people are getting more used to the idea that if a pair of jeans doesn’t fit them quite as expected, or a sweater is not quite the same color blue it looked to be on a website, it can be returned with little hassle and often at no cost. Apparel also is among the categories that is seeing particular benefit from the explosive growth in shopping on smartphones. Lipsman said that many of the categories that registered particularly strong increases in online spending last year were ones in which the purchases are not “highly considered,” meaning that customers don’t spend much time researching before buying. These purchases are especially conducive to being made on a small screen, and so with the lion’s share of online shopping growth coming from mobile devices, they are getting a particular tailwind from this change in shopping habits.

• Samsung Beats Estimates as Early Debut of S7 Boosts Sales:  Samsung Electronics Co. posted a better-than expected first-quarter profit after the early release of Galaxy S7 smartphones gave it a head-start on Apple Inc. and Chinese rivals and helped counter an industry downturn. Operating income rose to 6.6 trillion won ($5.7 billion) in the three months ended March, the world’s largest maker of phones and memory chips said in preliminary results released Thursday. That compares with the 5.53 trillion-won average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.Samsung debuted its high-end smartphones in March, about a month earlier than last year’s, with sales of the S7 line-up estimated to have hit 9 million units during their first month -- triple those of the S6 in the same time-frame. Production of curved displays for its Edge version also went more smoothly this time, avoiding the hiccups that plagued last year’s wraparound-screen line. “The biggest reason for the sharply improved profitability is largely due to much lower marketing spending for the mobile business,” said Yoo Eui Hyung, an analyst at Dongbu Securities Co. in Seoul. “The big disparity between the earlier profit estimates and the latest revisions stems entirely from the mobile business. The faster release surely helped but it’s dubious whether the S7 can continue to surprise the market in the longer run.”

• Daimler confirms HERE in talks with Amazon, Microsoft: Amazon.com and Microsoft are in talks about taking a minority stake in HERE, a digital mapping business controlled by Germany's luxury carmakers to help develop self-driving cars, Daimler said on Wednesday. Germany's luxury carmakers including Daimler's Mercedes, Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) Audi division and BMW bought HERE for 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) from Nokia last year to create an alternative digital mapping business to Google.The consortium needs cloud computing providers to manage the mass of data collected from sensors on board thousands of Mercedes, BMW and Audi cars. The data about traffic and road conditions is then fed into digital maps.  "We need a cloud provider to handle the huge amounts of data created by HERE and its users. We haven’t taken any decisions yet," Weber told the Wall Street Journal. Intelligent mapping systems supply information to control self-driving cars, which are equipped with street-scanning sensors to measure traffic and road conditions. This location data can in turn be shared with other map users. 

• Yik Yak’s CTO drops out as the hyped anonymous app stagnates: Is Yik Yak a thing anymore? Not so much, according to download stats, traffic charts, surveys and a source that says the college app’s monthly user count has been declining. That source — with intimate knowledge of the company — also tipped me off that Yik Yak‘s original CTOTom Chernetsky has bailed, which the startup now confirms. He’s not the only one who thinks the supposed rocket ship won’t fly as high as some expected when Sequoia led a mammoth $62 million at $400 million valuation in November 2014. Since late last year, Yik Yak’s VP of Product, Director of Engineering, Lead Product Designer and other senior employees have departed. Months after Sequoia pumped a ton of cash into the Atlanta startup, download rates and traffic began to drop, according to App Annie and comScore charts dug up by GigaOm. Things have gotten worse since, as Google Play dropped it from its charts last March, likely due to hate speech in the app. These stats all mesh with what my source says, which is that Yik Yak has had zero significant growth in over a year, and consistently misses its growth targets. They cite 4 million monthly active users as the count in January, noting the number has declined since then, though I can’t confirm that exact number. The problem with anonymous apps is that over time they start to feel exhausting. The crude stories, played-out jokes stolen from Reddit and cringe-worthy bullying wear on people. While they might have a few juicy quips of their own to share, blowing off steam can eventually feel pointless. That’s why my Secret and Yik Yak usage dried up. Yik Yak’s product has continued to plod along, despite some colleges’ attempts to ban the app for facilitating cyberbullying. But nothing has made it feel fresh again.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 28

