Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 30

• Paytm’s big day: IRCTC adds Paytm wallet as a payment option: Government-owned railway ticketing platform IRCTC, which is the one of the most used internet commerce site in the country clocking on an average over half a million tickets a day, has added Paytm’s wallet as an online payment option. IRCTC, the primary seller of railway tickets online (others OTAs act as secondary link) in the country, has been offering various online payments options besides the conventional credit/debit cards and net banking. It allows payments through cash cards, its own co-branded pre-paid Rupay card with Union Bank and with Paytm wallet it adds another payment option. Last we checked the Paytm payment option was integrated on IRCTC’s web portal but was not yet available on its mobile app on Android. The development means a big move for Paytm as it is already available as an alternate payment option in several key internet ventures such as the country’s top online food ordering venture Foodpanda, cab hailing app Uber (in India), eBay and Jabong. Although IRCTC has come a long way in terms of streamlining online payment process on its site, given the huge load on its servers it is not uncommon to see payment failures in a multi-authentication process which comes with a credit and debit cards. Paytm wallet would look to capitalise in partly solving this pain point for users and hopes to also expand its reach in tier-II and tier-III markets, where trains are a primary mode of long distance travel and IRCTC by default is the booking platform.

• This too shall pass: Secret Shuts Down: Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages. Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees, including top talent like Sarah Haider, Safeer Jiwan, and Amol Jain have left the company over the past month or so. One source says the company has been whittled down to under 10 employees from over 20 several months ago and has been in “maintenance mode.” More here: Secret’s trajectory illustrates the flash-in-the-pan nature of Silicon Valley’s current technology boom. Even as a handful of start-ups rise to stratospheric valuations and take in billions of dollars in financing, other privately held companies cannot sustain their following. Fab.com, a onetime e-commerce darling, was once valued at more than $1 billion and had raised more than $150 million before ending up in a fire sale this year, when it was bought for about $15 million. Other start-ups are dealing with a cooling-off process as big companies muscle in on their turf. Meerkat, a live-streaming video app that gained great traction early this year, is now grappling with the entrance of Twitter and its Periscope live-video app, for example.

• Cloud CRM major Salesforce is exploring a sale - shares up 17%; seen as pricey but valuable target: Cloud software company Salesforce.com Inc is working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential acquirer, Bloomberg said, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The company's shares rose as much as 17.3 percent to touch an all-time high of $78.46 on Wednesday. They closed up 11.6 percent at $74.65, valuing the company at about $49 billion. Salesforce Seen as Attractive, If Pricey, Target for Cloud Push: Salesforce.com, the software provider that has hired bankers to field takeover offers, would make sense as a partner for a buyer willing to spend a lot to become the leader in cloud computing. Salesforce jumped 12 percent to close at $74.65 in New York on Wednesday, giving the company a market value of about $49 billion. Salesforce’s business is entirely cloud-based. That means that as the company adds clients, it can lower costs-per-customer through economies of scale and by improving operations in its software and data centers. It also can update products and roll out new business lines quickly via the Internet. Also, customers are flocking to software and service contracts that tend to be simpler for cloud computing than for traditional software. Cloud clients also can avoid the sunk costs of buying hardware. “Specific to the cloud, the shift is accelerating and it’s happened more quickly than the big guys were hoping,” Steven R. Koenig, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc., said in an interview. The San Francisco-based company would give an acquirer “a lot of critical mass in the cloud.” Salesforce had 16 percent of the customer-relationship management market in 2013, compared with 13 percent for SAP SE, 10 percent for Oracle Corp. and 7 percent for Microsoft Corp., according to Gartner Inc. Salesforce will have more than 15 million end users in 2018, up from around 6 million last year, Gartner wrote in a November report. The CRM market has “gone to Salesforce, and no one is going to catch up,” Koenig said. Around 40 percent of organizations with greater than a billion dollars in annual revenue ran all their CRM applications within their own data centers last year, according to Gartner. That will shrink to 25 percent by 2020 as companies move to the cloud, Gartner said. As customers start to move into cloud CRM systems offered by Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, they also to tend to buy related products, such as analytics or marketing services, from the same company. That stitches clients tightly to their provider, making it less likely for them to move away. “There is still room for Salesforce.com and competitors to grow rapidly in CRM without reaching capacity for at least the next five years,” Gartner wrote. Salesforce has begun investing in data centers around the world. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff has said the company would open “multiple” data centers in Germany, along with ones in France and Canada. Local facilities help the company serve customers with stringent data regulations, without having to give up the economies of scale and operational expertize gained by being a cloud company. Salesforce also has expanded into data analytics through investments and product development. Lashing these various products together with its Salesforce1 program has allowed the company to pursue larger contracts with bigger firms. Salesforce closed 550 deals valued more than a million dollars each in its most recent fiscal year, up around 100 from the prior year, the company said in February.

