Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 31

• Grocery delivery startup Instacart is now valued at over $2B: Instacart has raised an additional $210 million, according to an SEC filing on Monday. The filing confirms a Series C funding round reported earlier this month, which values the company at more than $2 billion.

• Payments at a Tipping Point: Password-less authentication will drive more mobile transactions in 2015: "Today, 85 percent of transactions are still done via cash, but 2014 started changing the game for payments, and I believe we’re at an inflection point to push more payments than ever into the digital realm for 2015 thanks to innovations in authentication, shopping on social networks, and near field communication-based payment technology. The truth is only about 1 percent of commerce happens on mobile today, which is hard to believe considering there are now more mobile devices than people in the world. But I think that’s all about to change, and authentication is going to be an even bigger driver in mobile shopping and conversion in 2015."

• Good news for Chinese smartphone brands: Taiwan clears Xiaomi, others of breaching data privacy: In September, Taiwan's government began performing independent tests on Xiaomi phones after media reports said that some models automatically send user data back to the firm's servers in mainland China. Taiwanese regulators cleared on Tuesday Xiaomi and other smartphone brands of breaching local data protection laws after national security concerns triggered that proble. The probe, which also involved Chinese handset makers Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp, was a reminder of the scrutiny Chinese technology firms are subject to abroad as governments become increasingly wary of potential cyber security threats from the world's second-biggest economy. Privately owned Xiaomi, whose budget smartphones are popular throughout Asia, was previously accused of breaching data privacy. In August, the company apologized and said it would change a default feature after a Finnish security company said Xiaomi collected address book data without users' permission. 

• Uber must add 'panic buttons' to operate in Delhi: Taxi firms including Uber, the online cab-hailing company banned in New Delhi, will have to install panic buttons if they are to operate in India's capital under new rules framed after allegations that a driver for the U.S. firm raped a passenger.The Delhi government now wants all taxi operators, including aggregators such as Uber, to have a fleet of taxis running on clean fuels and fitted with tracking devices and emergency buttons. "The licensee shall ensure the facility of a panic button in the radio taxi so that in case of any distress, the signal is transmitted to the control center of the licensee and therefrom, to the nearest police station/police control room," Delhi's transport office said on its website.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday December 30

• China blocks Gmail..:The Gmail blocking began on Friday and has ignited anger and frustration among many Internet users in China. Data from Google shows traffic to Gmail dropping to zero from Chinese servers. But it is not just a matter of convenience for Chinese Internet users. Some foreign companies use Gmail as their corporate email service, for example, and so companies will have to ensure that employees have V.P.N., or virtual private network, software to get into Gmail. Google is not the only company to be censored inside China. Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is essentially blocked there. Its Instagram photo-sharing service was briefly blocked this fall when pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong began using it to share photos with mainland Chinese users. When LinkedIn began offering a Chinese-language version of its business social network this year, it had to agree to censor content seen by Chinese users. This time, Gmail appeared to have been singled out. Representatives for Yahoo and Microsoft said on Monday that the companies had heard no complaints from users in China about their email services being blocked.

• ...and Google Search too: It isn't just Gmail. The government of China, which this weekend launched a tweak to its Great Firewall filtering regime that blocked much of mainland China's access to Google's e-mail service, has on Monday cut off access nationwide to Google Search as well, reports one Internet intelligence expert. And, says Earl Zmijewski, vice president of data analytics at the New Hampshire firm Dyn, the changes aren't the result of some accidental misconfiguration by a ham-handed government engineer in some backwater office somewhere. "This was deliberate," Zmijewski says. "It was pushed out to the whole country at once. Google and the Chinese government have long been at odds, with Google choosing to stop basing operations in mainland China in 2009 in response to Beijing's efforts at censorship. Google has chosen instead to offer services to mainland Chinese using servers located in Hong Kong. (In normal practice, Google attempts to route users to the servers located the closest to them, or otherwise most quickly accessible; a user in New Hampshire, for example, might be routed to New York.) But this week's actions suggest a raising of the Great Firewall specifically to cut that passageway between the Chinese people and Google's services in Hong Kong. Beijing is using the bluntest instrument it has available to it to keep Google out, and isn't worried much about who knows it. Simple blocking of Internet protocol, or IP, addresses is the "easiest and crudest" method that China has for maintaining the effectiveness of its Great Firewall. Beijing also uses so-called "DNS poisoning," or the takeover of the address tables that govern the Internet so that a user who types, say, Twitter.com into her browser window is misdirected to another Web site. And then there's deep packet inspection, such as blocking online references to terms like "Falun Gong" or "Dalai Lama." But those methods can be technologically tricky and expensive.

• Facebook’s popularity among teens dips again, but Instagram is now worth $35B (35x in 2 years), sending Facebook stock to a record high: A report yesterday by Frank N. Magid Associates Inc. found that the portion of 13- to 17-year-old social-media users in the U.S. on Facebook slipped to 88 percent this year from 94 percent in 2013 and 95 percent in 2012. Facebook first warned a year ago that teens weren’t using its website as often as before, then stopped discussing teen usage on its earnings calls after last year’s disclosure alarmed investors. While more people use Facebook and its messaging app than any competitor, its user base tends to be older, with 55 percent of Facebook Messenger users being 37 or younger. By the same measure, 86 percent of Snapchat Inc.’s users and 83 percent of Kik Interactive Inc.’s users are under 37. Facebook sought to buy Snapchat last year for more than $3 billion, and was rebuffed. This has not prevented Facebook stock from reaching record highs: This year Facebook made further headway in mobile, a business that has flourished from a minor portion of ad revenue at the time of the IPO to a majority. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion has also been paying off: A Citigroup Inc. analyst last week said the photo-sharing app is worth $35 billion.

• Microsoft maybe building a new, lean browser: ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley’s recent report that the software company is building a lightweight browser, codenamed “Spartan,” bears out. According to Foley, Spartan is “new” and “isn’t [Internet Explorer].” Her post notes that it could be set free inside of the Windows 10 release schedule. In short, Microsoft may be building a speedy, simpler browser that maintains use of Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.

• Indian startup action: Six startups graduating from TiE Bootcamp’s fourth batch: Frapp: It is a hyper local deal & offers service exclusively for college students. Simpel: A mobile app that integrates with user’s credit/debit cards in order to help them in making cashless payments at local outlets. MassBlurb: It helps restaurants, spas and salons to showcase their businesses and update their online presence across all leading social media channels, as well as niche sites like Zomato and Tripadvisor etc. CityNaksha: It is a mobile app that enables users to find places of interest including restaurants, ATMs/banks and theatres around them. ChocoFair: It provides chocolate making kits to chocolate lovers both online and offline. HootOut: An online marketing platform that simplifies digital marketing by automating content, social media posts, and web presence.

