Daily Tech Snippet: Friday January 9

• CommonFloor raises funding from Google Capital; prospect of lower interest rates propeling India Real Estate Tech: CommonFloor.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Google Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of tech giant Google Inc. The fresh funding comes just three months after the firm grabbed $30 million (Rs 181 crore) in Series E round of funding from existing investor Tiger Global Management. This is Google Capital’s second investment in India following its investment in SaaS-based customer support solutions startup Freshdesk Inc in mid-2014 and the third ever in Asia. So far, since its launch in the summer of 2013, Google Capital has made just ten bets, seven of them in the US. The only ones outside America are Chinese optical components maker Innolight, India’s cloud-based customer support software maker Freshdesk, which is headquartered in San Francisco, and now CommonFloor. A lowering of home loan rates, a relaxation of FDI (foreign direct investment) in construction, and an improvement in business sentiment after a new government took over in India last year have given the real estate sector a boost.

• Apple’s Cut From App Sales Reached $4.5 Billion in 2014: Apple continues to make billions of dollars from mobile apps sold in its App Store. The company said on Thursday that in 2014, billings from app sales rose 50 percent from the previous year, which results in roughly $15 billion in revenue for app developers and a $4.5 billion cut for Apple. Apple takes a 30-percent cut of each app sale made in its App Store. The $4.5 billion sum is a tiny sliver for Apple, which makes more than $180 billion in annual sales. But it is still a considerable sum for providing a storefront for developers to sell their apps. By comparison, Google’s Android is the largest mobile operating system in the world, but its app store, Google Play, generates far less money than Apple’s. That’s partly because Apple’s iPhone customers are wealthier and spend more money than people who own Android phones. App Annie, an analytics firm that tracks mobile app sales, said that in the third quarter of 2014, Apple’s App Store revenue was 60 percent higher than revenue generated from Google Play. App Annie said it had not yet released numbers for annual sales for Google Play. In June 2014, Google said it had paid out $5 billion to developers in the previous 12 months. Gina Johnson, a Google spokeswoman, said the company did not have newer statistics to share. Apple said its App Store serves 1.4 million apps for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. Google Play hosts 1.72 million apps, according to App Annie.

• Activist investor urges Yahoo to dispose Alibaba stake in a tax-efficient manner and return money to shareholders - CEO Mayer seeks to spend and expand instead: In the letter, addressed to Mayer from Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith, the investor said it had become “increasingly concerned” by reports that the Web portal is looking to make major acquisitions. He reiterated that Yahoo should unlock value by monetizing assets -- which include stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan Corp. -- trimming costs and exploring a combination with AOL Inc. Starboard owned less than 1 percent of Yahoo, or about 7.7 million shares, as of September 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Yahoo’s performance has been increasingly in the spotlight since the initial public offering of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in September. Yahoo owned about a 24 percent piece of Alibaba, which had driven much of the Silicon Valley company’s value. Yahoo reaped a one-time boost of more than $9 billion before taxes from selling some Alibaba shares in the IPO and still retains a valuable stake of about 15 percent of the Chinese company. How Yahoo treats that stake has become a major debate, with options including a cash-rich split-off and a tax-efficient spinoff, among others. Starboard expressed “concerns” that Yahoo has made no announcement for a tax-efficient separation of the equity assets and criticized the possibility of a cash-rich split-off structure for those assets as unnecessarily complex. Starboard has spoken with large Yahoo shareholders, who also prefer a tax-efficient spinoff over a cash-rich split-off. In addition, he said Yahoo “must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL.” “Starboard has a point,” said Brett Harriss, an analyst at Gabelli & Co., who has a buy rating on Yahoo. “There are a lot of acquisitions that haven’t generated any financial returns.” He added that there’s a concern that Mayer is “not a steward of shareholder capital.”

• Messaging continues to rise as an eCommerce Platform: Line Launches A Taxi Booking Service In Japan Because Chat Apps Have Become Platforms Line Taxi is built into the existing Line app, just like its recently introduced payments service, and its launch pits the company against dominant player Uber and British rival Hailo. A messaging app integrating a taxi app might sound an odd pairing, but it has been done before. China’s top chat app WeChat tied up with taxi on-demand service Didi Dache last year and there’s been talk of Facebook Messenger integrating with Uber — a chat app launching its own taxi service is something unique, however. Line Japan has introduced taxi booking this week, but it also has plans for on-demand food delivery, it has its own maps app which could support online-to-offline commerce for retailers, and it is dabbling in social commerce too. There are also plans for a music streaming service — which will be global thanks to Line’s acquisition of MixRadio from Microsoft — and more than 30 apps and games are tied into its core chat service. Line isn’t alone in building out its messaging experience. WeChat is doing the same in China. This week parent company Tencent launched an online bank — WeBank — which is likely to become a focus of its messaging platform, alongside existing pushes into retail, payments, taxi-hailing and more.

• Facebook acquires a video startup that enhances low-bandwidth video-viewing and reduces buffering of videos without degradation in quality: Facebook has a acquired QuickFire Networks, a TC Disrupt 2014 Battlefield contestant that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news earlier today, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site. QuickFire’s tech speeds up encoding videos with different profiles for frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms. QuickFire’s solution relied on custom motherboards built to accommodate 11 high-end Intel Core i7 processors. Custom software let these processors work in unison, and a layer on top of that let the startup massively scale up by distributing work among multiple motherboards. For users, the end result of Facebook integrating QuickFire’s tech would be reduced buffering of videos without degradation in quality.

• Quick win for companies on customer support? Pay attention to tweets of complaint: Two new reports – one from cloud-based customer care software maker Freshdesk, and another from tech research firm Gartner – suggest that even the top global brands are doing an amazingly poor job of engaging with their customers on new age channels like social media and mobile. Freshdesk looked at the top 100 brands of 2014, according to consultancy firm Interbrand, and analyzed how they engaged with customers on Twitter during the week leading up to the holidays: December 15 – 22. And this is what it found: The top 100 brands on average responded to just 22 percent of tweets directed at them. These 100 brands each got 1,000 tweets a week on average, but only 37 of them have a dedicated handle to listen to customers. There were exceptions to this, but mostly in America – Samsung Support USA which goes by the handle @SamsungSupport responded to nearly all their tweets, as did @AskAmex for American Express, while @AdobeCare responded to a tweet in 26 minutes on average