• Yelp Shares Tumble on as First-Quarter Earnings, Outlook Disappoint: Yelp Inc., an operator of user-review websites, declined as much as 17 percent in extended trading after its profit and sales forecast missed analysts’ estimates. The San Francisco-based company reported a first-quarter loss of $1.28 million, or 2 cents a share, from $2.64 million, or 4 cents, a year earlier. Analysts’ estimated a profit of 1 cent. Revenue was $118.5 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement, trailing estimates of $119.8, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yelp forecast second-quarter sales of $131 million to $134 million, falling short of analysts’ average estimate of $137.4 million. “There’s not a lot of forgiveness for technology companies right now,” said Blake Harper, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities Inc.. “They are valued pretty well and there’s an expectation that they’ll perform well.” Yelp operates websites that let users search local businesses for free and read reviews about them. The company charges for advertising on those sites. It had 142 million unique monthly visitors in the period, an increase of 7.6 percent from a year earlier. Yelp’s local advertising revenue dropped as a result of a sales-force restructuring implemented in the first quarter, Harper said. Shares of Yelp dropped to a low of $42.68 in extended trading after closing at $51.28. The company competes with Angie’s List Inc. as well as new features offered by companies including Amazon.com Inc.

• Baidu Sees Revenue Growth And Profit Slump In Q1 2015: China's dominant Internet search engine Baidu Inc on Thursday posted its slowest revenue growth rate in almost seven years in the first quarter of 2015, as customers spent less money on its core online marketing business. The company's bid to create new avenues of income from mobile in China, the world's biggest smartphone market, also took their toll. Baidu's profit margins sank to their lowest in a decade, or 19 percent, as promotional costs for new businesses and research and development expenses skyrocketed. The search company's bid to promote new mobile-centric businesses like food delivery to compete with Tencent and Alibaba saw selling, general and administrative expenses rocket 47.2 percent to $477 million from a year ago. Revenues of 12.73 billion yuan ($2.05 billion) came in below forecasts of 12.9 billion yuan, according to a Thomson Reuters SmartEstimate poll of 16 analysts. Coupled with a 3.4 percent decline in net profit from the previous year, this prompted shares to slide 2.6 percent in trading after market close in New York. Baidu said it expected second-quarter revenue to be between 16.37 billion yuan and 16.75 billion yuan. A hiring spree for research and development also pushed the department's expenses up 79.1 percent to $368.8 million. Baidu's net income, its lowest in two years, was 2.4 billion yuan for the first three months of 2015. Profit margins of 19 percent were the lowest in almost a decade.