• Airtel backs off from its plan to charge higher rates for online voice calls, will await regulations on net neutrality: Indian telecom company Airtel will temporarily withdraw the decision to charge a higher rate for making online voice calls on its data network. Airtel last week announced a new plan to charge customers for data usage on instant messaging and VoIP apps like Skype, Viber, Whatsapp, and Line. But now the telecom operator has decided to wait for a regulatory framework to be put in place, according to a statement today from Airtel. Indian telecom regulator TRAI chairman Rahul Khullar had earlier stated that that while Airtel’s move was going against the concept of net neutrality, it was not illegal as there is no policy or regulatory framework in India which mandates operators to adhere to net neutrality. Net neutrality is the notion that service providers must not differentiate between the traffic that flows over their network so that every user and service has equal access to the network.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday December 29

• Snapdeal ties up with Hungama for a co-marketing deal, similar to its Saavn tie-up from last month: Snapdeal, and Mumbai’s Hungama Digital Media Entertainment have joined hands to roll out bundled offerings such as premium music videos with every purchase on the e-tailer’s mobile app. To begin with, Hungama.com is currently offering shoppers on Snapdeal a free access to its premium PRO service which consists of HD quality music videos with lyrics of songs for nine weeks. Hungama PRO, is an ad-free paid subscription service whose content can be accessed offline as well. After this offer, customers will be charged Rs 120 per month for the service. Early this month Hungama had also come out with a similar offer for subscribers to Aircel. The PRO services was launched six months ago with a free one month trial. Last month Saavn had sealed a similar co-marketing deal with free two months subscription to its premium service to Snapdeal shoppers on Android

• Qualcomm earns billions each year from its patent licensing, drawing Chinese telecom regulatory scrutiny: The settlement of China's anti-trust probe into Qualcomm Inc is likely to intensify global scrutiny of the firm's highly profitable patent licensing business, and may even call into question its worldwide contracts with smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung. Qualcomm is the top patent holder for cellphone technology, including many that form industry standards like CDMA and LTE. Charging royalties based on the cellphones' selling prices, even those made with competitors' chips, provided more than half of its $8 billion net income in 2014. As growth tapers in developed markets, the smartphone industry has turned to China, where the rollout of LTE technology is driving demand, and where the majority of the world's smartphones are also manufactured. The NDRC, one of China's anti-trust regulators, has said it suspects Qualcomm of overcharging and abusing its market position in wireless communication standards. Qualcomm is expected by industry sources to agree to changes in how it charges royalties on cellphones sold in China, which will hurt its bottom line in its fastest-growing and most significant market. Qualcomm earned about half of its global revenue of $26.5 billion in China for the fiscal year ended Sept. 28. An agreement to lower royalty rates charged by Qualcomm on phones sold in China could affect its contractual relationships not just with local manufacturers such as Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE and Xiaomi Inc, but also with bigger global players that make and sell phones in China, such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics, said patent lawyers consulted by Reuters.

• Pinterest expands Promoted Pins to all advertisers after a successful beta: The firm announced today that its Promoted Pins program, which it made available in beta to certain brands eight months ago, has performed “just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” and it will make the program available to all advertisers on January 1. Pinterest claims that brands who participated in the Promoted Pins beta program saw a 30 percent increase in “earned media” — or the amount of people who save a Promoted Pin to one of the boards. Promoted Pins are repinned an average of 11 times, the same as a normal pin made by one of the site’s users. Furthermore, Promoted Pins continued to get more pins in the month after a campaign, or a 5 percent increase in earned media. Once the Promoted Pins program rolls out, Pinterest says advertisers will have access to more ad formats and advanced targeting. In addition, it’s also launched the Pinstitute, a twee name for a program that will show advertisers how to leverage Promoted Pins through workshops and webinars. The Pinstitute follows the launch of Pinterest’s analytic dashboard in August, which lets advertisers track how their pins performed and how much content is being pinned from their sites through Pinterest’s Pin It buttons. Pinterest has been focused on monetizing its site since raising an impressive $225 million Series E in October 2013, which valued the company at $3.8 billion. At that time, Pinterest said one of the key uses of the capital would be to continue development of monetization, which it first began testing around the same time it closed its Series E, into a global program.

• Oracle's purchase of Datalogix highlights the rising importance of attribution: This week, Oracle showed just how important attribution services have become: It agreed to buy Datalogix, one of the leading players in the attribution, for what the analyst Brian Wieser estimated was in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. (Neither Oracle nor Datalogix would disclose the deal terms.) With their services in high demand, the attribution companies are a rare bright spot in an otherwise brutally competitive market among companies that provide the technical services for digital advertising. Even though you’ve probably never heard of Datalogix, it’s almost certainly heard of you. It buys purchase data from supermarket loyalty cards and other retail channels and also tracks what people do online. That data is vital to digital platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, which are trying to prove to marketers that ads on their services lead to sales in the store. Using a complex system that anonymously matches Datalogix’s profiles with Facebook or Twitter IDs and aggregates that data, the social networks can show that, say, a three-month ad campaign on Facebook for MegaRed krill oil actually prompted more people to buy the health supplement. How Datalogix does the matching is a bit of a black box, but brands and publishers believe that it works, with Datalogix boasting about 650 customers. The company’s biggest competitor, a partnership between Nielsen and Catalina Marketing, is more oriented towards measuring the impact of television ads on purchases, while Datalogix is more focused on digital platforms, according to Mr. Wieser.

• Amazon.com Inc said on Friday it drew more than 10 million new members to Prime shipping and digital content service over the holidays and intends to offer one-hour shipping to more cities in 2015. Amazon considers its $99-a-year Prime membership, which confers free two-day shipping and streaming of select movies and songs, essential to driving its growth and margins. It was unclear, however, how many of the 10 million new members were just taking advantage of a standing 30-day free trial offer. The Internet retailer has never disclosed the precise number of Prime subscribers, except to say it is in the tens of millions. Analysts estimate it is growing at a rapid clip, and the company continues to try and spice it up with new content. The company's shares climbed 2.07 percent to $309.31 in midday Nasdaq trading. Amazon said customers ordered more than 10 times as many items via same-day delivery this holiday season, compared with a year earlier.

• Top 10 Pricing Mistakes, e-Commerce companies make, according to TechCrunch: 1: Basing prices on costs, not customers’ perceptions of value. 2: Companies base their prices on “the marketplace.” 3: Same profit margin across different product lines. 4: Companies fail to segment their customers. 5: Companies hold prices at the same level for too long. 6: Salespeople incentivized strictly on revenue. 7: Changing prices without forecasting competitors’ reactions. 8: Companies spend insufficient resources managing their pricing practices. 9: Companies fail to establish internal procedures to optimize prices. 10: Companies rely on salespeople and other customer-facing staff for pricing intelligence.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 26

Its a slow day, with not a lot going on, so here are 2 shallow-dives, one into Alibaba's M&A in 2014, and the other on Indonesia's eCommerce market, both courtesy of TechInAsia. 

