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: Tuesday, March 15

• Wall Street Tours the Tesla Factory—and Loves What It Sees: Wall Street analysts have been touring Tesla’s massive factory in Fremont, Calif., and they're returning with the same conclusion: Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company is getting ready for something big. In a sign of this enthusiasm, Robert W. Baird & Co. upgraded its Tesla rating on Monday morning following a factory tour. Last week, Stifel analysts returned from their fourth visit in four years to Tesla’s flagship factory in Fremont. “In roughly one year since our last visit,” wrote analyst James Albertine, “the progress witnessed is truly stunning."  Tesla shares have jumped 45 percent in the past month as Musk, the chief executive, sought to reassure investors that the company is still on track after the challenging and much-delayed launch of the Model X luxury SUV.  Stifel and Credit Suisse both noted Tesla's new aluminum stamping press, which Credit Suisse's Galves says has 10 to 20 times the output of  Tesla's older machine. The bodies of the Model S and Model X are both made of aluminum, which costs twice as much as steel but weighs less. Tesla hasn't yet disclosed the composition of the Model 3. Keeping the weight down on electric vehicles helps achieve the maximum range on the battery, but maintaining a balance between cost and performance is crucial for a mass-market plug-in car. Tesla has built a new state-of-the-art paint shop that's capable of scaling up to 500,000 cars a year. That happens to be Tesla's production forecast for 2020, a 10-fold increase from last year's sales. If Tesla is to achieve that lofty goal, paint jobs won't be a holdup.

• What New Delhi’s free clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system: Rupandeep Kaur, 20 weeks pregnant, arrived at a medical clinic looking fatigued and ready to collapse. After being asked her name and address, she was taken to see a physician who reviewed her medical history, asked several questions, and ordered a series of tests including blood and urine. These tests revealed that her fetus was healthy but Kaur had dangerously low hemoglobin and blood pressure levels. The physician, Alka Choudhry, ordered an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital. All of this, including the medical tests, happened in 15 minutes at the Peeragarhi Relief Camp in New Delhi, India. The entire process was automated — from check-in, to retrieval of medical records, to testing and analysis and ambulance dispatch. The hospital also received Kaur’s medical records electronically. There was no paperwork filled out, no bills sent to the patient or insurance company, no delay of any kind. Yes, it was all free. The hospital treated Kaur for mineral and protein deficiencies and released her the same day. Had she not received timely treatment, she may have had a miscarriage or lost her life. The technology that made the instant diagnosis possible at Peeragarhi was medical device called the Swasthya Slate. This $600 device, the size of a cake tin, performs 33 common medical tests including blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, urine protein and glucose. And it tests for diseases such as malaria, dengue, hepatitis, HIV, and typhoid. Each test only takes a minute or two and the device uploads its data to a cloud-based medical-record management system that can be accessed by the patient. The Swasthya Slate was developed by Kanav Kahol, who was a biomedical engineer and researcher at Arizona State University’s department of biomedical informatics until he became frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the cost of diagnostic testing. He worried that billions of people were getting no medical care or substandard care because of the medical industry’s motivation in keeping prices high. In 2011, he returned home to New Delhi to develop a solution. By Jan. 2013, Kahol had built the Swasthya Slate and persuaded the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Northern India, to allow its use in six underserved districts with a population of 2.1 million people. The device is now in use at 498 clinics there. Focusing on reproductive maternal and child health, the system has been used to provide antenatal care to more than 22,000 mothers. Of these, 277 mothers were diagnosed as high risk and provided timely care. Mothers are getting care in their villages now instead of having to travel to clinics in cities. A newer version of the Slate, called HealthCube, was tested last month by nine teams of physicians and technology, operations, and marketing experts at Peru’s leading hospital, Clinica Internacional. They tested its accuracy against the western equipment that they use, its durability in emergency room and clinical settings, the ability of minimally trained clinicians to use it in rural settings, and its acceptability to patients. Clinica’s general manager, Alvaro Chavez Tori, told me in an email that the tests were highly successful and “acceptance of the technology was amazingly high.” He sees this technology as a way of helping the millions of people in Peru and Latin America who lack access to quality diagnostics.

• Google Will Let Mobile Games Stream in Search So That Mobile Game Makers Will Buy Search Ads: Google will let you try out a mobile game right inside the search results page, before downloading it. And Google will let game developers pay for the privilege. It’s part of Google’s ongoing effort to squeeze more ad revenue from mobile and its business cornerstone, search. For developers, the trick offers a new avenue — paid search — for recruiting new users. Most money for gamers is made inside the app, so some developers may be reluctant to move away from direct downloads. But, in theory, the streaming method lets them grab devoted game players who have tried out the game, like it, and will stick around and buy stuff therein. For Google, it’s another way to nab the ample flow of app promotional dollars — a flow that Facebook has largely cornered. Over the past year, Google has rolled out a stream of mobile app advertising tools as the company has prioritized ways to fortify its central business. It added ads to the Play store so developers could pay to get noticed there. In November, Google started testing app streaming in organic search results with a handful of apps; it brought the feature to ads within apps a month later. Now, developers can promote their apps with streaming inside search, too. Google’s share of app advertising is rising steadily, although Facebook is still out in front, according to industry sources.

• Infibeam turns profitable; to open first IPO by an Indian e-com venture on March 21: The parent of horizontal e-commerce platform Infibeam and e-commerce enabler BuildaBazaar, is to hit the market with its initial public offer (IPO) on March 21. This would make it the first among peers, including those several times bigger, to go public. Infibeam had received a green signal from securities market regulator SEBI for its initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to Rs 450 crore last October.  Founded in 2010 by a former Amazon executive, Vishal Mehta, Infibeam would also become one of the youngest firms to list on a national bourse. Having restricted itself from raising private capital, unlike its peers, it did not get too aggressive in customer acquisition to drive the B2C business and has been especially pushing the B2B e-commerce enabler platform BuildaBazaar. Infibeam would be the first pure-play e-commerce firm in the country to float an IPO in India and would test the general investors’ appetite for the sector. E-commerce in India has absorbed billions of dollars over the past four years, much of it from foreign private equity and venture capital firms. Infibeam happens to be an exception as it has not approached any major private investor for funds till now. It is promoted by a Gujarat-based affluent family whose business interest straddles a dealership for Toyota cars. Interestingly, Infibeam made profit in the first six months of the current financial year. It reported net revenues of Rs 171.27 crore for the April-September 2015 period with EBITDA of close to Rs 15 crore and net profit (adjusted for prior period items) of Rs 6.5 crore. It had clocked net loss of just under Rs 10 crore for 2014-15. As of December 31, 2015, it had 48,724 registered merchants on the BuildaBazaar platform. In Infibeam.com e-retail site, in addition to direct sales procured from suppliers, it had more than 5,000 registered merchants, and claimed to have more than 7.8 million active users (based on last login in the immediately preceding 12 months). To its credit, it is one of the rare horizontal e-commerce platforms to have survived without large external funding. Others like IndiaPlaza shut down as they failed to get follow-on funding, and as a consequence, investors funding got concentrated to the troika of Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues. Global e-commerce behemoth Amazon itself has built a big presence in India and is among the top three ventures in the country. Infibeam’s only external equity funding has come from media house Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, which bet around Rs 33.3 crore through the ad-for-equity investment platform Brand Equity Treaties Ltd (BETL). BETL owns a 1.8 per cent stake in the firm. BETL also pitched in with Rs 2 crore of non-convertible debentures, which are outstanding.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, January 7