• Flipkart acquires Delhi-based analytics and visual A/B testing platform Appiterate: India’s largest e-commerce platform Flipkart has acquired Delhi- and San Francisco-based DSYN Technologies Pvt Ltd, which provides a native mobile analytics and A/B testing platform for app developers and enterprises under the brand name Appiterate. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is in line with Flipkart’s ‘mobile first’ focus, the firm said on Wednesday. Post the acquisition, Appiterate’s mobile marketing automation platform will be integrated with Flipkart’s mobile app which will help the e-commerce firm in targeting users based on their activity on the app and website. Appiterate is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) A/B testing platform for native mobile apps. It allows app publishers to A/B test and iteratively optimise the designs (UX) and functionality of their mobile apps to improve in-app purchases, user engagement and conversion metrics. It also allows app publishers to run tests based on user segments and see real-time conversion metrics. The company says it has been delivering more than 100 million personalised notifications each month through its platform for leading e-commerce companies. Last year, it raised Rs 3 crore in seed funding from SAIF Partners, with participation from a group of individuals, including Greg Badros, former VP (product & engineering) at Facebook and Prashant Malik, former tech lead at Facebook and co-creator of Apache Cassandra.

• Twitter Troubles Lie in Marketers’ Reluctance to Buy New Kind of Ad: As a company, Twitter is an adolescent — gangly, starry-eyed, growing like a weed and unpredictable. No wonder advertisers and investors are having trouble figuring it out. The social networking company shocked Wall Street on Tuesday by reporting slower-than-expected growth in advertising sales, which account for nearly all of its revenue. Shares of Twitter, which fell 18 percent on Tuesday after the first-quarter results were disclosed, dropped an additional 9 percent on Wednesday. Although revenue rose a brisk 74 percent in the quarter compared with the same quarter a year ago, it was less growth than in Twitter’s five previous quarters and well below the high bar that the company had set. Twitter attributed the disappointment to advertisers’ reluctance to spend heavily on ads that prompt the viewer to take an action, like download a smartphone app or apply for a credit card. This type of ad, known as direct response, is a newer area for Twitter, which originally focused on general brand image ads. Marketers say they are indeed more cautious about Twitter’s direct-response ads because the microblogging service has not yet shown that it can target or track those ads with the level of precision that advertisers want. Compared with mature rivals like Google and Facebook, Twitter doesn’t know as much about its users, and it is more difficult to measure results. Facebook has so much data on its users, “you could actually target a premium credit card to a businessman you know is traveling all the time,” said Bryan Wiener, chairman of 360i, a digital marketing agency that works with brands like Capital One, NBCUniversal, Spotify, Oreo and Oscar Mayer. “That’s the kind of information that’s missing from Twitter,” he said. “There’s not this rich history of your holistic life.” As a result, he said, many brands are unwilling to commit big money to Twitter ad campaigns. Mr. Freeman said that, in general, Twitter is best for building brand awareness and recall. Its weakness is the ability to measure direct-response effectiveness. “A lot of times, brands don’t really know what to do with it,” he said. “And that was Twitter’s fault because I don’t think they had a very clear direction.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 29

• Twitter Q1 earnings: $436M, +74% Y/Y, net loss $162M; shares crash 18% on weakness in both engagement and monetization: Twitter posted weaker-than-expected financial results for the first quarter on Tuesday and told investors to reduce their expectations for the rest of the year. The quarterly report, which was supposed to be published after the stock market closed, was obtained early and posted on Twitter by the financial analytics firm Selerity. The release sent Twitter shares plunging. Trading was briefly halted so the company could disseminate its results. That steepened the drop, and the stock ended the day down about 18 percent. Twitter’s revenue grew 74 percent in the quarter, but that was less than the 97 percent growth seen in the fourth quarter and below the company’s own forecasts. Executives attributed the slowdown to a transition to a new advertising model that priced certain ads based on the result, such as whether the viewer downloaded an app, instead of whether the person simply clicked on it. Analysts said, however, that the shortfall suggested that the real-time network might be less useful than competitors for what are called direct-response ads. “Do people want to leave what they are doing on Twitter and do something else like buy something?” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer. “Direct-response advertisers haven’t figured out the best way to use Twitter, and Twitter hasn’t figured out the best way to market to them.” The quarterly results may renew calls for the resignation of Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, who has been under fire from some investors ever since the company’s initial public offering in the fall of 2013. “User growth doesn’t appear to be notably improving, and now monetization is failing to live up to expectations,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG Research. “That’s why the stock is selling off so hard. The question is, How much of this is Twitter’s own missteps versus how much of this is peers such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat eating into their advertising?” Twitter said that 302 million people used its service at least once a month during the first quarter. That is up from 288 million in December and in line with recent trends. But the figure failed to impress investors, who have been eager to see results from recent changes Twitter has made to help newcomers better understand how to use its service. Twitter’s revenue, most of which derives from advertising, came in at $436 million in the first quarter, up from $250 million in the same quarter a year ago. That was well below the $457 million that Wall Street analysts had expected, according to estimates collected by S&P Capital IQ. The company also continued to lose money in the first quarter: $162 million, or 25 cents a share. Excluding stock-based compensation and certain other expenses, however, the company reported a profit of $46.5 million, or 7 cents a share. On that basis, Wall Street had expected Twitter to earn 4 cents a share.