• Indonesian ecommerce: 
• Online share of retail: This year, of the nation’s US$411.29 billion in retail spending, Indonesia saw an uptick to US$2.6 billion spent in ecommerce. 
• eCommerce Leaders: Lazada Indonesia, Rocket Internet’s answer to Amazon, made the jump to the top spot in 2014. SingPost reasons that Lazada took the lead because it made a shift away from consumer electronics and focused more on lifestyle goods. Lazada’s marketing campaigns in Bahasa Indonesia were also key wins for Rocket. 
• Market Potential: Last year, Indonesia clocked in at 74.8 million internet users. Last year, Indonesia had 4.6 million online shoppers. This year, it has 5.9 million. 20 percent of Indonesian online shoppers prefer conventional shopping sites like Lazada or Zalora, while 26.4 percent prefer social media like Facebook or Instagram. 26.6 percent prefer online forums or classified sites like Kaskus or OLX. 
• User Habits - social media: SingPost says that between January and March 2014, Twitter users in Jakarta posted 2.4 percent of the global total of 10.6 billion tweets during that time period, maintaining the city’s reign as the Twitter capital of the world. However, the nation’s most popular social media channel continues to be Facebook, with 69 million active users. As of September, Indonesia has 30 million Line users. Remarkably, nearly 27 percent of all the country’s ecommerce transactions occurred via social media in 2014. 
• User Habits - messaging: Surprisingly, the highest percentage of online shoppers in Indonesia would rather buy from messaging apps like Blackberry Messenger or Line. 
• Category Preferences: While Indonesians shop across multiple categories, the most popular one is by far clothing and apparel, with 61.7 percent of the nation’s online shoppers making a purchase in that category last year. Females reign supreme in the archipelago’s ecommerce space, with women having higher purchase rates, and the highest spending amount on clothing, mobile devices, travel items, laptops, and accessories. 
• Means of Payment: Bank transfers are the most popular way to pay for online transactions, followed by cash on delivery, and finally credit cards. Less than five percent of Indonesia’s population own credit cards, and credit card payments still account for less than 10 percent of all online transactions in the archipelago.

• Alibaba’s 2014 investments and acquisitions: List below - 33 transactions, known investments of about $5.3B (could be a lot higher, since about half these transactions are of unknown sizes)

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 24

• Snapdeal launches offering for farming and agriculture inputs for farmers. The store currently offers over hundred products across categories like seeds, irrigation and farming tools. The firm has started with some 300 SKUs to begin with and also plans to launch a hindi version of the store. On the face of it, the approach seems to be unique, however what could be interesting to see is how does Snapdeal makes it simpler to buy such products online or for that matter the smartphone. Moreover, how does it tackle the pain point of logistics without bloating up the cost of purchase and cash payments in remote villages. We tried checking for some random fertiliser for a remote village in eastern region in India and the site threw up a “Product cannot be delivered at your pincode location” message. But to be fair its the first day of its official launch.

• Gift cards are the best gifts, research shows: the less specific the gift, the more it will be appreciated. The sad truth is that while gift cards constitute a minority of holiday gifts, according to the National Retail Federation, they have been the most popular gift request since 2007. In studies to be presented early next year at a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers tried to analyze the emotional turmoil churned up by the exchanging of gifts, noting that the giver’s earnest intentions may often widely miss the mark of the recipient’s true desires. The closer the relationship, the more thought givers believe they should put into selecting a gift. But when subjects were asked what they would like to receive, they overwhelmingly replied that they wanted credit-card gift cards, which would give them the flexibility to choose exactly what they want.

• Huawei's smartphone sales shoot up after copying Xiaomi's online strategy: China's Huawei has taken sales of its low-price Honor brand of smartphones to 20 million from 1 million in just one year, hitting pay dirt with the disruptive online-only strategy it copied from smaller upstart Xiaomi. Privately owned Xiaomi, valued at over $45 billion, sold 15.8 million smartphones in July-September versus Huawei's 15.9 million, according to Gartner. A year earlier, Xiaomi reached just 3.6 million compared with 11.7 million for Huawei. But analysts say the low-cost strategy has fanned the price wars and thin profit margins prevalent in China, and that its spread could affect margins at all makers. Honor brand president Jeff Liu said industry transition to an online sales strategy was inevitable given the competitive pricing, afforded by reduced distribution expenses that would otherwise make up 30 percent of handset costs. "E-commerce is massively changing the traditional channels for the smartphone industry, and we needed to go in that direction too," Liu said in an interview in Beijing, where he unveiled the Honor 6 Plus smartphone last week. Honor handsets dropped the Huawei name last December and have since been marketed and distributed independently of Huawei-branded phones. They are sold in countries ranging from Belgium to Brazil, primarily via marketplaces such as those of JD.com Inc in China and Flipkart in India.

• Indian startup action: Six startups selected for Kyron’s new accelerator batch: Cubito: It has developed an employee transport system that features automated grouping, routing & driver allocation, besides information exchanges between employee & drivers. All allocations are done in real time. Xpense Manager: It is an app that aims to simplify process of expense claims & reimbursements inside companies by way of supporting the business workflow of approvals & support for policies for employee expense & reimbursements. Eywa Media Innovations: It aims to make TV watching interactive and fun. The company claims to have partnered with a leading broadcaster in India already. Viamagus : A SaaS startup, Viamagus claims it helps simplify the way businesses and individuals build & maintain their online presence and do business online. Its cloud- based tools help you build websites & portfolios, blogs, e-mail/SMS campaigns and landing pages quickly, and in a code-free and fully hosted manner. The firm has over 100 customers. Cashkumar: It is an online platform that claims to be providing the best rates for foreign currency exchange in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. With an aggregation platform backed by a reverse bidding process, travellers can buy or sell their foreign currency and travel insurance at the best possible rates. Adwyze: It is a marketing optimisation platform that allows marketers to improve the performance of their marketing budgets.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday December 23

• Intel's margins are being buoyed by rising prices for custom chips for cloud computing: Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything,” Ms. Bryant said. “The name of the game is customization.” Indeed. Amazon has gone so far as to change around the 50 megawatt power substations that power its bunkers of computers. Deep in Google, former company executives say, the company has changed the way Internet packets of data work, to optimize how quickly they flow through Google. Facebook, which has by far the world’s largest public repository of pictures, might want a certain number of chips that can render images well, or rapidly process the steps for image recognition. That could affect the number of processing cores it wants on a chip. When eBay installed a hyper-efficient cooling system, it asked Intel for chips that had a greater thermal tolerance (they can be worked harder that way.) The difference appears to be showing up in Intel’s results. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent. But the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent, compared with the same period in 2013.

• After its Bluekai acquisition in February, Oracle is close by buying Datalogix, another audience-data major; Purchase likely exceeds $500 million Datalogix, whose clients include PepsiCo and HauteLook, helps brands measure media purchases against in-store sales. Datalogix has been an important partner to Facebook as the latter has attempted to show marketers that it can connect the dots between its social ads and offline purchases. Adexchanger reported that Facebook was one of Datalogix's suitors, along with Nielsen and Adobe. But Oracle ultimately nabbed Datalogix, which makes its new Redwood City, Calif.-based parent a more formidable marketing cloud player for clients like General Motors. The company will be able to boast a wealth of online and offline data to compete against rivals Adobe and Salesforce. The Datalogix price tag probably well exceeded $500 million. "Oracle is purchasing Datalogix for an amount we expect will be in the high hundreds of millions of dollars," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group, in an email. Wieser added that Datalogix "analyzes, segments and distributes data for use by marketers, and then analyzes data again post-campaign. While these functions are not unique to Datalogix, there is likely some experiential advantage that Datalogix has established in the processes it uses, and the Facebook relationship is a key one which is also relatively (although not entirely) unique."