• In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage: It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares? Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business. And yet investors love them.  Not all stock repurchases are bad, of course. But given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial. Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more. But a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage. Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average. But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually. Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years. Yahoo is not alone. Mr. Colby conducted a cost-benefit analysis of 26 companies buying back stock versus using that money to invest in a business. He found that McDonald’s was another problematic example. Since 2008, McDonald’s has allocated almost $18 billion to buybacks. This has helped produce 4.4 percent increases in annual earnings per share over the period. To equal that growth in overall earnings, the company would have had to generate just a 2.3 percent return on the money it spent buying back stock, Mr. Colby estimated. Last November, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded McDonald’s unsecured debt rating, citing its plans to increase its borrowings in part to fund future buybacks.

• Microsoft Apologizes After Twitter Chat Bot Experiment Goes Awry: Microsoft apologized after Twitter users exploited its artificial-intelligence chat bot Tay, teaching it to spew racist, sexist and offensive remarks in what the company called a “coordinated attack” that took advantage of a “critical oversight.” The company will bring Tay back online once it’s confident it can better anticipate malicious activities, he said. “A coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack,” Lee said, without elaborating. The company introduced Tay Wednesday to chat with humans on Twitter and other messaging platforms. The bot learns by parroting comments and then generating its own answers and statements based on all of its interactions. It was supposed to emulate the casual speech of a stereotypical millennial. Some users quickly tried to see how far they could push Tay.   In less than a day, Twitter’s denizens realized Tay didn’t really know what it was talking about and that it was easy to get the bot to make inappropriate comments on any taboo subject. People got Tay to deny the Holocaust, call for genocide and lynching, equate feminism to cancer and stump for Adolf Hitler. The worst tweets quickly disappeared from Twitter, and Tay itself also went offline “to absorb it all.” Some Twitter users appeared to think that Microsoft had also manually banned people from interacting with the bot. Others are asking why the company didn’t build filters to prevent Tay from discussing certain topics, such as the Holocaust. The bot was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and meant to entertain and engage people through casual and playful conversation, according to Microsoft’swebsite. Tay was built with public data and content from improvisational comedians. It’s supposed to improve with more interactions, so should be able to better understand context and nuances over time. The bot’s developers at Microsoft also collect the nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status of anyone who chats with Tay.

• Uber profits elsewhere support 'sustainable' spending in China: CEO: Ride hailing app company Uber Technologies Inc is generating more than $1 billion in profit a year in its top 30 cities globally, and partly using that money to bankroll its expansion in China, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in an interview. The company said in February it was losing more than $1 billion a year in China's red-hot ride hailing market, where it is battling large local incumbents to win customers. Kalanick said China was the company's most intense market, but also a crucible for new ideas that it has exported to other markets, and that its investment here was sustainable. "If you took our top 30 cities today, today they're generating over $1 billion in profit a year, just our top 30 cities. And that profit multiplies every year because we're growing," he said on the sidelines of the Boao Forum in the Chinese island province of Hainan. Other cities among the 400 where Uber operates were also profitable, he added.

• Snapchat Is Buying Bitstrips, the Company That Turns You Into an Emoji: Snapchat is buying Bitstrips, the company behind the Bitmoji app that lets you create an avatar of yourself to share on social media and over text, according to a source familiar with the deal. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who first reported the news, said Snapchat is paying “in the ballpark of $100 million” for the company, which was founded in 2012. It quickly became popular on Facebook, as users created and shared cartoon versions of themselves in a bunch of different settings. It’s not entirely clear why Snapchat wants Bitmoji, but it feels like a good fit for the company, which has a number of other fun features to help users spruce up their photos and videos. Snapchat allows users to put emojis on photos and videos they send, and has generated a lot of buzz for facial filters that let people distort their faces into different animals or characters. (Facebook just bought a similar company two weeks ago.) Personal emojis are a logical fit in that regard.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 22

