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- Nielsen to measure digital ads in partnership with Tencent: Nielsen announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Tencent Holdings to measure its digital audience in a move that could direct more ad dollars from companies in the United States to China's biggest social network. Nielsen said it is launching its Digital Ad Ratings, which tracks unique users, reach and frequency of a digital ad across computers, tablets and smartphones for the first time in China. Comscore, which offers a similar service and competes with Nielsen, said it is already available in China. The online gaming company Tencent, which also operates the popular mobile messaging app WeChat with 500 million monthly active users, has been making a big push to increase its advertising revenue especially through mobile. Nielsen will measure an ad campaign in a combination of surveys, consisting of 46,000 Chinese consumers, and aggregated, anonymous data from Tencent's hundreds of millions of active users. Tencent, which has a market value of $190 billion and reported first-quarter online advertising revenue of $438.4 million competes with Alibaba and Baidu.
- Its a Small World: Ola-owned TaxiForSure integrates Alibaba-investee Paytm wallet as cashless payment option, joining its arch-rival Uber: TaxiForSure, has tied up with Alibaba-backed online payments platform Paytm. The move will allow users of TaxiForSure to go cashless and pay through Paytm’s pre-paid wallet, the company said in a statement. Customers can link their debit card or bank account via a Paytm wallet or recharge their Paytm wallet and use it to pay for their rides. In March, cab hiring startup Ola had acquired TaxiForSure in what largely a stock transaction. Interestingly, Ola also has a prepaid wallet called Ola Money. Last November, on-demand car service Uber, Ola's arch-rival in India's ride-hailing space had joined hands with Paytm.
- Google and Apple Adjust Their Strategies on Mobile Payments: The battle for mobile software dominance revolves around two companies: Apple and Google. Now both giants are also going head-to-head in mobile payments, as they prepare to push deeper into digital wallets. Google is set to unveil plans at its annual developer conference on Thursday for an overhaul of its mobile payment products. Changes include a service called Android Pay that will let merchants accept credit card payments from inside their mobile apps and can be integrated with loyalty programs at retailers, the people said. Google Wallet, a mobile commerce app, will also be reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app that consumers can use to send money to each other directly from their debit accounts, they said. Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its software conference next month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service. The moves are the latest advances in mobile payments as several players jockey for an edge. With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses. The stakes are also high for Apple and Google, which are entering mobile payments later than others in the industry. For Apple, mobile payments tie people more directly to its main product, the iPhone. For Google, payments are a hook to reel people into its ecosystem of services and another way to gain insight about consumers. The challenge for Apple and Google, along with rivals, is that the mobile wallet is generally a technology in search of a problem. Cash and credit cards are easy to use and accepted broadly worldwide. As a result, the mobile wallet is typically more of a supplementary service than a replacement. Nonetheless, mobile payments are growing quickly. Forrester Research predicts they will balloon to $142 billion by 2019 in the United States, almost tripling from $52 billion in 2014. Still, Google and Apple offer something that few others can: Hardware, software and an insatiable desire to win. “Google and Apple have deep pockets and the appetite to invest,” said Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. “They may create something that is a lasting disruption.”
- Despite Its Dominance, Analysts See A Murky Road Ahead for Android: Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than a billion Android devices were sold in 2014, a c cording to the research firm Gartner. That’s about five times the number of Apple iOS devices sold, and about three times the number of Windows machines sold. Yet all is not well on planet Android. On the eve of Google IO, the company’s annual developer conference that starts Thursday, where Android will once again be a primary topic of discussion, cracks are emerging in Google’s hold over the operating system. Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android. Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014, according to one estimate. Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business. The stark numbers prompted a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android? Google faces several major Android-related headaches. First, while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple’s iOS. iOS users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices. A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 percent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly. But how long Google can expect Play to keep paying remains an open question, thanks to the second Android-related headache. Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China. Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps. Android has always been a tricky strategy; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.