• Twitter CEO faces a crisis of confidence: Twitter Inc.’s chief executive officer failed to foresee a slowdown that forced the social-media company to miss analysts’ first-quarter revenue estimates and cut its 2015 sales forecast, and the stock slumped 18 percent. While this isn’t the first time Twitter has fallen short on promised results, investors had been told that new features and services, as well as a management overhaul, were starting to pay off. Now, with results missing projections and executives warning of a “slow start” to April user additions, analysts are asking whether Twitter’s potential market is limited and about management’s ability to lure more users and advertisers“Management will again have to address credibility concerns,” Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a note to investors. The quarter’s performance “raises the question of how much visibility into advertiser and consumer demand for its offerings Twitter really has,” he said. As Twitter has evolved, Costolo has also sought to explain changes in how the company’s performance should be measured. He usually has a positive business reason for why a number went down. For example, after a slump in timeline views, a metric that Twitter touted as a key figure before its November 2013 initial public offering, Costolo said product improvements had made clicks less necessary, deflating the importance of a number that was supposed to measure user interest. That figure no longer appears on earnings releases, and Twitter hasn’t replaced it with a new metric to track engagement. As Twitter’s monthly active user growth slowed, Costolo responded by saying that it didn’t show the whole picture because 500 million people also visit Twitter’s website each month without logging in. Now, Twitter has decided to tweak the metric, it said on the conference call, making historical comparisons more difficult. The company is adding to the total user count people who access Twitter and send tweets via SMS, or text messaging, in emerging markets, reasoning that they will one day become regular users when upgrading their phones. The change, which will start this quarter, would have added 6 million more people to the prior period’s total count.

• Oracle raises $10B in debt as tech majors borrow to sweeten equity with dividends, buybacks: Oracle sold $10 billion of notes on Tuesday, including the software maker’s first bond that will mature in 40 years, at yields that were lower than originally offered, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Amgen, the world’s second-biggest biotech company, issued $1.25 billion in 30-year securities at its lowest coupon for that maturity as a part of a $3.5 billion debt sale, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Both borrowers raised debt to return capital to their equity investors. The highest-rated companies that have been building up their balance sheets after the financial crisis are showing willingness to borrow to satisfy stock investors pushing them to lift share prices. And even as the Federal Reserve moves closer to raising interest rates, forecasts that the U.S. central bank will wait until September, is encouraging borrowers to embrace yields on corporate bonds that are hovering near record lows. Apple Inc. said Monday it may tap debt markets to fund share buybacks. Investors are rewarding companies that have hoarded cash and tightened spending. The ratio of net debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index is near the lowest levels on record. Oracle last month boosted its dividend for the first time since 2013 by 25 percent to 15 cents a share, up from the prior payout of 12 cents. Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, last sold bonds in June, when it issued $10 billion. The company sold the new debt in six parts, with the $1.25 billion 40-year portion yielding 170 basis points more than similar-maturity Treasuries, 10 basis points less than where the deal was initially marketed. Apple unveiled a plan Monday to boost its share-buyback authorization by $50 billion to $140 billion, and increasing the company’s dividend by 11 percent. Cupertino, California-based Apple has issued the equivalent of $40.35 billion of bonds since April 2013, when it sold $17 billion in what at the time was the biggest corporate-bond offering ever.