• A summary of expedited delivery services from Amazon, Uber, eBay and Google: Amazon’s Prime Now (announced just last week) One-hour delivery for thousands of daily staples — paper towels, shampoo, books, batteries and more — is now available to Amazon Primers in certain parts of Manhattan. The catch? The delivery fee is $7.99. But if you can wait an extra hour, two-hour delivery is free. Amazon says that Prime Now will be available in additional cities in 2015. UberESSENTIALS the app-based ride provider is now dabbling in e-commerce, too. DC residents can now order “essential” items via the Uber app and receive them in 10 minutes or less. No delivery fee, tip or minimum order required. The expense charges are most likely factored into the items’ cost, but Uber provides transparency with an inventory list and associated prices. These items range from wine glasses to a portable table-tennis set to candy to grooming products. Uber even has a New Year’s Eve section for those last-minute party essentials. According to the company, uberESSENTIALS is a limited time–only experiment, but if the service takes off, the program may expand. EBay Local: eBay shoppers in select cities can choose to have their purchases delivered through traditional means, same-day delivery or self-pickup at a nearby location. EBay has a similar program already in place in the UK and is now slowly rolling out its Local pilot program across the US. It’s currently available in New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Dallas and Chicago. Google Express: Google also offers same-day delivery and overnight delivery in San Francisco, San Jose, West Los Angeles, Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC. Consumers can purchase goods online from a number of well-known national retailers — Whole Foods, Staples, Costco and Walgreens — and have the order on their doorstep within the day. Although a Google Express membership is required, new customers can try it for free for three months.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday December 22

• In China, digital ad spend will overtake TV next year, amid a rapid jump to mobile advertising: Next year companies are expected to spend more money on digital advertising than on television campaigns in China. It is a stark shift from three years ago when nearly half of the advertising dollars went to television and just 14 percent went to digital, according to ZenithOptimedia, an advertising agency. China is also diverging from the United States, where television continues to dominate. Homegrown social media platforms in China are at the center of the push. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all blocked in China, giving platforms like Tencent’s Weixin — known as WeChat outside the country — and Sina Weibo an advantage. “I’ve been here four years. In that time I’m now on the third dominant social network — first it was Renren, then Weibo and now it’s WeChat,” said Chris Jones, the executive creative director at the ad agency Wunderman in China. Weixin’s particular quirk — that users communicate only with friends and contacts within their circle — has allowed companies to develop direct relationships with consumers. But it also poses a challenge since users have to first choose to include a brand within their Weixin network.

• YouTube struggles to monetize despite its enormous engagement..:  For all of its influence as a cultural force, YouTube is still finding its way as an economic one. Viewers may be migrating online in droves from traditional television, but the advertising dollars have not yet followed. The marketing research company eMarketer estimates that YouTube will log about $1.13 billion in ad revenue in 2014, a small fraction of the $200 billion global TV advertising market. The quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers. YouTube creators, meanwhile, complain that the company takes too much of the ad revenue — as much as 49 percent — and does too little to market and promote its stars, which makes it hard for them to leverage their celebrity.

• YouTube also faces a host of small rivals - startups like Interlude that are gaining traction: The basic format of Interlude’s videos will be familiar to anyone who grew up on the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series. As the film plays, a viewer is prompted with questions about how to proceed — wear the black dress or the white one? — and the video seamlessly integrates each choice. The company is one of many challenging YouTube’s dominance of online video. Vessel, started by two former Hulu executives, recently revealed a plan to offer $3 subscriptions for early access to short videos. And in September, the Universal Music Group made a deal with Mirriad, a company that specializes in inserting new ads into old videos. Interlude’s success against a giant like YouTube — which is owned by Google and attracts more than a billion viewers each month — is by no means guaranteed. But it has already had some promising hits. more engaged audience yields higher ad rates, and Interlude’s narrative mazes also offer ways for producers to incorporate brands (for a fee, of course). In one illustration cited by Robert S. Wiesenthal, Warner Music’s chief operating officer, the viewer of a rap video could choose to have the star keep dancing at a party or hop into a BMW. “We are all on this hunt for monetization,” Mr. Wiesenthal said. “When someone makes a choice to learn about something, that is worth more than, say, a passive pre-roll ad or a guy just holding a bottle of Scotch in his hands.”

• Beacon-enabled mannequins are the latest in mobile app notifications: “We decided we had to work out a way to bring the good old-fashioned mannequin into the 21st century,” said Jonathan Berlin, the managing director of Universal Display, the company that is selling mannequins with electronic implants. About a year ago, Mr. Berlin and his partner, Adrian Coe, had an idea to outfit their product with electronic beacons, small transmitters that can communicate with your cellphone. Mr. Berlin and Mr. Coe created a separate company, Iconeme, just for the beacons, which interact with users through the company’s app. Shoppers can see what a store’s mannequins are wearing, who designed the clothes and how much they cost. But these can beckon you from outside the store, sending messages to your cellphones and beaming pictures of their outfits onto them. They are one of the latest efforts by the struggling retail industry to lure customers away from the Internet and back into brick-and-mortar stores. Don’t feel like going through the store to find an item? You can even buy it through the app. Iconeme is not the only business trying to use technology to help people shop in stores. A company called MyBestFit created kiosks that quickly scan people’s bodies, analyze a database of clothes and make suggestions. Iconeme’s first beacon mannequin began in Britain in August. Since then, about 3,500 people have downloaded the company’s app, Mr. Berlin said. Beacon technology is already popular with retailers along Regent Street, a high-end strip of stores in London, which already use beacons to ping shoppers with promotions and advertisements. He said three retailers in the United States were testing his products, but declined to disclose them, citing confidentiality restrictions.

• Xiaomi close to raising $1B, valuation seen at ~$45B: Xiaomi raises over $1B from All-Stars Investment, DST Global, others. The round, which is expected to be closed this week, would value Xiaomi at more than $45 billion, as per this report. Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, which also has a good presence in India, has netted over $1 billion in funding led by All-Stars Investment, an investment firm launched by former Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji, says a The Wall Street Journal report quoting an unnamed source. Russian investment firm DST Global, besides Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC also participated in the round.

• Flipkart raises $700M, valuation seen at ~$11B: Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, has raised $700 million in fresh investment from existing as well as new investors Baillie Gifford, Greenoaks Capital, Steadview Capital, T Rowe Price Associates and Qatar Investment Authority. The e-commerce powerhouse, which is on a fund-raising spree, has raised funding for the third time in 2014. In May, it had raised $210 million (about Rs 1,200 crore). It had raised funding worth $1 billion (about Rs 6,000) in July. The latest round of fund-raising has seen investment from existing stakeholders DST Global, GIC, ICONIQ Capital and Tiger Global. According to reports, the latest fund-raising has pegged Flipkart’s valuation at $11 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 19

• Snapdeal.com partners with Hero MotoCorp to sell two-wheelers through its platform: Snapdeal claims that it saw 700 two-wheelers being sold within 72 hours of launching the new category a week ago. The vehicles are priced as same as offline dealerships. For Snapdeal, automobile is one of the most promising categories, and it expects it to reach Rs 1,000 crores in GMV in the near term.

• Google's launches "Store Visits", making it easier to figure out if online ads drove in-store traffic: The tech giant is rolling out a new tool today called "store visits" that gives marketers some insight into which types of search ads—which include local inventory and product listings ads—motivate people to go to a store. Google's store visits tool uses an algorithm to estimate how many people went into a store as a result of seeing an ad within 30 days. In turn, advertisers are given anonymous data (meaning that it doesn't pinpoint specific users) that is collected from smartphone owners who have turned on their location history. To qualify for the new tool, Google advertisers need to verify their location with the search giant and set up location extensions in an AdWords account. Store visit info is only available to U.S. advertisers and will gradually be rolled out within the next few months.