• Flashing Red: A day of distress in the financial markets, and of distress sales in the tech startup-world.

• U.S., world stock markets slide as panic in China spreads: A collapse in China’s ailing stock market spread like contagion across the globe again Thursday, pummeling nervous investors looking for respite from the week’s rocky trading. Chinese stocks traded for less than 30 minutes, slumping 7 percent and triggering the second emergency market closure this week. The action prompted markets in Europe to retreat and then spread to the United States, where stocks tumbled 2 percent. China’s CSI 300 had traded for only 14 minutes before the first circuit breaker kicked in, calling a 15-minute halt to trading after a 5 percent fall. But instead of calming the market, it caused only more panic. When trading reopened, prices soon fell further, triggering a halt for the rest of the day. The Dow Jones industrial average, which tracks 30 blue-chip stocks, and the Standard & Poor’s 500, a broader measure of the market, both fell about 2.3 percent. They have lost about 5 percent of their value the week so far. The tech-heavy Nasdaq suffered the deepest losses, falling 3 percent on Thursday. It is down about 6 percent this week and on pace to enter a what’s known as a correction, meaning the index will have fallen about 10 percent from its most recent high. The sell-off was widespread, even hitting tech giants Apple and Amazon, which were down 4 percent and 3.7 percent respectively. JPMorgan Chase slid 4 percent, while Nordstrom tumbled 5.5 percent.  

• Distress Sale #1: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes To An End After Being Acquired For $250M: Hudson’s Bay Company, the owner of department chain stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, said today it was acquiring Gilt Groupe for $250 million. The sale still represents a tough end to the story of Gilt. The startup was one of the original darling flash-sale sites coming out of New York. But that whole market has found itself challenged by slim operating margins, its initial popularity waning, and the difficulties of building a large-scale e-commerce operation. Prior to the acquisition, the company had been widely considered to be part of the billion-dollar startup club. But the company struggled to become profitable, and in October last year the company continued cutting jobs (at that time laying off 45 people). The company previously said a few times that it would go public in 2013 and 2014, before putting that on hold indefinitely and raising additional capital. It’s also not the greatest return for its investors. Prior to the sale the company had raised more than $270 million, which makes this look like a deal that will not return the total amount of money that it had raised. 

• Distress Sale #2: One Kings Lane, Once Valued at $900 Million, Is Likely to Sell for a Fraction of That: One Kings Lane, the online seller of furniture and home decor that has struggled for the better part of the last two years, has been running a process to sell the company for several months, four sources told Re/code. The company had aimed to seal a deal by the end of 2015, one of these people said, calling it a “fire sale.” After originally seeking a higher price, One Kings Lane notified potential buyers in the last few months that it was willing to sell for less than the $230 million it had raised in venture capital, multiple sources said. It’s not clear if a deal is done or who the potential buyer would be, but sources say a deal is unlikely to fetch more than $150 million. That would mean at least some investors will lose money and any employee stock would likely become worthless. Several of One Kings Lane’s investors have a liquidation preference, according to venture data startup PitchBook, meaning they will get paid out before holders of common stock, such as employees. The company most recently cut a quarter of its staff in December, including five members of its senior management team. Sources said the layoffs were likely a condition to get a deal done.

• Distress Sale #3: Quikr closes purchase of online real estate portal Commonfloor.com, pushed by investor Tiger Global: Online classifieds firm Quikr India Pvt. Ltd, one of India’s most valuable start-ups, bought real estate portal CommonFloor in a distress sale orchestrated by Tiger Global Management Llc, the influential US-based hedge fund that is an investor in both. Quikr, valued at an estimated $1 billion, and CommonFloor (maxHeap Technologies Pvt. Ltd) didn’t disclose the terms of the transaction, but two people familiar with the matter said Quickr paid $120 million in an all-stock deal. The people spoke on condition of anonymity. CommonFloor was valued at more than $150 million when it last raised Rs.60 crore from Google Capital in December 2014. The company raised a total of Rs.321 crore from Tiger, Accel Partners and Google Capital since 2011. Quikr and CommonFloor have valuations that seem disproportionate to their revenue. Quikr reported sales of Rs.24.78 crore for the year ended 31 March 2015 while CommonFloor generated sales of Rs.45.76 crore for that year, according to documents with the Registrar of Companies. Despite having generated revenue that is much larger than Quikr’s, CommonFloor attracted a much lower valuation because of the valuation metrics used by e-commerce investors that may seem peculiar to shareholders in traditional businesses.

• Samsung's Earnings Miss Underlines Sputtering Global Demand: Samsung Electronics’s profit miss is the latest sign the global smartphone market is running out of steam, spelling trouble for the suppliers of displays, semiconductors and other components that go into mobile devices. The world’s largest maker of displays and memory chips, which sells to Apple and many other brands, posted fourth-quarter profit that fell short of analysts’ estimates as sales remained sluggish over the holiday season. Demand is waning for smartphones as markets mature and China’s economy slows, pressuring profit margins at Samsung. Concerns that the smartphone market is fizzling out has spurred analysts to trim estimated demand, which in turn has hammered device vendors as well as suppliers of components and contract assemblers. Apple, which garners most of the industry’s profits, ended Thursday below $100 for the first time in over a year after investment brokerages from UBS  to Morgan Stanley lowered forecasts on iPhone shipments. Samsung phone shipments are headed for their second straight annual decline in the wake of tougher competition from Apple in the high-end segment to China’s Xiaomi  and Huawei. for budget consumers. Yet even Xiaomi, which rose from obscurity to become the country’s biggest phone brand, may have missed its 80-million unit sales target in 2015, people with knowledge of its production plans have said.