• Microsoft might be approaching a substantial goodwill impairment from the Nokia purchase: Microsoft made waves recently by disclosing in its quarterly 10-Q document that its Phone business, which generates billions in yearly revenue, isn’t performing as well as it expected. As Microsoft is carrying billions of dollars of goodwill related to the Nokia purchase on its books, the warning landed like a brick in a puddle of lukewarm slop. History as prelude in this case is the aQuantive boondoggle, during which Microsoft wrote of billions of dollars of value relating to that purchase. As Business Insider’s Matt Weinberger recently wrote: “[T]he last time Microsoft used language like this in an earnings report was back in 2012, three months before it took a $6.2 billion charge to its bottom line for its aQuantive acquisition.” Microsoft currently counts quite a lot of goodwill as an intangible asset on its books. In its most recent quarters, the dollar amount of goodwill sourced from the Nokia deal, in which Microsoft bought the majority of the Finnish company’s hardware assets, sat around the $5.4 billion mark. That’s about a quarter of the company’s total goodwill, which it reports as just over $21.7 billion. Microsoft may not be forced to write down any goodwill relating to the Nokia deal. Or it may have to write down quite a lot. In terms of scale, how bad could the damage be? A massive write down could tank a quarter of the company’s profit, using normal accounting methods (GAAP). Using adjusted metrics, Microsoft could take the non-cash charge in stride, more shamefaced than materially castigated. On a GAAP basis, things get more interesting. The $5.4 billion in goodwill that the company currently counts as an asset is more than the company’s last-quarter GAAP profit. So, in theory, a massive write down could erase a full quarter’s profits both per-share and in aggregate. We can look back to the aQuantive write down to see the potential impact. Here’s Microsoft, from the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012. In short, the write down essentially erased the company’s profit for the quarter.

• In sharp reversal, US retailer Best Buy will start accepting Apple Pay in all stores: Best Buy announced on Monday that it now accepts Apple Pay payments for purchases made inside its smartphone app, and by the end of the year will accept payments made in its brick-and-mortar stores using the Apple Pay mobile wallet. A Best Buy spokesman said in a statement that the electronics retailer wanted to give customers as many options as possible in how they pay for goods and services. The company also plans to open a technology innovation office in the Seattle area to work on mobile technology issues, the spokesman said. That is a sharp reversal from just a few months ago, when major retailers like Rite-Aid and CVS abruptly shut off the ability to accept Apple Pay payments in their retail stores. Best Buy has not accepted Apple Pay payments in the past. The issue was not whether these companies want a mobile wallet to catch on. More than 50 retailers, including Walmart, Best Buy and Gap, started working together years ago to develop CurrentC, a smartphone-based payments product still in development. The hope was that for members of the consortium, also called the Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX, accepting mobile payments through their CurrentC app could be a way to help retailers understand more about their customers’ shopping habits and, potentially, let merchants avoid the high fees they pay when processing credit card transactions. However, when Apple Pay made its debut, MCX retail partners were contractually bound not to accept alternative mobile wallet payments, according to two retailers involved in MCX, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the partnership are private. That meant that even though the CurrentC product is still unreleased, partner retailers would not be able to take Apple Pay or Google Wallet transactions. Some of those exclusivity agreements will expire soon, people close to the coalition said, which could explain why Best Buy will accept Apple Pay in stores this year.

