Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday March 5

• Flipkart of India, to Bolster Its Tech Credentials, Hires Former Google Executive: Despite having raised billions of dollars and attaining a valuation of over $10 billion, the Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart isn’t necessarily the biggest name in Silicon Valley. Yet with its latest hire, the company is hoping to signal that it too can be a player. Flipkart plans to announce on Wednesday that it has hired Punit Soni, a former Google executive who most recently was a senior vice president for product management at Motorola Mobility when it was owned by Google. By tapping Mr. Soni to oversee Flipkart’s current and future products — and, in particular, their design and who is hired to design them — the e-commerce company means to show that it wants to attract top-level employees. “This really raises the bar for hiring talent,” Mukesh Bansal, the head of Flipkart’s commerce platform, said in a telephone interview. As the tech industry takes note of the rise of giants like the Alibaba Group of China, Flipkart’s executives are eager to show that India and its booming Internet sector are worth watching as well. Flipkart has become something like an Alibaba for the subcontinent, with Mr. Bansal saying that his company controls almost half of the country’s online shopping market. Yet when Mr. Soni announced his departure from Google last fall, around the time that it sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo of China, he said in an interview that Flipkart wasn’t even on his radar screen. At Motorola Mobility, he had served as a public face for the phone maker, especially in terms of discussing its products and plans with the public on the Google+ social network. But he was on the Indian company’s radar, ever since the two collaborated on bringing Motorola phones onto Flipkart’s sales platforms. Initially, he didn’t take the approach by Flipkart seriously. But when he traveled to India to observe the company’s operations firsthand, he said, his eyes opened. He went to one of the market operator’s warehouses and trucking systems, watching fellow Indians working jobs that they never could have had before. “I could see how the spread of an organized e-commerce system was actually changing people’s lives,” Mr. Soni said. “It was probably that evening that I realized this was not just a run-of-the-mill job.” After spending time at Flipkart, he also was surprised to see what he called a strong engineering culture at the company. But he also plans to try and infuse his new employer with more of the values — and employees — of Silicon Valley.

• Amazon launches mobile app for India sellers: Amazon has launched a mobile app for sellers who use its platform in India to sell their products. The company has over 20,000 sellers on its India marketplace Amazon.in across categories such as mobiles, books, clothing, kitchen appliances etc. The new merchant app will allow direct buyer-seller communication besides giving a free hand to the sellers to update inventory, source and list new items on Amazon.in and respond faster to customer queries. Sellers will also be able to view their sales summary for the day. They can also track order, fulfilment notification and shipment confirmation through the app. The app was previously available to sellers in other international markets of the company. According to the firm, the sellers using the app have reported a 30 per cent faster response time to customer enquiries. Amazon.in has customised the app for the Indian market by allowing listings of only new products and integrating the EasyShip in-browser experience. Vendors can also source new items to sell through the app by checking current prices, sale rank and customer reviews of items on Amazon.in using text search or scanning barcodes. Sellers will be able to estimate the profitability of the items before they are listed for sale as well. They can also use the app to contact seller support via email or phone call-back support and can provide feedback about the app directly to Amazon from within the app. It is a free app and needs only a sellers’ registration on Amazon.in to operate. Currently it is available for Android and iOS devices and can be downloaded from Google Play Store, Apple iTunes Store and the Amazon Appstore.

• Facebook's Instagram rolls out new 'carousel' ads: Instagram will let brand marketers showcase more images on its photo-sharing smartphone app, the Facebook-owned service’s latest move to expand its money-making advertising features. The new “carousel ads” feature will let brands post multiple images, which users can scroll through by swiping their finger across the phone’s screen. The idea, according to a post on Instagram’s official blog on Wednesday, is to match the multi-page ad campaigns found in print magazines. An automobile company, for example, could highlight different features of a new car and include a link to a website with more product information. The carousel ads feature will initially be available in the United States to a limited set of advertising partners, Instagram said. Instagram, which Facebook Inc acquired in 2012 for $1 billion, has 300 million monthly users. The new ad service marks the latest step in Instagram’s effort to position its mobile service as an online marketing channel. Instagram introduced photo ads in late 2013 and rolled out video ads last year.

• Xiaomi forecasts $16B in revenue, >50% growth this year: Xiaomi Corp. expects revenue this year to rise more than 50 percent as China’s biggest smartphone vendor diversifies its product lineup and expands to more overseas markets. The projection for more than 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) in sales compares with last year’s total of 74.3 billion yuan, founder and Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun told reporters at the National People’s Congress in Beijing Thursday. The company’s revenue more than doubled last year. Xiaomi’s valuation has surged to $45 billion just four years after releasing its first smartphone, with the company tapping the surging domestic demand for inexpensive devices packed with high-end features. The closely held company has taken stakes in more than 20 startups in the past two years, adding products including air purifiers and light bulbs that can be controlled by smartphones. “There’s no doubt sales will surpass 100 billion yuan this year, and growth will be more than 50 percent,” Lei said. Mobile Internet and other Internet businesses “maintain strong growth” amid weakening conditions in the Chinese economy.

• How Alibaba's U.S. IPO Got the Company Ordered Out of Taiwan: Documents give government evidence it needs to make the Chinese connection. Taiwan wants to kick Alibaba.com out because it's Chinese. Of course, everybody has known since its inception that Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce operator, is Chinese. What's operating in Taiwan, however, is Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce Private Ltd. When that company was registered on April 9, 2008, Jack Ma's outfit was doing what it does in many countries, and indeed what many corporations do in many countries: operating via an offshore holding company. But in Taiwan, the difference between being Singaporean and Chinese is as stark as night and day. If your company is from Singapore, the U.S., Japan or just about anywhere, then Taiwan is open for business. If you're from mainland China: not so much. Then Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. filed for its record-breaking U.S. IPO. While Yahoo! Inc., Singapore's Temasek Holdings, Ma and everyone else got rich, Taiwan got a nice little present too. The hundreds of pages of pre-IPO documents, such as Alibaba's prospectus, contained the information Taiwan's investment commission needed to prove what it already thought it knew, Chang said. So now that it has evidence of the alleged Chineseness, it's ordered Alibaba out by the end of August. They could either sell the business or close it, Chang said. Alibaba though, doesn't appear ready to walk away. Taiwan is an important market, Ma told reporters in Taipei later the same day. It complied with the law when it entered, and complies with local laws wherever it goes, he said. "We will actively communicate with related parties to clarify the issues and, if necessary, will take proper actions to protect the legitimate interests of Alibaba.com," the company said in a statement.

• Apple Inc will delay the start of production on a larger, 12.9-inch iPad until around September because of problems involving the display panel supply, said a report by Bloomberg News citing people familiar with the company's plans as saying. Production on the bigger tablet had been scheduled to begin this quarter, Bloomberg cited one of the people as saying.