• Amazon Is Now Selling Its Own ARM-Based Chips: An Israeli company acquired by Amazon last year has announced a new line of semiconductors, marking Amazon’s first foray into the chipmaking market. The company, Annapurna Labs, announced its Alpine line of ARM-based processors on Wednesday, nearly a year after Amazon acquired it for a reported $350 million. The company says that its chips are designed for Wi-Fi routers, media streaming devices, connected home products and data storage gear, and that they’ve already been used in commercial products from Asus, Netgear, and Synology.

• Collapse in Q4 Venture Deal-Making Could Signal End of Unicorn Era: A study released in October found that venture capital firms were raising significantly less money than in previous quarters. Around that time, a bunch of well-known investors — like Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson — began saying that the days of steady unicorn valuations were coming to a close. Here’s more cold water: An upcoming report from CB Insights says that VC funding levels in the fourth quarter of 2015 “fell 30 percent amid weakening mega-round activity while deal activity fell 13 percent vs. the previous quarter.” Here are the core findings from the KPMG International & CB Insights 2015 Venture Pulse Report, which will be released on January 19: In the third quarter of 2015, there were 72 $100 million equity funding rounds for VC-backed companies. In Q4, there were only 39 of those gigantic growth equity rounds. There were only nine new unicorns birthed in the fourth quarter, versus 23 in Q3. Deal-making activity in general fell to its lowest levels since the first quarter of 2013. While these numbers are by far the most concrete indicator that venture startup investing is getting less, um, frothy, there have been warning signs for the last few months. December data from Ernst & Young indicated that tech startups were avoiding IPOs, partly fearful that public markets would tank their private sector valuations. In November, a series of valuation writedowns of a number of unicorn startups shaved billions off Snapchat, Zenefits and other high-flying and fast-growing tech companies.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, January 6

• Apple falls on Nikkei report of ~30% iPhone production cuts: Apple is expected to cut production of its latest iPhone models by about 30 percent in the January-March quarter, the Nikkei reported. As inventories of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have piled up since they were launched last September, production will be scaled back to let dealers go through their current stock, the business daily reported. Apple's shares were down 2.2 percent at $102.97 in afternoon trading. The stock has lost about a quarter of its value from record highs in April, reflecting worries over slowing shipments. "This is an eye-opening production cut which speaks to the softer demand that Apple has seen with 6s out of the gates," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said. "The Street was bracing for a cut but the magnitude here is a bit more worrisome." Apple shares fell on the report. Tepid forecast by Apple suppliers such as Jabil Circuit, which manufactures casings for iPhones, and Dialog Semiconductor GmbH in December stoked fears that iPhone shipments could fall for the first time. Wall Street has also tempered its view on the high-flying stock in recent months. Since early December, about a third of the analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters have trimmed their estimates on Apple.

• Stuff from CES that you may actually want to buy: CES, the largest consumer electronics show in the world, kicked off Monday with a sneak peek at what some companies will be exhibiting on the show floor this week. Even with a smaller sampling of exhibitors, there was a dizzying amount of tech to take in -- everything from drones to laser-powered gizmos that promise to regrow your hair. We walked the floor and picked out five items that might be worth buying if they ever get to the market. There is a catch: Like so much of the gadgetry on display at CES, all of these items aren't for sale yet. They also don't have some of the finer details, such as price, worked out yet either. Parrot drones have been a highlight of CES for many years, and this year is no different. The company is showing off a new model called the Parrot Disco, a fixed-wing drone that you can launch by hurling it into the air like a Frisbee. Ili, the wearable translator: This little translator is about the size of a thumb drive, has one button and is described as the world's first wearable translator. The idea is that users speak into the device while holding down the button, let go, and then have the Ili translate into another language in real time. The whole thing is designed to work offline -- so no connection needed. It instead draws on a database of words and phrases stored locally in the device. Stabilo Digipen: Moving from the high-flying to the everyday, Stabilo's Digipen promises to be the modern notetaking instrument of my dreams. Made by an established German pen company, this souped-up ballpoint reads and learns the way you write and converts it into digital text for you. Unlike other smart pens, the Digipen is designed to work with any kind of paper.

• India’s most funded hyperlocal startup Grofers shuts shop in 9 cities: Hyperlocal grocery and fresh food delivery startup Grofers India Pvt Ltd, which ran a massive expansion drive four months ago, has shut down its operations in nine cities. The cities where it has stopped services are Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana, Bhopal, Kochi, Mysore, Nashik, Rajkot, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam. Grofers reportedly withdrew from the nine cities as it didn’t see much uptake even after running massive marketing campaigns. A company spokesperson told Mint that all the employees in these cities are being relocated to other centres. The company’s founder Albinder Dhindsa did not respond to Techcircle.in calls to confirm the development.

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Shows Users Why 10,000-Character Tweets Aren’t So Crazy: Show, don’t tell. It’s a general rule for writers and it was a helpful tool for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Tuesday afternoon just a few hours after Re/code reported that the company is working on a feature that would allow people to send tweets that are 10,000 characters long. (The current limit is 140 characters.) As expected, Twitter users freaked out, so Dorsey tweeted an explanation for the potential change, and he did so in many, many characters. Because Twitter can’t accommodate more than 140 characters in a single tweet, Dorsey shared his much-too-long explanation as a photo instead. This is the closest Twitter has ever come to speaking publicly about the feature, referred to internally as “Beyond 140.” The product could launch as early as March, according to sources, but Dorsey didn’t acknowledge a launch date in his post. It’s clear, though, that Twitter isn’t afraid to make drastic changes to the product in its effort to jump-start user growth and its sagging stock price.

• In reversal of strategy,  Verizon launches auction to sell data centers - sources: Verizon has started a process to sell its data center assets, hoping to fetch more than $2.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, as the U.S. telecommunications conglomerate focuses on its core business. A sale would represent the latest effort by Verizon, the No. 1 U.S. wireless carrier, to streamline its portfolio following a divestment last year of a chunk of its landline business and a portfolio of wireless towers. It would also mark a reversal of its strategy to expand in hosting and colocation services after it acquired data center operator Terremark Worldwide Inc in 2011 for $1.4 billion. The so-called 'colocation' portfolio up for sale includes 48 data centers, and generates annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of around $275 million, one of the people said.