• New Chinese Rules on Foreign Firms’ Online Content: China is taking another step to restrict what can be posted on the Internet in its country by issuing new rules barring foreign companies or their affiliates from engaging in publishing online content there without government approval. The rules, which were jointly released this week by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that beginning March 10, foreign companies or foreign joint ventures will be restricted from disseminating a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, animation, audio and video. The rules also apply to digitized books, art, literature and science. The new regulations would allow foreign-owned companies to cooperate with a Chinese partner to publish content on the Web in China, but they must get government approval. China already has some of the world’s most restrictive policies on the dissemination of information. Chinese TV and the news media are censored; the government has censors monitoring popular social media platforms, like WeChat; and American Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been blocked in China for years. One key question is the impact such regulations would have on companies like Apple and Microsoft, which run online platforms in China that provide services and sometimes content. For example, Apple’s Chinese App Store offers games and other apps in the country while Microsoft has a joint venture through which it provides a cloud version of Windows and Office software. Internet companies, like Akamai and Cloud Flare, have operations that work to speed traffic to foreign websites or host them through servers in China.

• Apple Still Holds the Keys to Its Cloud Service, but Reluctantly: In Silicon Valley — if not Washington — Apple is being hailed for digging in its heels on a court order requiring it to aid the Federal Bureau of Investigation in gaining access to an an iPhone used by one of the attackers in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, emphasized on Tuesday in a letter to customers that helping the F.B.I. essentially hack into one of the company’s own phones would be a dangerous precedent. What’s more, Apple said it would have to create new software to do this. But while company executives have embraced the notion that Apple is no longer able to intervene for law enforcement when investigators want access to an iPhone, it has repeatedly cooperated with court orders for access to online services like its iCloud. That may sound like hypocrisy, but to people familiar with how Apple’s products and services work, it is simply a matter of technology. ICloud is an Internet service Apple customers can use to back up information that is stored on their devices. It is helpful if your phone, tablet or computer is lost or badly damaged. And it, like other online services, is a gold mine for law enforcement — as the government spying revelations by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden showed. Every few months for the last few years, tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have published transparency reports, which are lists of instances in which a company turned over data on users at the behest of a court order in the United States or other countries.In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2015, Apple received nearly 11,000 requests from government agencies around the world regarding information on roughly 60,000 devices. Apple provided some data in roughly 7,100 of those requests, the report said.Apple has stated repeatedly that it would hand over data to comply with a court order when it is technically able to do so. And as that report indicates, it has. Often.But the operative phrase to understand the difference between Apple’s cooperation and its resistance is “technically able.”In the fall of 2014, with an update to its iOS software, Apple switched off its ability to retrieve data from its phones and tablets. By doing this, Apple tried to take itself out of the equation when law enforcement is looking for access to a phone. In essence, the company could no longer fulfill a request if it was technically unable to do so.ICloud is a different story. Apple encrypts that data on its servers and holds on to the key, which it uses to gain access to the data when it is required to do so by a court order.There are practical reasons for managing security in the cloud differently from on an iPhone. ICloud exists, in part, to save backups in the event that, say, you drop your phone in a swimming pool. Apple needs to have that key to get your data back for you.It is not so easy for a company to take away its ability to gain access to your information when that company’s ability to retrieve your information is the reason you are using its service.

• Facebook Brings 360 Dynamic Streaming To Samsung Gear VR, Forms Social VR Team: Zuck shocked everyone by appearing on stage for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event for MWC 2016. He wasn’t there to push Samsung’s new phones or talk about Messenger, his time onstage was all about virtual reality. Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is the parent company of Oculus) will be bringing its dynamic streaming technology for 360 video to Gear VR (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is powered by Oculus). This technology allows significant performance upgrades to streaming content by only playing back what’s in view of the headset at any given time rather than processing the entire 360 sphere of video at once. All of this is done by seamlessly switching between dozens of variants of each 360 video taken from multiple angles. Facebook revealed more about the technology at its Video @Scale event last month. The results speak for themselves, Facebook says their efforts have “quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x.” Another interesting tidbit comes from a Facebook blog post today—they’re building a social VR team to focus “entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR.”