• Credit derivatives traders helping RadioShack stay alive: RadioShack is finding an unlikely ally in its efforts to stay out of bankruptcy: credit derivatives traders who amassed more than $25 billion of trades speculating how much longer it can keep paying its bills. When the retailer’s biggest shareholder arranged $585 million of funding in October to help it survive the holidays, much of the money came from hedge funds wagering on the company to avoid default, said people with knowledge of the trading. By injecting the 93-year-old electronics retailer with new money, swaps traders, more often blamed for pushing companies toward bankruptcy, have been preserving big payoffs if they can delay or prevent a default. “The sellers of the protection built up quite a large war chest, and it took a relatively small amount of money to keep the company going,” said Peter Tchir, a former credit-swaps trader who is now head of macro strategy at Brean Capital LLC in New York. “They have huge incentives to keep the company alive to not trigger the swaps.”

• IBM says its cloud business is having a 'breakthrough year': IBM aims to expand the number of data centers it offers clients around the world by 25 percent to meet fast-rising demand for internet-based services, after what a company executive said has been a "breakthrough year" in 2014 for its cloud computing business. IBM has quadrupled the number of cloud data facilities it offers around the world to 49 in the past 18 months, responding in part to laws requiring the local retention of data following revelations over U.S. government Web surveillance as well as increased corporate compliance rules. IBM's cloud revenue amounted to $4.4 billion in 2013 and was up by 50 percent in the first nine months of this year, it reported in October, making it one of IBM's fastest-growing businesses IBM has announced multi-year deals in recent weeks worth a total of more than $4 billion that are fuelling the company's expansion in data centers. The company's cloud computing services let companies mix classic computing jobs with new ways of working, a twist on the largely consumer-facing cloud services made popular by Amazon's Web Services, Google and Microsoft. IBM, along with rivals Hewlett-Packard and EMC's VMware, offer “hybrid cloud” services that let customers run key business data on private, internal networks along with consumer-facing public cloud systems.

• Zomato expands in Italy by acquiring Cibando: After recently adding a presence in Central and Eastern Europe by means of two local acquisitions, the New Delhi-headquartered company, which now boasts a presence in 20 countries, has gobbled up Italy’s Cibando. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, though Zomato says all of Cibando’s team will be joining the company and will now lead its efforts to build out the service in Italy. This will include integrating Cibando into Zomato, thus transitioning its user base and traffic. It also plans to scale up its teams in Rome and Milan to 30-40 full-time employees over the next three months, up from Cibando’s current headcount of 10. Even longer term, Zomato says it will invest $6 million in its newly-acquired Italian operations over the next 2 years, growing the team to 150-200 people across the country’s top six cities. That planned increase in headcount is probably a reflection of Zomato’s relatively labor-intensive business model, at least compared to other pure Internet plays. To power part of its restaurant search and discovery engine, the company collects menus from restaurants and scans them using OCR. Its menu data is then re-checked in person by Zomato’s team every three months to ensure it stays relatively fresh, and it’s this “feet on the street” approach that attempts to differentiate the company from competitors, such as Yelp, IAC-owned Urbanspoon, Priceline-acquired OpenTable, and TripAdvisor. Discussing today’s acquisition, Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah tells me that Cibando is one of the largest restaurant search services in Italy and lists 82,000 restaurants across various cities. In November, the company closed a further $60 million in funding, giving it a post-money valuation of $660 million, and taking total funding to over $113 million.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday December 18

• Sony cancels movie release after terror threats: Sony Pictures Entertainment on Wednesday dropped plans for its Christmas Day release of “The Interview,” a movie that depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after receiving a terror threat against theaters. Before that, the four largest theater chains in the United States said they would not show the movie, which has been at the center of a devastating hacking attack on Sony over the last several weeks. American intelligence officials on Wednesday concluded that the North Korean government was centrally involved with the attacks on Sony’s computers. That determination and the cancellation of the film were new twists in a series of developments that has found a major studio fighting for its art, and perhaps life, against forces driven by a foreign government. Hackers claim to have taken at least 100 terabytes of Sony data, or about 10 times of the amount stored in the Library of Congress. Sony computer systems were damaged and the studio is already the focus of at least two lawsuits from former employees who had their personal information spread online.

• How smartphones maybe reducing Amazon's edge: Phones have already radically altered both the way Americans shop and how retail goods move about the economy, but the transformation is just beginning — and it is far from guaranteed that Amazon will emerge victorious from the transition. Phones are at the heart of the service offered by Postmates, one of several start-ups that are working with retailers and helping to change shopping experiences. As local retailers adopt mobile innovations, customers will be able to search stores’ inventories, purchase goods for same-day delivery, and navigate and search for help and reviews inside a crowded store. None of these technologies pose an existential threat to Amazon, but by giving physical stores some of the conveniences that Amazon has long had, they may limit its potential reach. With Instacart, you can get groceries delivered instantly from big and small supermarkets. With Google’s Express delivery service, you can get household goods from big-box stores delivered on the same day you order. The app Curbside lets users order items from Target, and have them ready when they drive up to a store. And with Postmates, it is possible to order takeout, and pretty much anything else, and have it delivered directly very quickly. These services all have in common speed and convenience: Because they route purchases from stores, they can often shuttle goods to buyers faster than they are available from Amazon. The prices are even competitive with Amazon, which delivers most of its products, even groceries, from warehouses that are a few hours away.

• Twitter's CEO has sold >500K shares since November: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s family trusts sold $5.32 million worth of Twitter shares Monday, and the sale comes at an interesting time. Twitter shares have declined nearly 45% this year, and Ev Williams, Twitter’s cofounder, just sold more than 719,000 shares, worth nearly $28.7 million, last month. Jack Dorsey, too, is reported to have sold $2.1 million worth of his shares last month. Also, back in April, Twitter executives, including Costolo, Williams and Dorsey had indicated in an SEC filing that they had no “current plans” of selling their shares, even after the company’s lock up period ends.

• Indian startup action: Zepo.in, Livspace get funding: Zepo.in, a do-it-yourself (DIY) e-commerce platform for SMBs, has secured an undisclosed amount in funding led by Anupam Mittal, CEO of People Group, which operates the internet properties including Shaadi.com and makaan.com. Zepo can help an SMB to open its online shop in a few minutes for under Rs 999 per month. It also provides them free payment gateway, logistics support and marketing. With 20 employees on board, Zepo has offices in Delhi and Bangalore. The firm mainly competes with Nirvana Venture Advisors-backed KartRocket.com, besides MartMobi, Shopify and CostPrize. Livspace, an online marketplace for personalised home interior design and décor, has received $4.6 million in its Series A round of funding. Livspace claims that it enables homeowners to discover thousands of pre-created looks for all rooms, kitchen, and storage areas in their homes at the click of a button. Customers can select and purchase these looks, which are created by international designers, and personalise them (by material, colour, style) online. The startup will then deliver the items at the customers’ doorsteps. Livspace has partnered with many real-estate developers in the country and also offers a ‘find your apartment’ feature to offer pre-created, ready-to-install interior design for customers who buy homes from these developers.