• Fitbit Takes On the Apple Watch With the Blaze - Stock Falls 18% on News: The fitness tracking leader goes for a full-on, fashionable smartwatch. Fitbit has come out swinging by introducing the Blaze, the company's first smartwatch with some fashion sense.  The Blaze isn't a smartwatch that you can weight down with apps or customize to organize your entire digital life. It is primarily meant to be a detailed fitness tracker that can be worn all the time, offering a few additional features for convenience. Apart from interacting with Fitbit's own fitness app, the Blaze can push calendar appointments, calls, and texts, but it doesn't get into the weeds with such things as e-mail or Twitter notifications. The Fitbit Blaze will set you back $200 for the tracker and the rubber strap that's included. Additional rubber straps will cost $30, leather options are $100, and the steel bracelet is the most expensive, at $130. The Fitbit Blaze is now available for pre-order via Fitbit and will go on sale January 6 via Fitbit's larger retailers such at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target in the United States. Global availability isn't yet set, but the Blaze will start rolling out outside the U.S. in March.  After the announcement, shares fell throughout the day before ending down 18 percent. The Fitbit Blaze, starting at around $200, represents not only new competition with smartwatch makers, but also potentially a lack of focus for the company — which investors may be punishing. Fitbit had carved out a strong niche in the fitness tracking market, setting itself up for one of the strongest stock performances from companies that went public last year.

• Expanding push into ad-tech, Oracle Buys Audience Tracking Firm AddThis For Around $200M: Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech. Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories or follow accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and audience tracking technology for online publishers and marketers. AddThis says it currently covers activity data for 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors and over 15 million mobile and desktop web domains. Oracle and AddThis are not disclosing the terms of the deal, but we have been digging around, and sources with knowledge of the company tell us that it was in the region of $100 million to $200 million, closer to the latter. The acquisition underscores a couple of bigger developments in the world of advertising and marketing tech. The first of these is the growing role that Oracle is playing in this area. Oracle says that it will continue to serve existing clients of AddThis, but it is currently evaluating the future product roadmap. More concretely, AddThis will become a part of Oracle’s Data Cloud business, a division that also includes assets from two other recent Oracle acquisitions: BlueKai (advertising data) and Datalogix (marketing data). Taken together, the technology and big data portfolios that Oracle has amassed in this division give the company a strong play for more business from brands and ad firms, as well as from online content companies that want better tools to make better sense of their audiences and to monetise them more effectively. Secondly, the deal points to a wider trend for consolidation in marketing tech and ad tech. While AddThis has been around for more than a decade, it’s interesting to see that it finally made the leap to join a bigger company. On its own, AddThis had developed some interesting, but also somewhat controversial, technology. One example, “canvas fingerprinting,” was being tested by AddThis last year as a potential replacement for cookies, by way of a digital image created by each browser to follow users wherever they went online. As Pro Publica described it, canvas fingerprinting was “extremely persistent” and nearly impossible to block, raising concerns from privacy advocates. It’s not clear whether canvas fingerprinting is something that AddThis uses today, or whether Oracle plans to market the tech in future. AddThis is Oracle’s 96th acquisition.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 30

• Instacart’s crazy-growth days may be coming to an end: the $2 Billion Grocery Delivery Startup, Lays Off 12 In-House Recruiters:  The grocery delivery startup, which investors valued at $2 billion last year, laid off 12 in-house recruiters earlier this month, according to multiple sources. A spokeswoman confirmed the layoffs, but did not disclose how many recruiters the company still employs. In a statement, CEO Apoorva Mehta attributed the job cuts to the company’s plans to be less aggressive in hiring in 2016 than it was in 2015, when its staff tripled, from just under 100 employees to a little more than 300. A person familiar with the move, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the company likely should have employed fewer full-time recruiters and more contractors since it was unlikely that last year’s pace of hiring would continue indefinitely. Those affected by the cuts will be paid through the end of January, this person said. Instacart delivers groceries in 18 American cities from big chains like Whole Foods, Costco and Target and smaller grocers like Fairway and Zabar’s in New York City. Customers place orders through Instacart’s website or app, and the goods are whisked from local stores to customer doors, usually within an hour. A substantial portion of Instacart’s revenue originally came from marking up the in-store price of a given item, but the company now often charges the same price as the grocer, but takes a cut of the sales from the store. Earlier this year, Instacart finally began being transparent about when it was charging higher prices than its partner grocers.

• First Look at New Foldable Google Glass for the Workplace: The division of Google responsible for wearable technology, Project Aura, has been hard at work on numerous iterations based on the original Glass headset. Now we’ve got a glimpse at what one of those devices may look like. In FCC filings published today, a version of Glass designed for the workplace shows a familiar-looking device with a glass prism, but equipped with a hinge so that it can be folded and placed in pockets like a standard pair of glasses.

• Sidecar Squeezed Out by Uber and Lyft, Will Shut Down on Dec. 31: Sidecar, the third-biggest U.S. car-hailing service, said it will end its ride and delivery operations as the company is squeezed out by better-known competitors Uber and Lyft. One of the pioneers of the ride-sharing concept, Sidecar will end its service on Dec. 31, co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a blog post. The move will help pave the way for the "next big adventure in 2016," according to the letter. Founded four years ago, Sidecar created one of the first apps to try ride-destination tracking, discounted carpooling and deliveries that placed people and packages on the same route, according to its founders. The closely held San Francisco-based company shifted from transporting passengers to goods after struggling to compete with Uber and Lyft, according to CB Insights. "They’re competing with very heavily funded companies, and they didn’t have the same pull with drivers that these other companies might have," said Nikhil Krishnan, a technology analyst at CB Insights. "Even when it pivoted to transporting goods, it still had to compete with Postmates, and even Uber is transporting goods." Sidecar has raised about $35 million, according to Margaret Ryan, a company spokeswoman. That number pales in comparison to venture capital raised by Uber and Lyft. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Uber is seeking $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion. Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing service, is currently seeking to raise $500 million, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg last month. Sidecar’s investors include Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, and Richard Branson.