• PremjiInvest may lead $50M fresh investment in grocery e-tailer BigBasket. PremjiInvest, the private investment arm of Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, is in discussions to lead a $50 million (Rs 312 crore) Series C investment round in Bangalore-based SuperMarket Grocery Supplies, which owns and operates online groceries marketplace – BigBasket.com, sources told Techcircle.in. According to senior investment bankers who are aware of the discussions, this fresh round of funding is expected to be wrapped within three months. Request for views on the development from the management of BigBasket and PremjiInvest did not elicit any response. This comes within seven months of BigBasket raising Rs 200 crore ($32.9 million) in its Series B round of funding from a clutch of investors including Helion Venture Partners and Mumbai-based Zodius Capital. After establishing its presence in its home market Bangalore, it has expanded into Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. It is expected to enter Delhi soon. The firm still has cash from the last round but would need a larger stash not just to enter new markets but to create a war-chest to fight fresh competitors, including some which follow an asset-light hyper-local grocery delivery marketplace. In the grocery e-commerce space ZopNow raised $10 million from Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from the existing investors Accel Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Times Internet. ZopNow, which earlier competed head on with BigBasket, has pivoted to become an asset-light business and partners with offline hypermarket chain HyperCity to pick products and deliver to consumers who order online. Then there are a bunch of delivery startups which essentially connects users to local grocers. Grofers raised $45 million across two rounds since January this year; PepperTap raised $10 million while LocalBanya also got fresh funding. BigBasket is understood to have closed FY15 with a top-line of Rs 250 crore, with a run-rate of 6,000 orders a day with average billing of Rs 1,500 per customer. It had generated sales of around Rs 70 crore in the year ended March 31, 2014, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

• Indonesian startup Cubeacon aims to be pioneer in iBeacon technology: Cubeacon wants to be Indonesia’s pioneer in iBeacon technology: It’s a rare thing to hear about software-as-a-service (SaaS) ventures from Indonesia, and even more rare to hear about hardware innovation. But Cubeacon combines both. It focuses on customer loyalty management with a hardware component based on Apple’s iBeacon technology. The startup may be so far ahead of the curve in Indonesia that its CEO Tiyo Avianto is focusing Cubeacon’s distribution in the Japanese market for the time being. Cubeacon uses a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) sensor that was introduced by Apple under the name of iBeacon in 2013. iBeacon sensors are made to be placed indoors, for instance inside a shop. These sensors can detect a customer’s position within the shop very precisely, and they can send offers or information relevant to that location directly to a customer’s phone (so long as they have Bluetooth turned on). Potentially, hundreds of sensor units can be installed across one location. Along with its sensor units, which Cubeacon calls a Cubeacon Box, the company delivers customizable software which shop owners can configure depending on their context and requirements, for example to receive analytics and maps, and to deliver custom ads, or push notifications. “At this time we can produce about 2,500 Cubeacon units per month,” Avianto says. Cubeacon hopes to tap into the big budgets that major companies have at hand for their customer loyalty programs. “Cubeacon exists to bring a different experience to customer loyalty,” he says. Cubeacon’s revenue is based on hardware unit sales, but it also charges for its software on a subscription-based model. For large companies, Cubeacon’s software can be white labelled, meaning that it can be branded and adapted to suit the firm’s needs. It even allows the integration of other iBeacon-based devices, which makes the software attractive for developer companies who are already experts in the technology.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 28