• Chinese phone maker OnePlus, selling on Amazon in India, has been barred by the Delhi HC from selling, marketing, or importing phones in India. The dispute centers around OnePlus using Cyanogenmod’s version of Android, which is licensed exclusively in India by rival phone brand Micromax. OnePlus received a shock in October when Micromax acquired the rights to be Cyanogen’s exclusive partner in India in order to launch Micromax’s new YU Cyanogen phone on December 18. Cyanogen has already clarified that OnePlus One phones sold in India will not receive updates. In return, OnePlus says it will start work on a custom Android build for its users in India. The high court has allowed the Chinese company, which launched its OnePlus One phones in India through Amazon on December 2, to clear its stock of Cyanogen-based products.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 17

• Apple Pay continues to gain traction: On Tuesday, Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups to adopt Apple Pay, the company’s new e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone. The new companies that recently agreed to work with the service include SunTrust, Barclaycard and USAA. Ten more banks, including TD Bank North America and Commerce Bank, will back the new form of payment on Tuesday. With the new additions, Apple says it supports the cards that represent about 90 percent of the credit card purchase volume in the United States. While Apple Pay still accounts for a tiny fraction of total transactions, the new additions suggest that Apple has generated more traction for the service than any competing service. Others giant companies like Google, Verizon and AT&T have offered similar takes on a smartphone-based e-commerce product, though to little avail.

• Facebook Starts Auto-Enhancing Photos on the same day that Instagram launches its first new filters since 2012: Rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me it will now auto-enhance newly uploaded photos starting today on iOS and soon on Android. You’ll be able to adjust a slider to control just how enhanced you want the light, shadow, and clarity, or revert back to your original shot. Facebook and the other social apps are locked in a battle for photo sharing. To the winner goes tons of engagement. That’s why Twitter just revamped its filtering interface, Snapchat started letting you dual-filter with color filters and its geo-filter titles, and Instagram today added five new filters. Google+ added a similar auto-enhance feature a year ago. Photos are automatically enhanced, but you can quickly tone the effect up or down. I found the auto-enhancements to be a touch overzealous in some of my experiments, but it’s typically in the ballpark of how I’d want to edit a photo, plus it requires no work on my part.

• Amazon India launches jewelry sales; separately an auto-repricing bug drops some prices on Amazon UK to a penny, shocking some sellers: A groups of British Amazon.co.uk sellers were shocked last week to find their goods had gotten an unexpected and drastic price cut -- to just a penny. Although Amazon and other retailers do occasionally run promotions where things only cost one cent, this glitch was the fault of non-Amazon software from RepricerExpress, which automatically reprices items online. The problem only lasted for about an hour, but it came during peak shopping time ahead of Christmas, at a time when many customers are looking to online shopping to get last-minute gifts to their destinations on time. And, according to Britain's Sky News, some retailers say the glitch cost them tens of thousands of dollars, and may even put some of them out of business. Repricing software is commonly used by retailers and individuals who regularly sell items on Amazon and other online marketplaces. These automated tools are used by sellers across the globe to send prices down (or up) depending on market demand. The company, which claims to support over 2,000 sellers on Amazon and Raukten.com, has apologized for the error and said it's looking to "put measures in place" to keep the mistake from happening again. As of Monday, the company said, systems were running normally. Most affected orders were canceled. In a statement, Amazon said it's working to remedy the few orders that were processed and will be reaching out to sellers on its own.

• Xiaomi India ban on Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S lifted; Redmi Note remains fully banned: Delhi HC partially lifts the ban on Chinese handset maker Xiaomi for importing & selling smartphones in India. Today’s ruling allows Xiaomi to sell only Qualcomm-powered smartphones in India, and only until January 8, 2015. This allows Xiaomi to sell three of the four models it had launched in India – the Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S. The MediaTek-powered Redmi Note remains fully banned. The Delhi High Court has now permitted the company to sell and import Qualcomm chipset-based (a licensee of Ericsson) handsets in the country till Jan 8, 2015, according to a tweet by PTI. A Mint report further mentions that Xiaomi has also been told to deposit Rs 100 for every device it has sold in India or sells till January 5. Last month, Jun Lei, co-founder and CEO, Xiaomi, had said that India is becoming its largest overseas market for Xiaomi. According to the company, it has already sold over 500,000 smartphones in the country in less than four months of operations. It is now also considering setting up a manufacturing base in the country.

• Google is in danger of losing mobile advertising to Facebook, reports Amir Efrati at The Information. Google still does more than twice as much revenue as Facebook on mobile advertising overall, thanks to search. But when it comes to graphical and video ads on mobile devices, their positions are reversed: Facebook does three times as much revenue as Google there. Worse, Google’s share of these kinds of ads is falling. Google’s biggest problem is its inability to track ads across devices, meaning it has a harder time proving that a sale is made after a user sees one of its mobile ads. Facebook’s ad platform is more integrated. The company is able to tell if someone sees an app on Facebook’s mobile ad and then buys that product on their laptop. It uses cookies — identifiers that match a user’s web browser to their smartphone — to collect data on users. Google collects cookies too, but it doesn’t share them across its ad products. Google’s search engine data is never mixed with Google DoubleClick data, which tracks Google’s ads on non-Google sites. Google also doesn’t have a way of knowing whether or not a user has already bought the product they’re seeing an ad for.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday December 16

• Big data companies are acting far more as services companies than they hope to be eventually: Data science, as a business, is still young. As the technology moves beyond the Internet incubators like Google and Facebook, it has to be applied company by company, in one industry after another. At this stage, there is a lot of hand craftsmanship rather than software automation. So the aspiring software companies find themselves training, advising and building pilot projects for their commercial customers. They are acting far more as services companies than they hope to be eventually. For now, the technical hand-holding and pump-priming is an essential step. The young companies are building the market of commercial users in retailing, finance, consumer products, health care and other industries to which they will then sell software. The cost of chasing the big data opportunity can be daunting. A glimpse into one company’s bet was revealed last month, when Hortonworks filed documents to prepare for selling shares to the public. Hortonworks is a leading distributor of the open-source Hadoop software, which is a database for handling so-called unstructured data from the web, sensors and smartphones, used in big data analytics. The company’s financial statements show rapid growth in revenue, more than doubling in the nine months that ended on Sept. 30, to $33.4 million. But its costs surged, resulting in a net loss of $86.7 million, well more than double its total revenue.

• SurveyMonkey raises $250M, valued at ~ $2B: SurveyMonkey, the Silicon Valley company that runs an online survey and questionnaire platform, announced today that it has raised $250 million in a new round of funding. The raise was first reported last night by the Wall Street Journal, and was officially confirmed by the company this morning. The new money will be used at least in part to fuel more M&A transactions, and to allow some existing investors and employees to cash out if they choose, SurveyMonkey said in a statement. This brings the total amount of venture capital invested into the 15-year-old company to more than $1.15 billion. The new round, which included participation from a group of institutional investors, reportedly values SurveyMonkey at some $2 billion, up significantly from the $1.35 billion valuation the company had just one year ago.

• Facebook video's success is scaring Google, causing Twitter to weigh autoplay: Since launching autoplay earlier this year, Facebook has been catching up to YouTube in views. In September, Facebook said it was showing 1 billion videos per day. The Twitter source, who has seen the latest numbers, said that figure has already grown to 3 billion. The insider added that the completion rate—where viewers watch the entirety of a video—is “mind-boggling,” suggesting that autoplay is a winning strategy and something Twitter ought to implement, even at the risk of upsetting some users. Meanwhile, “Google is freaking out,” said a media agency executive, as Facebook attempts to poach YouTube talent in order to improve the quality of its video offerings. YouTube has gone on the defensive with lucrative counteroffers in exchange for exclusivity. Twitter is divided over whether to allow videos to simply start playing when users scroll over them. It is a feature already adopted by Facebook, but one that scares Twitter purists who don’t want it to stray farther from its text-based roots, according to industry insiders with knowledge of the company’s video strategy. “It’s an argument that’s happening—a tug of war,” said one. 