• Foodpanda India to sack about 330 employees: Foodpanda India is laying off one in seven staffers, continuing its clean-up drive after allegations of operational irregularities rattled the Rocket Internet-owned food ordering marketplace. The company said on Tuesday it will sack 15 per cent of its employees, or 330 people, as increased automation of 98 per cent in order processing has reduced the need for staffers. Foodpanda joins a raft of food-tech startups such as Zomato and TinyOwl in laying off employees amid a tightening in fund flow from investors due to high cash burn and growing profitability concerns. Before the job cuts, Foodpanda had 2,200 employees on its rolls. The company said it will provide affected employees due remuneration and help them explore job options.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 17

• Fed Raises Key Interest Rate for First Time in Almost a Decade: The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, a vote of confidence in the American economy. Policy makers have waited a long time for this moment: Since December 2008 the Fed has held the benchmark rate near zero, the centerpiece of its campaign to revive economic growth and reduce unemployment from the recession. Fed officials predicted that they would raise interest rates by about one percentage point a year over the next three years — an indication that they would be taking a slow-and-steady approach to economic expansion. The cost of borrowing is expected to rise, but only slightly, with variable effects on what banks charge for credit cards, home equity lines of credit, adjustable-rate mortgages, auto loans and some student loans. Remember, Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, has said the Fed will move cautiously in raising its benchmark rate. Financial markets were encouraged by the Fed’s announcement. Stocks rose, the dollar gained modestly and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose slightly. The Fed’s announcement came exactly seven years to the day after the central bank cut its benchmark rate nearly to zero.

• Facebook Messenger Lets You Book an Uber:  The feature will be made available in the U.S. to start. Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday. The new feature for Messenger, which has more than 700 million users globally, will allow users to tap on a street address in a message and summon a ride. After booking, the app will let Uber customers easily share their estimated arrival times or coordinate splitting the fare with friends through Messenger. The feature is expected to be made available in other countries outside the U.S. later. One place Facebook probably won't introduce the Uber button any time soon is in China, where the social network is blocked. The Chinese have had a similar feature in Tencent's WeChat, the dominant messaging platform in the country. That version works with Didi Kuaidi, however, a Tencent-backed ride-hailing service that is Uber's chief competitor there. Tencent has blocked Uber from using WeChat to recruit drivers or promote the company in China, says Uber. 

• Amazon Leads $23M Investment In India-Based Home Services Startup Housejoy: Amazon has led a $23 million investment in India-based Housejoy, a startup that — as the name not-so-subtly suggests — is much like Homejoy, the home services on-demand company that closed its doors this summer. The U.S. e-commerce giant was joined in the Series A round by existing investor Matrix Partners, and new backers Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. Unlike U.S.-based Homejoy — which had raised nearly $40 million and was the most visible player in an emerging category — Housejoy offers more than just home cleaning services. It caters to plumbing, electrical/appliance repairs, beauty, fitness, laundry and pest control and more. The startup is less than a year old, it previously raised $4 million, and is currently available in 11 cities across India. With this new funding, CEO Saran Chatterjee told TechCrunch that it plans to expand to cover 25 cities by the end of next year. The involvement of Amazon, which previously invested in India-based deals with financial comparison service BankBazaar and gift card startup QwikCilver, is interesting. Its founder Jeff Bezos hasn’t been shy in admitting that the company is very much focused on growing in India, where it launched two years ago and is rivaled by two home-grown unicorns: SoftBank-backed Flipkart and Alibaba-backed Snapdeal. Last year, Amazon invested $2 billion in its India business and results seem to be going its way after it recently claimed to have beaten its well-backed rivals on monthly traffic for the first time. Chatterjee stressed in an interview that Amazon hasn’t discussed acquiring Housejoy, and that its involvement in the round could unlock a lucrative partnership for the startup. Beyond its expansion, Housejoy plans to use the money to ramp its quality assurance protocols which evaluate and assess the ‘service providers’ who work for the company. In that way, it’s very much like Uber — a marketplace through which independent workers can find jobs. With some customers experiencing issues with the service — including one India-based writer at Tech In Asia — Chatterjee admits that it needs to raise its reliability from (probably) a seven out of ten score, to nine or ten. The company is also planning to spend a portion of its funding on strategic acquisitions. Chatterjee said that around 10 percent of the round — so roughly $2 million — could go towards buying up companies or acquihiring teams that “give us a position of strength in a city or category, or [add to the] team and talent.”

• Oracle profit forecast fails to impress; shares fall. Oracle Corp on Wednesday delivered a third-quarter profit forecast that did not quite meet analysts' expectations, and the company's shares fell about 1 percent in extended trading. Oracle forecast third-quarter profit of about 63-66 cents per share, with revenue flat or up 3 percent which translates to $9.33 billion-$9.61 billion. The company's shift from licensing software to cloud-based subscriptions has squeezed its margins. Oracle, like other established technology companies, has been moving its business to the cloud-based model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Up to Wednesday's close, Oracle's stock had fallen 13.5 percent this year.

• In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers: The Internet took off as a way to book travel because the human intermediaries were always a bit suspect — their expertise questionable, their methods opaque and their allegiances unclear. And at first, the machines seemed to improve everything. For uncomplicated trips, booking online is now much easier than in the past. Because we’ve replaced agents with computers whose sole purpose is to ferret out the best deal, and for lots of other reasons, airfares have plummeted over the last three decades. Yet as you suffer through another holiday travel season, you might pause to consider how much we’ve really gained — and lost — in ditching human agents for machines. And you might welcome an emerging trend on the Internet: start-ups that are trying to put human agents, whether in travel, home services or shopping, back at the center of how we make decisions. “A lot of companies pushed hard on the idea that technology will solve every problem, and that we shouldn’t use humans,” said Paul English, the co-founder of a new online company called Lola Travel. “We think humans add value, so we’re trying to design technology to facilitate the human-to-human connection.” Lola, which is currently open only in a limited prerelease version, has an unusual interface: When you’re looking to book a trip, you just send a text. Your request can be vague — “Hey, my family is thinking about going to Europe next summer” — because on the other end sits a human. The agent knows your general travel preferences and has access to many of the same tools you’d use to book a trip. But the agent also has something extra — experience and data to help make decisions about the kind of trip you should take.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, November 20

• Successful Tech IPO#1: Shares of Square Soar by 45% After Public Offering: Square began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, at one point surging more than 64 percent above its initial public offering price of $9. It ended the day up 45 percent, closing at $13.07. The first-day pop followed a turbulent I.P.O. process for the six-year-old company, one that was marred by questions over pricing and valuation and that arrived in the face of a precarious public market for technology offerings. On Wednesday, when Square had priced its shares at $9, that was lower than the $11 to $13 range it had set, putting its valuation at $2.9 billion, well below the $6 billion price tag that private investors had valued the company at last year. As recently as Wednesday, advisers laid out options for Square including pulling the deal, three people briefed on the discussions said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but for Square, that was not a consideration.  “We have a great beginning,” said Jack Dorsey, Square’s chief, striking an upbeat note in an interview on Thursday, which was his 39th birthday. “I don’t see negativity as necessarily something that detracts from our work.” The I.P.O. ordeal illustrates the difficulties — some might say guesswork — of accurately valuing companies, both when they are private and when they go public. And Square, which closed its first day trading with a market capitalization of $4.4 billion, now faces the challenge of moving on from the fund-raising event, solidifying its business and building itself up. “I want to get back to a steady state and back to business,” Mr. Dorsey said. He added that Square’s strategy now was “to continue to save people trips to the bank. We’re not going out there to say we’re getting rid of the banks or card networks. We’ve just put a much cleaner face on that infrastructure.”