- Twitter Is Giving Advertisers More User Data In The Hope That They Spend More: Twitter is hoping to help marketers better understand their Twitter audience by adding a tool that will give them deeper user behavior around organic tweets. The audience insights dashboard tool adds some similar insights as the Facebook advertising platform with aggregate information on user demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior as well as what television shows users watch and their mobile usage. These new insights are expected to help advertisers identify a more relevant audience for upcoming campaigns on the platform. Will these new insights help boost advertising on Twitter? The company needs it right now. It had slower than expected growth in advertising sales this last quarter and even die-hard fans and early investors think the company needs some help. Early investor Chris Sacca recently scribed a blog post warning Twitter that he would soon be sharing a few thoughts on what the company needs to do now. Offering more profound insights about organic user behavior may be an answer to some of this frustration and may help to lure brands to spend more ad dollars on the platform. The audience insights tool is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Twitter-specific information can be accessed within the U.S., with plans to roll this out more broadly over the next few months.
- Cisco Predics that in 5 years, 80 percent of Internet Traffic will be online video: We already know that Netflix accounts for one-third of Internet traffic at peak hours. Toss in YouTube, and that figure rises to roughly half of all bandwidth consumed. But even that's small potatoes compared with what's coming. In five years, 80 percent of the entire world's Internet consumption will be dominated by video. That number will be even higher in the United States, approaching 85 percent. That's according to the latest projections from Cisco, which publishes an annual study peering into the near future of the Web. The newest report, out Wednesday, predicts that by 2019, the Internet will have become more or less a big video pipe. Part of the growth will come from adding new people to the Internet — for the first time, over half the world's population will be digitally connected. But individual Internet users are also expected to consume more video over time, and at a higher quality, which will put tremendous new burdens on the world's Internet infrastructure. When you see the Internet as a huge distribution channel for video, it puts virtually everything that tech and communications companies are doing into perspective. Telecom firms like Verizon are racing to expand their cellular networks so that they can deliver video over LTE. Cable companies are fleshing out their public WiFi hotspots so users can watch videos outside their homes. Content providers like HBO and CBS are putting their programming on the Internet so that customers don't have to be tethered to their television sets. Implicit in this idea is that mobile devices will be the primary way users will access all this video. And researchers agree on that point. Five years ago, Americans were spending less than an hour a day on mobile devices. Today, it's more like three hours a day, accounting for more than half of the time we spend consuming digital media in general, according to the latest in an annual report released Wednesday by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.
- Consolidation in the colocation business: NTT buys German data center operator, while Rackspace seeks tie-ups with Amazon, Microsoft: NTT: Japan's NTT Communications Corp said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy German data center firm e-shelter, becoming Europe's third biggest operator in the sector, in the latest in a series of overseas acquisitions to counter sluggish growth at home. NTT Communications, an unlisted division of Japanese telecom firm Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) (9432.T) didn't disclose the deal's financial terms. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this month the NTT unit was in talks to buy e-shelter for about 100 billion yen ($832 million). In a joint statement, NTT Communications and e-shelter said the Japanese firm will acquire 86.7 percent of the German company, founded in 2000. Operating data centers in four major cities in Germany including Berlin, as well as in Zurich and Vienna, e-shelter is Germany's biggest provider of data center services, they said. The European deal stretches the NTT brand further across the globe. In 2010, parent NTT bought South Africa's Dimension Data for 382 billion yen, while in 2013 NTT Communications signed deals with a combined value of 85.5 billion yen to take over two U.S. cloud computing firms, Virtela Technology Services and RagingWire Data Centers. Rackspace Rackspace Hosting Inc. is open to forging partnerships with large cloud-computing operators such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as the company seeks to bolster slowing revenue growth. Rackspace, which has faced price cuts by Amazon, Microsoft and other competitors, decided in September to reject approaches by multiple groups interested in a partnership or acquisition. Since then, Rhodes hinted that the company has had a team looking at supporting customers who are renting computing services from other providers. Rhodes confirmed on Monday that Rackspace intends to provide third-party support for users of rival cloud-computing services via a combination of people and custom-management software. “There are future versions of our model that will be more capital light and more service oriented,” Rhodes said.