• Uber Driver Held in Killing Spree as Police Probe Tie to Routes: A driver for Uber may have picked up passengers in between incidents as he drove around and shot at least six people dead over the span of several hours, according to police in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While there have been other incidents of misconduct by Uber drivers, the Michigan shooting would be the first to involve a mass shooting. In order to become an Uber driver, Dalton would have undergone, and passed, a background check. Uber said it’s referring inquiries regarding the routes to police given that there is an active investigation. “We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence,” Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can.” 

• Yahoo launches auction process as Starboard gears up for fight: Yahoo Inc officially launched the sale of its core business on Friday, a move seen as a positive step for frustrated investors but not enough to keep an activist hedge fund from pursuing a proxy fight against the struggling Internet company.Yahoo shares jumped after the company announced its board has formed a committee of independent directors to explore strategic alternatives, and that it has hired investment banks and a law firm to run the process. The launch of the auction process, a move activist hedge fund Starboard Value and other shareholders have pushed since late last year, showed the company was moving another step closer to selling its core business, which includes search, mail and news sites, rather than spin it off as previously planned. The move follows more than three years of effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to turn around Yahoo by focusing on mobile apps and trying to boost advertising revenue.  Yahoo had acknowledged during its earnings last month that it was open to exploring options for its core business. Despite the launch, Starboard's founder Jeffrey Smith is not backing down, and will continue his pursuit of nominating a group of directors for the Yahoo board, people familiar with the matter said.

• This glove could make eating easier for those with Parkinson’s disease: Eating can be difficult and embarrassing for those with tremors, but GyroGear thinks it has a solution for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease or essential tremor. The start-up has created a glove that steadies a person’s hand, making it easier to complete everyday tasks such as eating. The glove’s power lies in a bronze disc on the back of the hand, which weighs about as much as a roll of nickels. It spins at up to 20,000 rotations per minute, providing a steadying force. The force of the battery-powered disc is akin to putting one’s hand in molasses. While moving is not as easy, the benefit is that much of the shaking is naturally filtered out. GyroGear is aiming to reduce tremors by 70 percent. In one lab test, the London-based researchers say, it reduced a tremor by 90 percent. GyroGear founder Faii Ong was inspired by a 103-year-old hospital patient who couldn’t eat without spilling food. While cleaning her up, the medical student at Imperial College started to brainstorm solutions.  Ong cautions that there’s still work to be done. The glove hasn’t been tested by outside parties, but they plan to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the year. They also hope to begin selling the product by year’s end and are raising funds from investors. “The idea of simple, wearable devices to treat tremor and to avoid the side effects from medications or alternatively the dangers of surgery is very appealing to patients and health care providers,” said Michael S. Okun, medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation. “The GyroGlove is an interesting idea, however many of these types of devices fall short of the expectations — especially when faced with very severe and disabling tremor.” There are other efforts to use mechanical solutions to aid those with Parkinson’s disease. Lift Labs, a start-up that Google acquired in 2014, has devised a vibrating spoon and fork to counteract tremors and make eating easier. While having shown promise for mild tremors, Okun said it hasn’t proven the most effective solution for more severe cases. In the long term GyroGear is interested in adapting its glove to other uses, such as for surgeons, physical therapists, photographers or anyone seeking to keep a steady hand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 9