• Sucessful Tech IPO#2: Investors 'swipe right' in Tinder-owner Match's debut: Shares of media mogul Barry Diller's Match Group, the owner of popular dating site Match.com and mobile app Tinder, jumped as much as 24 percent in their market debut on Thursday, valuing the company at $3.57 billion. Match Group, which touts itself as the world's No. 1 dating company, is seen as the crown jewel of Diller's media properties and has driven parent IAC/InterActiveCorp's (IACI.O) profit and revenue in recent quarters. The U.S. online romance market, worth more than $2 billion a year, has thrived as instant messaging, photo-sharing and geolocation services grow in popularity. One of Match Group's most popular offerings is Tinder, a mobile app on which people "swipe right" or "swipe left" to signal their willingness – or not – to meet prospective partners.

• Facebook Makes It Easier to Move On After a Breakup: Breaking up is now a little easier to do, at least on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that lets people untangle themselves from a relationship without cutting ties altogether. The operator of the world's biggest social network introduced a tool on Thursday for users to "take a break" after changing the status of a relationship with another person, letting them see less of an ex's posts without blocking or unfriending them. People can also tell Facebook to show an ex less information. While the feature might seem intrusive, it's become more necessary as Facebook has worked to highlight a user's most important relationships. The company is using its data to make better suggestions, such as who should be invited to events or whose birthdays are more important to celebrate. For example, Facebook has been serving up flashback memories of older posts, which, after a breakup, could bring back bad memories. And Facebook doesn't want to drive away any of its 1.55 billion users. The tools are more subtle than unfriending or unfollowing someone—the ex won't see any changes. Twitter, which lets users know if they were blocked, came up with a similar option last year, adding a "mute" button that would keep users from seeing someone's posts without letting them know. Facebook's new breakup feature is also reversible—just in case.

• Patron of Indian start-ups Tiger Global to tone down current aggressive style; to come up with two-track approach in giving money to companies: Tiger Global Management, the most prolific backer of startups in India, has decided to tone down its current aggressive style here, several people aware of the thinking at the US firm said, in a reflection of the limits of its strategy so far as well as the changing investor mood. Tiger, which is based in New York with private investments led by Lee Fixel, is coming up with a twotrack approach when it comes to giving money to companies in its portfolio, conversations with founders and investors reveal. The ones that are in leadership positions in the market can expect Fixel to keep his purse strings open, but not the laggards which have been told to fend for themselves. They must obtain validation from investors other than Tiger to lead new rounds and get unit economics right with positive operating margins. One of the founders who met Fixel recounted the conversation thus: "I will be leading very few investments in the next six to eight months, but if you use your cash and survive this cycle, then the pressure will ease out." Tiger, which is the main backer of India's most valuable startup Flipkart and owns significant stakes in the country's largest cab aggregator Ola, has invested around $2 billion (Rs 13,000 crore) in over 35 Indian companies. This year it has been even more active than in the past, but that has changed along with the onset of a more cautious mood about throwing large sums of money at consumer internet ventures. 

• Trailing in the Cloud, Google Taps VMware Founder to Chase Amazon: With its cloud business, Google finds itself in a rare position: Behind. The search giant has toyed with different enterprise products for years, with limited success, and now faces fierce competition from Microsoft and Amazon. But Google is signaling that it is serious about building an enterprise business. And here is its biggest sign: Alphabet has tapped Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of the software company VMware, to run it. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, announced the move in a blog post. Therein he said Greene, who has been a Google board member since 2012, will take over “all our cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Cloud Platform and Google Apps.” The move includes an acquisition of Greene’s new company, Bebop. Pichai describes it as a “new development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications.” Google isn’t sharing a price on the deal. Greene is joining at a moment when Google’s cloud efforts, both on the application and the infrastructure side, seem to be spinning. Three years ago, the narrative about Google Apps was how it was so often displacing Microsoft Office with its word processing and spreadsheet apps that run in a browser. Now that Microsoft Office has gotten the cloud religion with Office 365, which runs both as an on-premise version and in the cloud, the narrative around Google Apps has shifted in the last year or so: It’s now described generally as “doing well with small businesses,” even though Google itself still touts the fact that 60 percent of the Fortune 500 use it. Still, the cloud world has just gotten a lot more competitive. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Office Graph, a set of unified APIs that will let third-party developers build add-ons and apps that enhance how Microsoft Office works. This hiring seems a partial response to that.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 16

• For Indian tech startups, 'Winter is here… and why this is a great time to invest':  The horizontal e-commerce Unicorns in India – Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, and adding ShopClues and even a more diversified Paytm – are in a dogfight with no end in sight. It doesn’t help that Amazon keeps on growing from strength to strength and getting more aggressive. The online classified players have even bigger issues. Unlike the e-commerce Unicorns, Quikr, OLX, the real estate and car classified firms and other listing-related ones like Zomato have yet to see a serious revenue jump that matches their astounding valuation surge. They all have a serious dogfight coming with no one being particularly dominant in their segment (well Zomato is, but is revenue growth justifying valuation?). Ola and Uber? Ditto, serious dogfight with no end in sight. Ad-tech? Tough for InMobi and Pubmatic to claim resilience and justify high valuations when Facebook and Google want to eat it all. Payments? Paytm has an extraordinary franchise but is it too distracted with other possibilities? Probably the only secure privately-held Unicorn in India is MuSigma – no surprise there as it has real profits and real cash generation. All the rest of the Unicorns are work in process. For early-stage startups, good news and very bad news. The good news is that several Series A funds have lots of dry powder – Accel, Kalaari, Matrix, Nexus, SAIF, Sequoia, etc. will all continue to invest and there will be some fantastic opportunities as the extraordinary customer adoption, benefits of a hyper-connected world and improvements in broadband infrastructure will continue. This is a great time to invest, much like 2008-2011 when many Unicorns of today were created. Many investors have seen such down cycles before and they will not retreat. We also plan to continue investing at our regular rate of one to two deals per quarter. However, Series A investors have to be prepared to fund fewer deals and fund the winners more as Series B/C will not be easy to come by as the ‘hedgies’ boosting up this market and valuations are more or less gone. Indian startups are not a good ‘trade’ anymore! The really bad news is that funding will be available to only a small number of players, as investors get overly conservative. There will be mass closures or scale downs and heavy bleeding for many angel, seed and Series A investors. Capital will vanish for not only the vague and fluffy ideas but even for some good ones as they will get washed away with the tide and sink.