- Dating app Tinder launches slew of product features, dynamic pricing: Tinder’s “Rewind” functionality just went live, finally giving users the ability to go back in time and swipe right instead of left. The “Rewind” feature is included in the premium tier of the service, Tinder Plus, which was unveiled today and costs anywhere between $9.99 and $19.99 in the United States, depending on the age of the user. That’s right. Tinder Plus costs $19.99 for users older than 30, while it costs just $9.99 for folks who are younger than 30. However, in the TechCrunch office we’ve seen Tinder Plus offered at the price of $14.99/month for a 30+ female user. We’ve reached out to Tinder to get a clearer picture of the Tinder Plus pricing structure and will update as soon as we know more. For now, however, we do know that pricing not only ranges based on age but by location. Users in emerging countries (Tinder is currently available in 140 countries across the globe) will pay as little as $2.99/month, while users older than 28 in developed markets like the UK will be paying approximately $23/month (and nearly 4x as much as their over 28-year-old counterparts). Tinder has been testing pricing in various markets for the past few months, but even without the complete information, it’s easy to get an idea of the general landscape here. Older users, who theoretically have less supply and offer less demand, should pay a greater amount for extra dating tools. Plus, they likely make more money than younger users. It’s Uber’s Surge pricing model applied to romantic endeavors. Tinder Plus also includes Passport, which allows users to search for matches anywhere in the world through the drop of a pin, as opposed to being locked into your current location. Tinder Plus also allows users to buy themselves out of advertisements, though Tinder has yet to launch any ad products just yet. Sources say that the ad product will launch later this month, but it’s unclear what exactly those ads will look like. As for the features launching today, they make a lot of sense given the current user behavior on Tinder. Rewind, in particular, appeals to just about anyone who has swiped left when they meant to swipe right. The company has seen over 6 billion matches in total, though it’s hard to say how many of those matches become anything. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Tinder. The point is that it has become an addiction, with people mindlessly flipping through potential suitors and swiping based on a gut reaction.
- India’s Mobile Carriers Head Into $14 Billion Fight for Survival: What happens when a wireless operator with millions of customers loses the airwaves it needs to provide service? We may soon find out thanks to an unusual government auction taking place in India. The government will open the bidding Wednesday for airwaves already in use by the biggest carriers, including Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Vodafone Group Plc. They’ll have to compete to keep their licenses in the auction against Mukesh Ambani, who is India’s richest man and has signaled his determination by making the largest deposit of the competition. India’s approach, which is unlike what happens in the U.S., could mean seismic change for the world’s second-largest smartphone market. The airwaves up for auction serve more than 300 million customers and account for almost half of the $19 billion in combined revenue for the four largest operators. “For some of the telcos, renewal of spectrum is a key for survival,” said Nitin Soni, a director at Fitch Ratings in Singapore. Bharti, India’s biggest carrier, and second-ranked Vodafone could each spend as much as $4.5 billion for the spectrum, Soni said. Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. submitted a 45 billion-rupee ($726 million) bank guarantee, the most of any carrier, to participate in the auction, according to data from Mjunction Services Ltd., which is running the sale. Bharti Airtel was second with 43 billion rupees, and Vodafone gave a guarantee of 37 billion rupees. Any company losing previously held airwaves will probably have to shut down business in that region and abandon any investments or infrastructure it’s made. Companies also will lose revenue if they can’t switch to other bands, a move that would probably require new towers or technology. If companies shut down their business in a particular circle, their subscribers will have to look for new cellular operators, said Rishi Tejpal, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in New Delhi. “For some operators, it’s a do-or-die situation,” Tejpal said. “And with Reliance Jio in the picture, nobody knows their strategy.”
