Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday February 25

• IBM announces plans to build corporate cloud centers in India and other new geographies; IBM shrank employee count 12% last year but is hiring in analytics, the cloud and security: IBM Monday announced at a conference in Las Vegas a series of technologies and investments designed to win business customers over to IBM’s version of modern computing. IBM also said it was opening corporate cloud centers in Australia, Canada, India and Italy. These follow a company effort to best Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft by renting computation in more locations. “Mega clouds are great, but not that great if you’re not in their geography,” Mr. Diaz said. Rebalancing workforce: IBM’s employee count shrank 12 percent last year as Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty has tried to reinvent the 103-year-old technology giant into a more nimble competitor. It’s the second straight annual drop for IBM’s workforce, the first two-year decline since 1993 and 1994 when the company was pushed to the edge of bankruptcy. Rometty has been seeking to transform International Business Machines Corp. to keep up with newer competitors in an industry undergoing what she’s called “unprecedented change.” IBM had 379,592 employees at the end of 2014, down 12 percent from a year earlier when the company posted the first decline in a decade, according to a filing Tuesday. Excluding a 35,000 reduction from divestitures, headcount fell about 3.9 percent last year. To help boost earnings-per-share, Rometty has fired and furloughed workers, cut IBM’s tax rate and bought back shares. She has also offloaded less-profitable business units last year, like the low-end server business sold to Lenovo Group Ltd., a customer-care business and the chip-making unit, which IBM paid Globalfoundries Inc. $1.5 billion to take off its hands. “IBM has 15,000 open positions right now, many in areas such as analytics, cloud, security where we are rebalancing skills to meet the evolving needs of our clients,” said Ian Colley, a spokesman for IBM.

• HP Q4 earnings: $26.8B -5% Y/Y, net income $1.4B, -4% Y/Y; stock down 7% on earnings miss: Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard‘s chief executive, says she thinks her company did almost everything well in its most recent fiscal quarter. Except make money. HP shares tumbled about 7 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday, after the release of first-quarter earnings that showed drops in revenue and net income, and flat to lower sales in almost all product areas. The company also sharply lowered its outlook for annual earnings. For the quarter ending Jan. 30, HP reported revenue of $26.8 billion, a fall of 5 percent from a year ago. Net earnings were $1.4 billion, down 4 percent. Using nonstandard accounting popular in the tech business, per-share earnings were 92 cents. The revenue numbers were worse than expected in a survey of Wall Street analysts by Thomson Reuters. They thought HP’s revenue would be $27.3 billion. Per-share were 91 cents. Ms. Whitman said that HP was not cutting back on research and development, despite the lower earnings, and said valuable new products were on the way, particularly in business computing. Another bright area, she said, was HP’s security software business, thanks to the hacking last year on Sony Pictures. While there had been earlier violations of corporate computers, she said, Sony took the business up to a new level. “We’re sold out — 5,000 security professionals.”

• Facebook active advertisers stand at 2M, up 33% since July 2014 on small-business strength: Facebook Inc said on Tuesday that its active advertisers rose to 2 million, a 33 percent increase from the 1.5 million it had in July 2014. The vast majority of the advertisers, defined as those that have placed an ad on the social media platform in the last 30 days, represent small- and medium-sized business owners. "Small business owners are really hard to reach and they are not tech savvy usually," Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said in an interview. She added that 30 million small business owners have Facebook pages. Facebook also launched a mobile app for advertisers to use to manage their campaigns. Of Facebook's newly acquired advertisers in the 2014 fourth quarter, 80 percent started by paying for a promoted post. Facebook does not break out the actual number of small business advertisers versus big brands, but they tend to spend on average $5 to $50 a day. That compares to the millions spent annually by big companies. Sandberg said that the fastest areas of growth of small business advertising are in regions of Europe-Middle East-Africa and Asia Pacific. Getting more advertisers onto its platform is critical for Facebook as it tries to increase global share. Facebook's fourth-quarter revenue grew 49 percent to $3.85 billion from the same period a year ago, with mobile accounting for 69 percent of advertising revenue. Google is the worldwide leader in digital advertising market share, at 31.1 percent, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. But Google's slice has shrunk slightly, down from 33.6 percent in 2013. Facebook, on the other hand, increased its share to 7.8 percent in 2014 from 5.8 percent in 2013, according to eMarketer. It is unknown how many advertisers Google currently has. In 2007, it said it was used by 1 million advertisers.

• Google Guns for Apple in Mobile Payments Race: Google announced on Monday that it has cut a deal with three wireless carriers — AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon — as well as their jointly-owned payments company, Softcard, to have its Google Wallet payment application preinstalled on Android phones sold by the carriers. As part of the deal, Google said, it acquired “technology and intellectual property” from Softcard. The move will allow Google to get its Wallet app in front of a whole lot more people, but it is facing an increasingly crowded field. Last week, Samsung acquired Loop Pay, signaling its move into mobile payments. Apple’s Apple Pay, meantime, has been available for only a few months but has already signed up dozens of companies that report consumers are finally starting to warm to paying for things with their phones.

• Opera offers new feature for free access to mobile Web apps: Norway's Opera, whose browser software has helped mobile operators sign up millions of users for free or low-cost Internet access, said on Tuesday it was introducing features that let operators offer subscribers free access to selected apps. Opera Max was first introduced last year for Android smartphone users to download free-of-charge. Opera browser users could gain access to an hour or a day of free time on Facebook or music on Spotify using the software. What's different with the new feature, called Opera Max with App Pass, is that it is no longer confined solely to Opera browser users. Instead, App Pass works with any browser or mobile app that an Android phone user may choose to use.

• India smartphone shipments (distinct from sales to end-customer) fell QoQ in Q4 2014 on holiday-related inventory buildup in Q3: For the first time ever, smartphone shipments fell in India during the last quarter of 2014. The smartphone market contracted by 4 percent, while the feature phone market plummeted by 14 percent in relation to the previous quarter, according to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC). The 64.3 million units shipped by vendors to sales channels in Q4 2014 was also 5 percent lower than the number of phones shipped in the corresponding period of the previous year. This includes both smartphones and feature phones. It’s worth noting here that the contraction was in shipments from phone vendors, and not necessarily in phone sales from retailers. The main reason for the drop in shipments has been attributed to the big inventories built up with sales channels during the third quarter. That was due to the strong surge in sales during the festive season. While the overall phone market contracted by 11 percent quarter-to-quarter, the decline was mainly in feature phones. On the positive side, smartphones formed 35 percent of the overall mobile phone business in Q4 2014, compared to a 13 percent share in the same quarter a year earlier. This confirms a strong shift from feature phones to smartphones. Samsung maintained its leadership position in Q4 2014, with Apple presenting stiff competition, but “online exclusive” brands like Xiaomi are making big inroads in the value-for-money category. Homegrown vendor Micromax shipped fewer phones in Q4 2014 owing to high inventories pumped into sales channels during the previous quarter in the festive season.