• The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital: According to a recent study of 27 schools [in the United States], about one-quarter of female undergraduates and students who identified as queer or transgender said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Some felt the incidents weren’t serious enough. Others said they did not think anyone would believe them or they feared negative social consequences. Some felt it would be too emotionally difficult. Now, in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. Students at participating colleges can use its site, called Callisto, to record details of an assault anonymously. The site saves and time-stamps those records. That allows students to decide later whether they want to formally file reports with their schools — identifying themselves by their school-issued email addresses — or download their information and take it directly to the police. The site also offers a matching system in which a user can elect to file a report with the school electronically only if someone else names the same assailant. Callisto’s hypothesis is that some college students — who already socialize, study and shop online — will be more likely initially to document a sexual assault on a third-party site than to report it to school officials on the phone or in person.

• As Bubble Deflates, A Cottage Industry Emerges Around Startup Investors Trying to Cash Out: With Silicon Valley startups staying private longer these days, investors, company executives and rank-and-file employees are increasingly eager to cash out early. In recent weeks, growing fears of a bubble have given insiders even more incentive to sell their shares. Typically company founders try to limit such transactions, but a cottage industry has sprung up to help facilitate the sales on the quiet. Selling shares early isn’t entirely new. Before Facebook Inc. went public in 2012, a secondary market emerged that helped early employees and investors cash out to buy houses, cars or build a nest egg. A network of brokers helped facilitate the private deals, and firms such as DST Global Ltd., run by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, were eager to amass positions in the growing social network. Many of the current crop of promising startups -- among them Palintir, Dropbox, Flipboard -- have reached or surpassed their fifth year of existence. That’s when early employees increasingly need the cash, said Mark Dempster, a partner at Founders Circle, which buys officially sanctioned secondary shares. Adding to the anxiousness among those with equity in startups is a drop in valuations for some high-profile companies. Fidelity cut the valuation of Snapchat Inc. by about 25 percent in the third quarter, BlackRock Inc. trimmed the value of storage-company Dropbox Inc. and payments company Square Inc. is seeking an IPO market capitalization that’s significantly lower than its valuation as a privately held company. There’s no shortage of eager buyers attempting to buy a stake in a hot startup. Some aspiring investors even cold call insiders asking to buy shares. organized sales clearly aren’t meeting all the demand to cash out. Many employees and investors are finding other ways to sell shares on their own. Several companies have sprouted up to help find buyers for their shares. EquityZen, based in New York, offers “forward contracts,” where an employee trades the rights to their stock in exchange for cash now. The company sends out regular e-mails offering stock in companies such as Spotify, AppDyanmics and Chartboost. The sellers “get the cash they are looking for,” said Chief Executive Officer Atish Davda said in an interview. More traditional financial institutions also are participating in the secondary market, with mutual funds, hedge funds and asset managers like BlackRock Inc. occasionally buying shares this way. Last month, Nasdaq bought Secondmarket Solutions Inc., the operator of a software platform that helps facilitate the sales of shares in private companies.

• After Outcry, Ireland Adjusts Its Corporate Tax Draw: While lawmakers often play down its importance, Ireland’s 12.5 percent tax rate (versus 35 percent, before deductions, in the United States) has been a mainstay in the country’s decades-long strategy to attract the world’s largest companies. With few natural and manufacturing resources, Ireland and its politicians instead have turned to one of the world’s lowest corporate tax rates as the country’s primary competitive advantage in the global economy. In recent years, other European countries have accused Ireland of acting like an unfair low-tax haven. The European Commission, for example, is investigating whether Ireland gave Apple a preferential tax deal that broke the region’s tough state-aid rules. While lawmakers and the company have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, the country is already phasing out the most controversial loopholes. Ireland has since turned to a new inducement: a low tax rate on revenue generated from patents and other intellectual property held in Ireland. Such an incentive — announced last month to be 6.25 percent, or half of the country’s corporate tax rate — could be most attractive to patent-heavy industries like technology and pharmaceuticals. But many tax experts say the benefits will be significantly smaller than many had expected, particularly for global tech giants. Because of recent changes to global agreements, Ireland must limit what type of intellectual property can be included in these low-tax structures, known locally as a “knowledge development box.” Such restrictions have been demanded by several European countries, particularly Germany, which raised concerns that Ireland and other countries would turn to such structures to unfairly bring down corporate tax rates. Under international law, Ireland and other countries like Britain and potentially the United States can offer the tax breaks only on intellectual property derived from research carried out in their national borders. Much of the research and development for technology companies is done outside Ireland. So revenue from global patents like those linked to Google’s search algorithm, many of which were developed in the United States, will not be eligible for the reduced tax. Still, for regulators who have tried to limit Ireland’s tax advantage, the restrictions placed on the country’s knowledge development box represent a victory in the global push to close unfair tax loopholes. Some companies in Ireland had lobbied for a wider definition of what type of intellectual property, especially linked to online advertising and search patents moved from other countries to Ireland, could be included in the tax mechanism. Those efforts, though, failed.