- It’s official #1: Google says it wants to offer cellular service: A top Google exec has confirmed what many have been speculating for months: That the search giant wants to start offering wireless service. Google isn't necessarily looking to become the next Verizon and AT&T, said Sundar Pichai, Google's head of Android, at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But, according to various news reports, Pichai said we'll begin to see more details trickle out in the next few months as Google announces partnerships with wireless carriers and other businesses. Analysts say Google is likely to partner with firms such as T-Mobile and Sprint rather than build its own network from scratch. Asked whether Google's aim was to drive wireless prices down for consumers, Pichai responded that the experiment's goal is to showcase new mobile innovations, according to the Verge. An example: Technology that can automatically reconnect dropped calls. But by adding wireless service to its very long chain of mobile offerings, Google would be showcasing something nobody else has tried: A totally unified cellular experience that's entirely within the Google ecosystem. Google already sells a combination of hardware and software with its line of Nexus phones. Now, Google's wireless service — combined with a Google handset, the Android operating system, the Google app store and Google's own mapping, search and e-mail apps — stands to create a formidable vertical silo that goes far beyond the Nexus experiment.
- Its official #2: Olacabs acquires TaxiForSure for $200M in cash and stock: Online cab booking service Olacabs.com run by Mumbai-based ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, has acquired Bangalore-based Serendipity Infolabs Pvt Ltd, which runs rival service TaxiForSure for $200 million (Rs 1,240 crore) in a cash and stock deal, as per a company statement. The breakup of the cash component of the deal could not be immediately ascertained but with the stock swap, TaxiForSure investors—Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Blume Ventures would get small minority equity stakes in Ola. Ola’s backers include SoftBank, Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital and Steadview Capital. Ola is already the top player in its business and TaxiForSure is believed to be among the other large firms in its space. Both are locked in a pitched battle against global giant Uber and other local players such as hybrid venture Meru. The company said TaxiForSure will continue to operate as a separate entity, at least for now, with Arvind Singhal (currently COO) being appointed CEO. Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G, co-founders of TaxiForSure, will contribute in an advisory role for a certain period. This is the second largest deal in the consumer internet/e-commerce business behind Flipkart’s acquisition of Myntra last year. That deal was reportedly worth over $300 million. TaxiForSure is currently present in 47 cities with over 15,000 vehicles registered on its platform. Ola said the deal compliments the two companies, as TaxiForSure follows a different model of supply and distribution by working with cab operators compared to Ola’s model of working with drivers who own their own cabs.
- Alibaba and top Chinese university launch new education portal for MOOCs: One of China’s most highly regarded universities has partnered with the country’s biggest ecommerce company to create a new website for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The generically named Chinese MOOCs was just launched by Peking University and Alibaba as schools around the country begin their new semesters following the Chinese New Year holiday (h/t to TechNode). Chinese MOOCs lists 26 courses, covering subjects in science, law, literature, music, and IT. The website lists six other universities that are apparently on board, including the University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, and Beijing Normal, but all the courses currently offered are from Peking University (note: Peking University is also known as Beijing University, or Beida, for short). Using a model similar to Coursera, Chinese MOOCs combines video lectures, quizzes, and other coursework to educate students, who can take courses for free and opt to pay for certificates upon completion. There’s no limit to the number of students per course.
- U.S. millennials post ‘abysmal’ scores in tech skills test, lag behind foreign peers: The test is called the PIAAC test. It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to 65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in America, they're poised to claim the title of largest generation from the baby boomers. U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34 years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head on.” The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom. But surely America’s brightest were on top? Nope. U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality. The study called into question America’s educational credentialing system. While few American test-takers lacked a high school degree, the United States didn’t perform any better than countries with relatively high rates of failing to finish high school. And our college graduates didn’t perform well, either. “Abysmal,” noted ETS researcher Madeline Goodman. “There was just no place where we performed well.”