• Facebook Loses a Battle in India Over Its Free Basics Program: For years, Mark Zuckerberg has had a grander vision than just connecting the more than one billion people who already use Facebook: He wants to connect the entire world. That effort hit a major roadblock on Monday, when Indian regulators banned free mobile data programs that favor some Internet services over others. The regulations, issued after months of intense public debate over how to extend the Internet to India’s poorest citizens, effectively block Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program in the country. Free Basics offers people no-fee access to a text-only mobile version of the Facebook social network, as well as to certain news, health, job and other services. Facebook describes the program as a way to introduce the poor and the technologically unskilled to the potential of the Internet. Free Basics came out of Mr. Zuckerberg’s program for universal Internet access, which was started in 2013 under an initiative called Internet.org. The idea was to simplify phone applications to run more efficiently and to offer these apps to users in developing countries. Half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, agreed to work with Facebook as partners on the initiative. Free Basics is now in 38 countries, from Indonesia to Panama. Facebook is investing heavily in other parts of the project, including experiments to deliver cheap Wi-Fi to remote villages and to beam Internet service from high-flying drones. In India, where Facebook already has at least 132 million users, the company began offering Free Basics last year through Reliance Communications, a local mobile phone carrier. A Reliance spokesman could not be reached for comment. The program quickly became the target of critics, who said that it was an attempt to steer unsophisticated new Internet users to Facebook and other services that were working with the company. They argued that Free Basics and other so-called zero rating programs, which are a set of apps or sites that a mobile operator or I.S.P. does not charge customers to use, violated the concept of net neutrality. Facebook embarked on a blitz of paid lobbying and advertising to promote Free Basics, spending millions of dollars in media campaigns to convince locals its offering would be positive for the population. The company ran special banners in the Facebook news feeds of Indian users urging them to petition the government to allow Free Basics. Mr. Zuckerberg personally lobbied against the new rules, including writing an opinion column in The Times of India. Experts said that campaign may have had an adverse effect on Indian thinking. Locals were wary of the company’s unknown long-term plans for advertising or other parts of Facebook’s business.

• Job Site Hired Raises $40 Million and Forecasts Profit by 2017: When Mehul Patel, Hired Inc.'s chief executive officer, began talking to venture capitalists last year for the company's latest fundraising round, they were no longer interested in hearing about market potential or user growth. Investors wanted to know when the job recruitment website would become profitable. Patel tailored his pitch to highlight the ways he'd made his startup run more efficiently while showing that Hired would roughly triple annual revenue in 2016. He forecast a profit by early 2017. "The conversation had really changed from a year ago," he said. Hired faces many larger and more established competitors. CareerBuilder.com, Indeed Inc., LinkedIn Corp., and Monster Worldwide Inc. each control segments of the online jobs market. Monster generated revenue of $770 million in 2014. Although LinkedIn had a rough time last week, the site generated $862 million in just its last quarter. Hired said it has a 2016 revenue "run rate" of $100 million. (The number is generally calculated by using the performance during one period as the basis to project a full year.) Hired is cost-free for job seekers, who create profiles listing their skills and backgrounds. About 4 percent of applicants are accepted. Recruiters from companies such as American Express Co., Comcast Corp., and Facebook Inc., pay to target those high-skill candidates and send them offers via e-mail. Since it began in 2012, Hired has expanded from tech workers in San Francisco to sales, marketing, and other professionals in 15 cities. The company has acquired two small startups in Paris and Melbourne to help it continue expanding internationally. Patel said he's constantly looking for ways to cut costs. The startup has moved three times in as many years because it was unwilling to commit to a long-term lease. The chairs at the company's San Francisco office are mostly from Ikea. Patel said he bought a Herman Miller model for his home office from a startup that shut down during the first dot-com crash. "That's still my office chair," he said. "It reminds me not to let things get too crazy."

• Sacked! Twitter and Facebook Experience a Super Bowl Down Round: Sunday’s Super Bowl was, to put it bluntly, pretty boring. That was reflected on the Internet as well: Despite it being the 50th Super Bowl and most likely the last game for future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning, both Facebook and Twitter saw significantly less Super Bowl chatter than they did last year. Facebook reported that 60 million people created some 200 million posts, comments and “likes” throughout the game. Those numbers are down from last year, when 65 million people generated 265 million posts, comments and likes. That’s about 25 percent less activity for those keeping score. Twitter had it even worse. Much worse, in fact. Roughly 3.8 million people created 16.9 million tweets during the game, according to Nielsen. That’s down from 25.1 million tweets sent during last year’s game, a drop of roughly 33 percent*. In fact, Twitter didn’t even share its total tweet metrics this year like it did in 2015. The company also didn’t immediately reply to our request for comment on Nielsen’s numbers. Yes, a lousy game doesn’t help. But a dip like this is not a great sign for either platform, both of which offered new features this year intended to increase engagement for a game just like this. On Twitter, that feature is Moments, a curated stream of tweets around a particular event. On Facebook, it’s Sports Stadium, a new area of the app dedicated to following live sporting events and talking with your friends about them. (The new feature had some technical difficulties Sunday afternoon.) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be hit hardest from a poor showing like this. User conversations around live events are where Twitter is supposed to dominate. This kind of regression is exactly why the company stock is at an all-time low; investors are concerned about slowing user growth and the resulting engagement. Those same investors are bracing for the company’s earnings this week, and it could have used a nice Super Bowl boost to highlight on the earnings call. Apparently it’ll need to find something else. 

• Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad Out Amid Compliance Concerns:  There’s a big shuffle happening at Zenefits today — with Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad exiting the company and COO David Sacks taking over. Conrad is also stepping down as a director of the company. In an email to employees, Sacks noted that compliance issues that have plagued the company contributed to Conrad’s exit. Zenefits has hit significant turbulence, including missing revenue targets according to a Wall Street Journal report, and also running into issues with regulators. Regulatory issues have plagued the company, as has been reported by BuzzFeed. Zenefits allowed unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance, leading to at least one commissioner to investigate the company in Washington State, according to a BuzzFeed report. Most recently, BuzzFeed reported 80 percent of the company’s deals in Washington State were done by unlicensed brokers.

• Verizon enlists AOL CEO to explore Yahoo deal: Bloomberg: Verizon Communications has given Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer of its AOL unit, a leading role in exploring a possible bid for Yahoo's assets, Bloomberg reported, citing a person with knowledge of the situation. Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, hasn't hired bankers to conduct an offer and there have been no formal talks, according to the report. Yahoo said last week that it would consider "strategic alternatives" for its core Internet business, even as it continues with its plan to revamp the business and spin it off. Yahoo's core business, which includes popular services like Yahoo Mail and its news and sports sites, could attract private equity firms, media and telecom companies or firms like Softbank, analysts had said. Verizon's Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said in December that the U.S. wireless carrier could look at buying Yahoo's core business if it was a good fit. Earlier this year, Verizon bought AOL Inc in a $4.4 billion deal to push into targeted advertising and mobile video. Verizon's shares were down 1.1 percent, while Yahoo's shares were down 4 percent in afternoon trading on Monday.

• Yelp posts smaller-than-expected loss; CFO to step down; Shares plunge: Consumer review website operator Yelp Inc reported a smaller-than-expected loss on Monday, but its shares slumped 11 percent, swept up in a broader selloff in the technology sector coupled with a weak adjusted EBITDA forecast. The company said results were released about 3 hours ahead of schedule during trading hours on Monday, due to an error by PR Newswire, leading to a spike in volatility in its shares. Yelp also said Chief Financial Officer Rob Krolik would step down later this year but did not elaborate. Krolik, who joined in 2011, will continue in his role until Dec. 15, 2016, or until a replacement is hired, the company said in a statement. Yelp's revenue rose about 40 percent in the fourth quarter, topping analysts' estimates, helped by the strength in its advertising business and a rise in mobile usage. Local advertising accounts in the quarter rose 32 percent to about 111,000, in line with estimates from market research firm FactSet StreetAccount. Revenue rose to $153.7 million from $109.9 million. Yelp reported a net loss of $22.2 million, or 29 cents per share, for the quarter ended Dec. 31, compared with a profit of $32.7 million, or 42 cents per share, a year earlier.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 3

• Magic Leap, an Augmented Reality Firm, Raises $793 Million: Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality start-up based in Dania Beach, Fla., announced on Tuesday that it had raised a $793 million round of venture financing, valuing the company at $3.7 billion, excluding the new funds. The round comes during a race to discover and create the next breakout platform for consumers, which many of the world’s largest tech companies think will be some form of virtual reality. In 2014 Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus, a virtual reality company that plans to ship its first headsets to consumers in the coming weeks. Microsoft has been working on Hololens, and Apple is reportedly at work on its own efforts. But Magic Leap has drawn attention for the prominent investors it has attracted — Google, Fidelity Investments and Warner Brothers, among others — despite being almost completely closed off from showing the public any of its products. Only occasionally do the founders pop up to give interviews. This most recent round was led by Alibaba, the large Chinese e-commerce company, with participation from new investors including J.P. Morgan Investment Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and T. Rowe Price Associates. Magic Leap has raised more than $1 billion in funding to date.