• Sensor and Chip Makers stand to win as automakers battle for high-tech dominance: Automakers hope semi-autonomous features will, over time, help drivers and regulators get over fears of riding in vehicles that accelerate, steer and stop themselves, making potentially life-or-death judgments. Shorter term, car companies want these features to make driving more convenient - and cars more profitable. Ford's Active Speed Limiter comes at 560 euros ($602.78), and it's too soon to tell how popular it will be. Among the biggest winners for now are the companies that produce electronic sensors, cameras and software that make self-driving features possible. The growing list includes the high-tech units of traditional automotive suppliers such as Germany's Continental AG, Israel's Mobileye Vision Technologies, and consumer-technology giants Google, Apple, Samsung Electronics Co, Sony Corp and more. At Silicon Valley's Nvidia Corp, for example, video games remain the biggest market, but automotive revenue is the fastest-growing segment.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 15

• Facebook Works With Google To Let Mobile Web Users Get Push Notifications Via Chrome: A big reason developers hate mobile websites is that they lack the push notifications which help re-engage people with native apps. That was a serious problem for Facebook. It sees a ton of users on its m.facebook.com site, especially in the developing world where data budgets are tight, but had trouble pulling them back in. So today Facebook announced that after working with Google on its new mobile web alerts standard, m.facebook.com mobile web users can now opt to receive push notifications via Chrome. Google first announced the development of its third-party push API through Chrome back in April and noted some partners like eBay and Vice News who had committed to implementing the standard. Now Facebook has rolled out the feature,  so mobile Chrome users on m.facebook.com will be asked to turn on Chrome pushes. Facebook’s product manager on browser partnerships Jonathan McKay tells me that already, “We’ve seen an increase in visitation from launching push notifications.”

• Indian cab-hailing firm Ola is raising $500 million+, at a valuation that we’ve heard is around the $5 billion mark, with $225 million committed so far. The news comes as the company — which competes in its home market against the likes of Uber and Indian startup Meru — continues to expand into more cities, and more products. Today, Ola launched a new car leasing service for drivers on its network; last week it expanded to shuttle services for commuters. The raise is due to be finalised in the next week or two and announced officially then, sources tell TechCrunch. As it is still in progress, the final amount and final valuation may also change. This funding, a Series F, has been rumored for some time now, with the first reports surfacing just after Ola announced its last raise of $400 million in April of this year. That round, a Series E, valued the company at $2.5 billion.

• Russian Authorities Rule Google Broke Antitrust Regulations:  Russian antitrust authorities ruled on Monday that Google broke the country’s competition rules, adding to the regulatory headaches the search giant is facing worldwide. Russian officials said that Google had abused its dominant market position with Android, its mobile operating system, by favoring the company’s own services over those of rivals, including Yandex, a Russian competitor. Earlier this year, Yandex had complained to the country’s competition authority that cellphone manufacturers were not able to include the company’s rival digital offerings in the Android operating system. After the complaint, the regulator began investigating whether Google unfairly bundled its own services, like digital maps, in its Android software. Unlike in other parts of the world, where Google has outmuscled domestic search rivals, Yandex still holds more than a 50 percent market share in Russian online search, according to industry statistics. The company’s share price rose more than 8 percent in early afternoon trading in New York after the regulatory decision was announced. “Russia is the first jurisdiction to have officially recognized these practices as anticompetitive,” Yandex said in a statement, in reference to Google’s favoring of its own services in Android over those of rivals. The company added that it believed the antitrust ruling would “serve to restore competition in the market.” European and other international antitrust watchdogs are taking an increasingly tough line against the company.

• The auto and tech worlds are fighting for the best minds in race for self-driving car: Google had all of Silicon Valley to choose from when deciding on a leader for its ambitious self-driving car division. Instead, the tech behemoth hired an auto-industry lifer: John Krafcik, a former head of Hyundai's American brand who got his start as an engineer working on the Ford Explorer. The announcement on Monday comes just a week after Toyota said it, too, had looked outside its industry for its next big name. Earlier this month, the carmaker said it had tapped the military’s chief robotics engineer, Gill Pratt, to lead a $50 million push into not just driverless cars but artificial intelligence, through investments into tech research labs. The high-profile hires spotlight the growing overlap between the global giants of autos and tech, and analysts say it could point to a growing tension between some of the industries' biggest, wealthiest names. Tech giants increasingly see ways to make money and save lives in the old-fashioned, hyper-profitable business of cars. But traditional automakers, who could lose heavily if self-driving cars go mainstream, aren't hesitating to grab onto some of tech's top minds, either, as a way to adapt in a world beyond cars.

• Twitter, InMobi Embrace New Stripe Mobile E-Commerce Tool: Stripe Inc., the online-payments processor, unveiled a tool to simplify mobile e-commerce for stores and software applications developers. Twitter Inc. said it’s adopting Stripe’s offering, called Relay, to make it easier to buy products from a link in a tweet. InMobi, a mobile-advertising company, and SAP SE’s e-commerce software unit Hybris also said they are integrating their services with the San Francisco-based startup’s product. Payments processing company Stripe Inc launched a new tool on Monday that will connect retailers and brands to sell on platforms like Twitter Inc and tap an increasing number of consumers shopping on mobile apps. Twitter's adoption of Stripe's new product, Relay, is expected to help the microblogging site further dabble in e-commerce and generate revenue through its "buy buttons," which lets shoppers buy a product and enter payment and shipping information without leaving Twitter's platform. Twitter has been struggling to increase its audience and in July said its number of monthly average users grew at its slowest pace since it went public in 2013. Stripe, which makes software that helps businesses accept various types of payments on websites and in apps, counts grocery-delivery startup Instacart, ride-sharing app Lyft and e-commerce platform Shopify among its clients. The payments company's new Relay product functions as a universal sell button for retailers, allowing companies like eyewear brand Warby Parker to list products in a single place and sell them directly on Twitter as well as other e-commerce platforms like ShopStyle.

• Alibaba Falls After Barron's Suggests Drop, Company Rebuts Alibaba shares fell Monday, the first day of trading since a Barron’s magazine article on Saturday suggested the Chinese Internet company may lose another 50 percent of its value. The company, in a statement posted Monday on its website, said the article was inaccurate and misleading. Barron’s based its conclusion that the Chinese company is overvalued, in part, by comparing Alibaba’s share price as a multiple of earnings estimates with EBay. Alibaba said the comparison is unfair because EBay’s online marketplace doesn’t do significant business in China. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares fell Monday, the first day of trading since a Barron’s magazine article on Saturday suggested the Chinese Internet company may lose another 50 percent of its value. The company, in a statement posted Monday on its website, said the article was inaccurate and misleading. Barron’s based its conclusion that the Chinese company is overvalued, in part, by comparing Alibaba’s share price as a multiple of earnings estimates with EBay. Alibaba said the comparison is unfair because EBay’s online marketplace doesn’t do significant business in China.