• Apple earnings: revenue $58B (+27% Y/Y), net income $13.6B (+33%). Another monster quarter sends shares modestly up (1.3%):  In total, revenue climbed 27 percent to $58 billion, up from $45.6 billion last year, the company said in its earnings report. Profit was $13.6 billion, up from $10.2 billion a year ago. Mr. Dawson said. Over all, Apple sold 61.2 million iPhones in the quarter, beating analysts’ estimates of roughly 60 million phones. That also far exceeded the 43.7 million iPhones that Apple sold in the period a year ago. Analysts had anticipated that iPhone sales would increase sharply, largely because of the company’s growing presence in greater China. Apple also said it was seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhones from Android smartphones. Sales of Apple’s iPad declined for the fifth quarter in a row, however. The company sold 12.6 million iPads, compared with 16.4 million tablets a year ago. Over the last year, Apple’s tablet sales have steadily shrunk, partly because people do not upgrade those devices as frequently as they do smartphones. In addition, as smartphone screen sizes increase, some consumers question whether they need both a tablet and a phone. Apple also sold 4.6 million Mac computers in the quarter, up from 4.1 million a year ago. Apple on Monday also said it increased its capital return program by 50 percent, to $200 billion in cash by the end of March 2017. Apple is increasing its share repurchases to $140 billion from $90 billion, and is also raising its dividend to shareholders. The company’s cash and securities pile stood at $193.5 billion as of the end of the quarter.

• Apple's revenue from China this quarter: $16.8B (+71% Y/Y) - sells more iPhones in China than in the US Apple’s growth engine has now shifted unmistakably to China. The company said on Monday that quarterly iPhone sales in greater China, which includes mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, had surpassed those in Apple’s home market, the United States, for the first time. While Apple did not disclose specific numbers, the performance powered the company’s revenue, with sales in greater China rising 71 percent to $16.8 billion in the fiscal second quarter compared with the same period last year. Revenue from greater China also exceeded that from Europe for the first time. The China results punctuated another strong quarter for Apple. Apple has long laid the groundwork to reap big sales in China, and revenue growth from the region has steadily gained momentum. The company in late 2013 struck an important deal to sell iPhones through China Mobile, the world’s largest phone carrier. Apple is also expanding its operations in the region, with 21 retail stores and plans to increase that number to 40 by mid-2016. Add to all that the fact that the Chinese New Year holiday, typically a big retail season, was in February. The latest iPhones also have much bigger screens than past models, another feature that has been especially popular in China. Jan Dawson, an independent technology analyst for Jackdaw Research, said Apple’s performance in China highlighted its advantages against other American technology companies. “It’s hugely important because it shows that Apple continues to be the only major U.S. tech company that is really succeeding in China, in contrast to Google, Microsoft and Amazon,”

• Apple is raising prices, and still managing to sell more units. Apple is pulling off a feat almost unheard of in the history of consumer electronics – as more competitors offer rival products for less, Apple is raising prices and still selling more gadgets. The latest report from the International Data Corporation estimates that Apple held nearly 20 percent of the world’s smartphone market at the end of 2014, an increase from 17.5 percent the previous year. It largely took those sales away from Android-based smartphones, which declined by about the same amount over that period

• Amazon starts Sunday delivery service in India: Global e-commerce giant Amazon has expanded the scope of its logistics services and is now delivering products on Sundays starting with 100 cities of the country, it said. It’s key competitor Flipkart among others already deliver products on Sundays so Amazon’s move is more a catch-up rather than an industry-first initiative. Amazon has already been doing same day, next day, two day and release (or launch) day delivery options for products. However, if consumers ordered the product on a Friday (two-day delivery option) or Saturday (one day delivery option) their deliveries was still rolled over to Monday as the firm was not delivering on Sundays. This changes now. Currently, Amazon has over 700,000 products available for next day delivery across eligible pin codes in several cities and around 75 per cent customer demand is already eligible for next-day shipping on products fulfilled by Amazon.