• Amazon has dipped its toes into the greeting card business with its new mobile app, Surprise! (Yes, the exclamation mark is included.) The app allows users to personalize e-cards with photos, audio or video. The main draw? You can conveniently attach an Amazon gift card to your e-card via one simple app. The Facebook-powered app (yes, the social giant is behind this as well) is equipped with the ability to sync your Facebook account and phone calendar, making it virtually impossible to miss being present (get it?) for an important occasion. The app also helps you avoid the panicky brainstorm sessions you face when gift-stumped for your hard-to-buy-for loved ones. Surprise! is available for iOS and Android users.

• Uber surge prices during Sydney standoff, then backs off, also UberPop banned in France. On Monday, as the police surrounded a cafe in Sydney, Australia, where an armed individual was holding hostages, Uber began raising rates. The move, which the company calls surge pricing, is governed by an algorithm and occurs whenever demand spikes for rides in an area. The idea is that higher rates give drivers incentive to fill the demand. With the authorities cordoning off part of the city’s central business district, many who were stranded in the area were forced to pay roughly four times the normal rate, according to complaints on social media. In a relatively quick response, the company released a statement explaining what happened. “Surge pricing is algorithmic and responded automatically to the large increase in demand for Uber rides out of the C.B.D.,” it said, referring to the central business district. “As soon as we became aware of the situation, we capped it and made all rides free to people leaving Sydney’s C.B.D. Uber is paying for these rides. If riders got charged surge pricing earlier, we will refund it.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday December 15

• Facebook dumps Bing search results as it gets serious about search: Facebook has stopped including results from Microsoft's Bing search engine on its social networking site. The move, confirmed by a company spokesperson, comes as Facebook has revamped its own search offerings, introducing a tool on Monday that allows users to quickly find past comments and other information posted by their friends on Facebook. The decision may reflect the increasing importance that Facebook sees in Web search technology, a market dominated by rival Google Inc (GOOGL.O). Facebook and Microsoft have a longstanding relationship dating back to Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook, for a 1.6 percent stake in the company, in October 2007. As part of that deal, Microsoft provided banner ads on Facebook's website in international markets. Facebook stopped using Microsoft banner ads in 2010 as it moved to take more control of its advertising business. But Facebook, during that same time, expanded its use of Microsoft Bing search results to international versions of its service.

• Baidu said to buy stake in Uber, Boosting App in China: Baidu Inc. (BIDU) is buying a minority stake in Uber Technologies Inc., giving the car-booking company a boost as it expands in China, according to a person familiar with the matter. Uber will receive cash and non-cash assets, including Baidu’s online resources as owner of China’s biggest Internet search engine, the person said, asking not to be identified as the matter is private. The investment may be worth as much as $600 million, China National Radio reported earlier. Uber is expanding in China and hiring in 14 cities, according to a July 1 LinkedIn post. Uber has been targeting customers willing to pay a premium for the luxury of tracking the vehicle’s approach, not handling local cash and finding daily newspapers and a Wi-Fi access inside the car.

• Alibaba's efforts to position 12/12 as another Singles Day (focused on Taobao) seem to have met with only mixed success: Alibaba has tried hard to position Double 12 as a similar shopping bonanza to Singles Day. Last year, it promoted the day heavily on Taobao and flooded other online and offline channels with advertisements. Taobao bought most of the internet portal traffic, and “12/12” signage saturated billboards and bus stops. After stressing that the nature of December 12 is different from November 11, Alibaba has kept the traffic and revenue results from the past two Double 12s on the down-low. The lack of numbers released has led many to believe that Double 12’s results didn’t live up to Alibaba’s initial expectations. The reason for the underwhelming sales? Hard to say for sure, but there are many theories. First off, it’s been just a month since Singles Day. Retailers’ inventory and consumers’ budgets may not be sufficient enough to take part in the 12/12 extravaganza. Also, it’s possible that the two-thirds of Taobao retailers that didn’t take part in Double 12 ran out of inventory or turned to offline sales channels for the rest of the holiday shopping season. Retail logistics make it harder for smaller companies on Taobao to be as flexible on price as the big dogs on Tmall. They also can’t offer up the same kinds of amazing bargains Chinese consumers are now accustomed to.

• Hints that Whatsapp is expanding to the web: It looks like WhatsApp might be bringing its messaging service to the web. The rumors started shortly after the the co-founder of rival messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, told TechCrunch that he thought WhatsApp was working on a web version “since they tried to hire our web dev.” While WhatsApp has yet to make any official mention of a web version of its popular messaging app, a recent discovery by the team at AndroidWorld.nl appears to back up Durov’s suspicions. Hidden inside the code of a recent WhatsApp update is the mention of “WhatsApp Web.” It’s still not definite proof, but it certainly looks like the WhatsApp team is at least exploring some sort of web functionality.

• India startup action: Bangalore-based Blowhorn offers an online marketplace focused on last mile logistics services: Mithun Srivatsa, director of operations, Walmart Labs, co-founded Blowhorn, an online marketplace for last mile logistics services, along with his classmate from NIT Nagpur Nikhil Shivaprasad (CTO), in November 2013. “Currently, mini-truck drivers suffer from inefficient utilisation, sometimes not getting a booking for a load to carry for a day or more. At the same time, consumers have ever-increasing needs to move things around the crowded streets of India’s major metros. We bring them together seamlessly,” said Srivatsa, CEO of Blowhorn. The Bangalore-based startup claims to be receiving a lot of demand from people buying from online classifieds sites like OLX and Quikr, as well other second hand goods groups on social media. The firm charges Rs 600 for the first hour and pro-rated every 10 minutes thereafter. Last month, the startup had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from impact investor Unitus Seed Fund, with participation from Tim Draper, founder and managing partner of Draper Associates. While the space is new and unexplored in India, there are examples of such startups globally. In Asia, Hong Kong-based GoGoVan provides similar services and has presence in Singapore and Taiwan, besides its home city.

• SoftBank shrinks U.S. office, hurt by its Sprint investment, marking end of failed T-Mobile bid: Japan's SoftBank Corp (9984.T) will soon downsize its Silicon Valley offices, people with knowledge of the matter said, signaling the company won't revive efforts to buy T-Mobile U.S. Inc

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday December 12

• Xiaomi Confirms It Has Suspended Sales In India, “open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably”: Hugo Barra revealed the temporary pause in India, which is triggered by a patent suit brought against the company by Ericsson, via an update on Google+. Initially, Xiaomi told media it had not received a notice from the high court, but that situation has changed now. Xiaomi told TechCrunch yesterday that it is “open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably” so this situation may yet be remedied quickly and without too much disruption to its sales in India. Indeed, Ericsson has struck recent patent deals with a number of India-based phone makers, and it may be holding out for a similar arrangement with Xiaomi.

• Snapdeal has acquired Wishpicker, a recommendations platform for gift purchases: Snapdeal says this is the fifth acquisition it has made so far. Back in April, the company, whose competitors include Amazon India and Flipkart, announced that it had purchased Doozton. Since folded into Snapdeal’s main site, Dootzon, a fashion products discovery site, was also geared toward matching shoppers with products they are likely to purchase. Other companies Snapdeal has acquired include group buying site Grabbon in 2010; sports retailer esportsbuy.com in 2012; and Shopo.in, a marketplace for handmade items, in 2013.More on the target: Founded in 2013 by IIT Delhi graduates Apurv Bansal and Prateek Rathore, Wishpicker offers users smart gifting options based on different parameters like relationship with the recipient, their age, personality, and various other parameters. Users can also find gift suggestions based on Facebook likes and interests of recipient.