• Image Recognition Invades Shopping As Curalate Raises $27.5M: Pinterest. Instagram. Tumblr. The future of the web is visual, but how does anyone make money on that? By understanding what’s in the images people post and connecting them to where you can buy what you see. That’s Curalate’s job. The image recognition marketing startup just raised $27.5 million led by NEA, bringing it to $40 million in total funding. If a picture is worth a thousand words, Curalate makes brands literate. Since Curalate is a suite of visual commerce tools rather than a single product, what the company actually does can seem a bit nebulous. Here’s a quick breakdown of what Curalate offers:  Like2Buy_home_cardLike2Buy – Turns the one link in a brand’s Instagram profile into a gateway to buy products from any of their Instagram posts. Fanreel – Pulls in user-generated images to a brand’s website and applies image recognition to tag products to show so they’re easy to buy. Visual Insights – Generates analytics about which of a brand’s products are being shared in images on Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other networks so businesses know what’s hot Reveal – Makes images on a business’ website shoppable by tagging the products in them and linking them to detail and purchase pages. Ads – Allows brands to buy ads on Instagram and Pinterest using additional proprietary targeting options.

• Amazon Is Said to Be Planning an Expansion Into Retail Bookstores:  Amazon signs may be headed to more physical storefronts. The Internet retailer plans to open more brick-and-mortar bookstores following the unveiling last year of one such location here in its hometown, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans. But the company’s plans for physical stores are modest, this person said, especially in comparison with reports of an expansion suggested by an unusual source, the chief of a large shopping mall operator. Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of the mall operator General Growth Properties, was answering questions from analysts on Tuesday about foot traffic in malls when he said, of Amazon’s bookstore plans, “Their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores,” according to a recording of the call. Even if Amazon is not planning to go nationwide with its stores anytime soon, any expansion of its brick-and-mortar presence is likely to send shivers down the spines of other booksellers. Amazon’s success as an online retailer of physical and electronic books has already devastated chains like Borders and seriously wounded Barnes & Noble. Independent booksellers, though, are seeing sales growth in many parts of the country, showing how reluctant some book fans have been to give up browsing store shelves. “There are all kinds of studies that show the best way to find things when you don’t know what you’re looking for is an old-fashioned bookstore,” said John Mutter, editor in chief and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, which publishes an email newsletter for booksellers and librarians. “I think that’s a major part of what Amazon is trying to do with this bookstore in Seattle.”

• Yahoo to look at job cuts, alongside spin-off:  After its core Internet business has continued to flounder, Yahoo says it is now exploring “strategic alternatives,” which could imply a number of things — including selling off its core business to another company, as was previously reported. Basically, this is an acknowledgment that things are not working over at Yahoo proper. The company released its full-year earnings today that showed, once again, flat earnings growth, and a series of products that still haven’t breached mainstream stardom. All this, taken together, is something that has investors very displeased. The company also said it was laying off 15% of its staff, including closing some international offices — which TechCrunch previously reported — as it continues to figure out what its core business looks like in 2016. Following the report, the stock basically went nowhere, meaning all of this was baked into expectations for the company’s earnings report. Mayer dismissed accusations of excessive spending, denying what she called an inaccurate report of a $7 million bill for its holiday party, saying the figure was exaggerated by a factor of three. Yahoo reported a 15-percent drop in adjusted quarterly revenue - after deducting fees paid to partner websites - to $1.00 billion from $1.18 billion as it struggles to keep its share of online search and display advertising in the face of tough competition.