Tuesday November 4

• Xiaomi looking to raise funds at $40-50B valuation: Xiaomi Corp. is in talks for a funding round that values the smartphone maker at around $40 billion to $50 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The discussions are at an early stage and nothing is finalized, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The world’s third-biggest smartphone maker had a financing round in August 2013 that valued the company at $10 billion.

• Caught off-balance by Holiday season demand surge last year, US retailers (a) boost demand planning (b) hire more (c) push in-store pick-up: Last year hundreds of millions of gifts and bad weather overtaxed United Parcel Service and FedEx, leading to shipping delays and empty space under the tree. Given the expected spike in online sales, the big question will be whether retailers and carriers can plan well enough to avoid the same problems.  “We started talking to our customers much earlier this year, and we were planning together with them for their volume forecasting,” she said. U.P.S. and FedEx, which typically hire tens of thousands of extra workers around the holiday season, plan to hire even more this year, both companies said. And they are taking other steps, like adding more sorting facilities and technology to help track packages. At the same time, they will also be crossing their fingers to avoid the abysmal weather that delayed shipments last year (FedEx even has 15 full-time meteorologists on staff). But the onus is not just on the carriers. Major retailers like Walmart and Target are also taking steps to make sure that customers get their gifts on time. Target is planning an even bigger marketing push to get customers who order online to pick up their gifts in the store, a feature the company introduced last year, a Target spokesman, Eddie Baeb, said.

• Audience-Targeted ads embedded in the comments sections of forums:  Third party comments service Disqus believes it could be sitting on an advertising gold mine. The third-party comments service, which runs the discussion section on 3 million websites, is starting to show data-targeted sponsored comment ads. Disqus has 150 million users signed up for its service, which lets people leave comments across participating websites like CNBC, The Atlantic, ABC News, Rolling Stone and more niche sites like SuperHeroHype. The San Francisco-based company mines comments, comment votes and comment context to target ads, which will now show up looking like part of the discussion.Disqus is working with Xaxis, WPP's automated ad platform, to let brands buy ads against the Disqus comments, which will be shown at the top of the discussion threads and marked sponsored. It will be up to publishers if they want to show the new ads from Disqus, and they could share in the revenue."When people come to a page that has Disqus, we know what they’re reading," said David Fleck, gm of advertising at the company. "We know if they choose to comment. We know what they comment on and know what they say in that comment. We know if they voted on it, and shared it out to social networks." Disqus said its metadata are used to create anonymous profiles against which brands could target ads, without sharing personally identifiable information. "We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the Web," Fleck said.Brian Lesser, Xaxis CEO, added, "It makes native advertising programmatic at scale. We are pushing the envelope of what is possible within the world of programmatic."

• Fading Monster.com hopes big-data snooping and audience targeting will win its mojo back: Monster.com disrupted the talent business, and then the disrupter was itself disrupted. Competing websites, as well as aggregators that scanned many sites for job listings and put them in one place, began to eat into Monster’s business. LinkedIn was born and became a global behemoth by positioning itself as an upscale matchmaker that helped people build careers, not just find the next job. Today, the company that owns Monster.com, renamed Monster Worldwide, is a shadow of its former self, and its stock trades for less than $4 a share. It still earns substantial revenue, $194.4 million in the second quarter of this year, from its job board and various other services. But now it wants to recapture some of its past luster by offering new cutting-edge tools for employers. Its latest products, both rooted in start-ups acquired by Monster this year, use big-data snooping and social-ad targeting to improve the process of matching job openings and potential applicants. The more developed of the two new tools, called TalentBin, works by building profiles of individual workers. But unlike LinkedIn, it does so without their active participation or consent. Instead, TalentBin scans publicly posted information on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup and Twitter, as well as what people have put on industry-specific sites, such as GitHub for software engineers and Dribbble for visual designers, to craft the dossiers. It then allows employers to run their job listings against the database to find people who meet certain criteria, such as “knows a lot about Java programming.” Recruiters can also study the dossiers to craft personalized email pitches to top candidates, citing personal or professional details from their profiles — something like “I loved the shoe designs you posted on Coroflot.”