• More India startup action: mobile app dev firm Apps Daily close to $15M in Series C funding, and big data firm Qubole raises $13M Series B funding: Qubole offers a platform to empower developers and non-developers to access Big Data generated by their companies to gain insights at a cost-effective rate. Its flagship product, QDS, runs on Hadoop infrastructure where users can analyse and collaborate with their company’s data. QDS helps IT organisations use cloud infrastructure (Google Compute, Amazon Web Services or Azure) to access data while eliminating expenditures associated with maintaining hardware. Qubole’s clients include Pinterest, Quora, MediaMath, TubeMogul, Answers.com, Videoplaza and Pubmatic; Mobile app development firm Apps Daily in advanced talks to raise $15M in Series C funding. Apps Daily develops and markets mobile apps across India and abroad. The company also focuses on developing and distributing software for mobile phones. Unlike traditional companies that simply launch apps on Google Play or iTunes app stores, Apps Daily follows a unique model of selling and distributing its own and third-party products through retail outlets across India. The products are sold under the brand name ‘daily’.

• Google launches offline viewing of YouTube videos in India, Indonesia, or the Philippines: This new feature will allow users to download a movie over wi-fi at home, and then watch it offline on a mobile device during the long commute to work, or watch their favorite videos over and over again for up to 48 hours after downloading them just once – without having to stream it repeatedly. They simply have to sign in, pick the video they want to watch later, and tap the offline button to download it. Besides India, the feature is available on Android devices in Indonesia and the Philippines too.

• Amazon and Google spare on app stores - brings to mind this post by Ben Evans on the future of Android: In October, we spotted that Amazon had quietly launched a hidden and functional app store within its main Android application which was available for download on Google Play. Now, according to new reports from varying sources, Amazon’s flagship application’s listing is no longer available via search from within Google Play, though its direct link is still live. Additionally, there’s now a newly launched application called Amazon Shopping which looks much like the original application, but no longer includes the Appstore section. The change was first spotted by German site Caschys Blog who also received a statement from Amazon which claims that this is related to a September update that brought Amazon’s Prime Instant Video to Android users. That update involved having users update to or install the newest version of the main Amazon app, then download the Amazon Instant Video Player app afterwards, in order to watch Prime Instant Video on their Android devices.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday December 11

• Coverage here, here, here and everywhere that Instagram is now bigger than Twitter, will launch verified accounts: Instagram announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million monthly active users, up 50 percent in just nine months. That makes the service, a photo- and video-sharing app owned by Facebook, more popular than Twitter, which had 284 million monthly active users as of the third quarter. More than 70 percent of Instagram’s users are outside the United States, the company said Instagram users are highly engaged with the service, with users interacting with posts at 18 times the rate they do with Facebook posts, according to a report issued last month by the research firm L2. Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, said in a statement that the service was also going to begin verifying the Instagram accounts of celebrities, athletes and brands. Verified accounts will be identified with a badge so that fans know that they are really what they say they are. Instagram is also cracking down on spam accounts, deleting them from the service instead of just deactivating them.

• Twitter slipping: behind Instagram in users, behind Yahoo in 2015 mobile revenues, out of Glassdoor's top 50 best employers list: “Instagram is adding an average of 360k new active users per day; For comparison Twitter is adding 160k new users per day,” Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W Baird & Co., said today in a tweet. Twitter declined to comment on Instagram’s announcement. San Francisco-based Twitter has recently been on a campaign to promote its prospects after several quarters of slowing user growth and questions about whether it can ever reach the scale of Facebook, which has about 1.3 billion members. Monthly active user count at Twitter rose 23 percent in the third quarter, down from 24 percent growth the prior quarter.

• Reliance Capital is set to sell its 16% in Yatra.com for INR 500 Crore; Yatra valuation ~ USD 500 Million: per cent stake in travel portal Yatra.com for an estimated Rs 500 crore ($80 million) and is in talks with two-three international investors. The deal would mark an over 12x appreciation for this investment by Reliance Capital, the financial services arm of Anil Ambani-led business conglomerate Reliance Group, which had acquired a 16 per cent stake in the online travel company for Rs 40 crore in 2006. While the spokesperson did not give further details, sources said Reliance Cap aims to close the transaction in four-six weeks and the deal would put the total valuation of Yatra.com at around $500 million (Rs 3,000 crore). In the fast-growing Indian online travel business, Yatra.com competes with NASDAQ-listed MakeMyTrip, which commands a market value of $1.2 billion. During the last fiscal 2013-14, MakeMyTrip is estimated to have clocked total transaction value of $1.38 billion on its platforms, as against $763 million by Yatra. The operating income of MakeMyTrip and Yatra stood at $116 million and $51 million, respectively, for the year.

• eBay might cut 10% of its workforce, primarily in marketing, and increases its (small) investment in Indonesia: Ebay is considering eliminating almost 10 percent of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, the WSJ cited one source as saying. The cuts are expected to be localized in the company'smarketplace division, the report said. Separately, US-based ecommerce giant eBay plans to increase its ownership in Indonesia’s MetraPlasa from 40 percent to 49 percent, local media outlet Berita Satu reports. “Ebay can increase to 49 percent and they can also have the option to become the majority shareholder. There are stages for them to get there and they want to do it quickly. But I can not disclose anything more,” said Telkom’s acting president director Indra Utoyo in Jakarta on Monday. Ebay remains a strategic partner for Telkom as it will allow for future cross-border trading, and for products on the Blanja site to eventually be sold overseas. Blanja claims to have one million products on its site from only 600 sellers. It recieves a mere 50,000 visitors per day. “Currently, the revenue contribution of ecommerce to our business remains small,” says Utoyo. “But we estimate the contribution could reach 10 percent within two to three years.”

• Coupang, Korea's Amazon" raises USD 300M, valuation > USD 1B, GMV runrate USD 2.2B: Coupang, a fast-growing e-commerce company in South Korea, has raised $300 million of additional financing to aid its expansion plans. While Bom Kim, the chief executive, declined to disclose the company’s valuation, he said it was higher than the roughly $1 billion price tag the company achieved in its previous financing round. He also said the company now had about $500 million of cash in the bank. Coupang, based in Seoul, calls itself the Amazon of Korea. In addition to selling its own inventory, the company allows third-party merchants to sell through its site. While it competes in Korea with eBay and a site called 11th Street, Coupang says its competitive edge stems from its focus on ordering through mobile devices and from its delivery network. Like Amazon, Coupang has built its own warehouses, called fulfillment centers. But it has gone a step beyond Amazon by also employing its own delivery workers, whom it calls “Coupang men.” (Mr. Kim said the fleet includes some women as well.) These workers, who try to build relationships with customers by doing things like leaving handwritten notes, can often deliver packages on the day they are ordered. Mr. Kim, 36, who started Coupang in late 2010 after dropping out of Harvard Business School, said the company was now generating gross sales — the total value of goods passing through the site — of $2.2 billion on an annualized basis. He said roughly one in three people in South Korea had downloaded the company’s app.