• Facebook Adds Free Video Calls to Messenger App: Facebook is adding free video calls to its Messenger communications app, showing how quickly it is raising its game in a battle with other global tech behemoths to dominate every form of mobile communications. Just last month, the company introduced a feature that lets Messenger users to send money to each other. A few days later, it opened up Messenger to outside developers, and now users can download dozens of apps to send funny GIFs, personalized emoji and other enhanced messages. Video calling fills a major hole in the Messenger service, which has about 600 million users worldwide and has evolved from instant messages sent within the Facebook social network into a standalone app. Competitors such as Google’s Hangouts, Microsoft’s Skype, Apple’s Facetime, and Tencent’s WeChat have all offered video calling for some time. The company said in a blog post Monday that it has begun rolling out the Messenger upgrade to Android and iOS users in about 18 countries, including the United States, Mexico and much of Europe, and it should be available across the globe within the next few weeks. Facebook hopes to replicate the success it had with free voice calling in Messenger, which was first offered in 2013 but really took off a year ago after a major update to the software made it easier to use. Since then, Messenger calls have grown to about 10 percent of all mobile voice calls globally, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told investors on Wednesday when reporting the company’s first-quarter financial results. The video calling feature is a way to spontaneously upgrade from a text conversation when the participants think video is necessary, said Stan Chudnovsky, Facebook’s head of product for messaging, in an interview. That contrasts with the typical use of other video messaging services such as Skype or Hangouts, which are more oriented towards planned video calls. “We just think we are serving different use cases,” he said. The calls are encrypted and Facebook cannot eavesdrop on them, Mr. Chudnovsky said. Facebook designed the video feature to adapt to the connection on each side, so calls in places with weak cellular data networks will be at lower resolution than those on a fast Wi-Fi network.

• Sources: Amazon Plans ‘Prime For Business,’ Folding AmazonSupply Into Big B2B Play: TechCrunch has been told by sources that Amazon is now doubling down on its B2B supply marketplace. The focus will be on Amazon for Business, complete with extra features that will be offered only to registered business customers. Think of it as “Prime for Business.” According to sources briefed on the matter, as a consequence of this, Amazon plans to shutter AmazonSupply, its existing B2B portal for hardware, lab & scientific, health & safety, sanitation and office supplies that Amazon dubs “The store for business and industry.” One source says the closure of AmazonSupply will happen by the end of this year, with the products that it offers there instead folded into Amazon.com and the bigger Amazon for Business offering, not unlike Amazon’s closure of Endless in the shoe and fashion category and folding that into its fashion category in 2012. Aside from our own sources, it seems others have also been hearing similar murmurs of AmazonSupply getting folded into Amazon.com. And in other markets, like India, Amazon is launching B2B supply services doing away with the AmazonSupply brand altogether, opting instead for Amazon for Business. Whether it’s called AmazonSupply or Amazon for Business, it’s a big opportunity for the company. A Forbes article profiling AmazonSupply and the opportunity of B2B wholesale sales noted that in the U.S. alone there was $7.3 trillion worth of goods sold to businesses according to the last U.S. Census, compared to $4 trillion for retail sales (the area we know Amazon for best these days). “Our goal is to supply everything needed to rebuild civilization,” Amazon notes rather ambitiously on its job openings page for the B2B effort. The “Prime”-style tier that our sources tell us is being planned — we don’t know what actual name it will have or whether it will just be called “Amazon for Business” — for registered users will have various perks. They will include special pricing for items; bulk discounts; medical and lab registration; and items available only to business customers (for example, chemicals and medical devices available only for registered hospitals and labs). As with the Prime badge for retail consumers, items with special B2B features will be highlighted in a special color.

• US data center consolidation continues: Telx Group Inc, a private equity-owned provider of data centers and network solutions to companies, is exploring a sale that could value it at around $2 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter. U.S. businesses' burgeoning demand for data and video is fueling a revival in fiber optic services and data centers. New York-based Telx manages 1.3 million square feet of data center space and more than 50,000 network connections. The company owns 20 data centers, including three major ones in New York City. Its customers range from small businesses that only need half of a cabinet in data centers to global companies requiring a full-floor lease. Telx is just the latest data center company to hit the auction block. Zayo Group Holdings ZAYO.O bought data center company Latysis in February for $675 million, while AT&T has been pursuing a sale of its data centers worth $2 billion. Earlier on Monday, Lightower Fiber Networks, a fiber company that is also owned by Berkshire Partners and ABRY partners, bought Fibertech Networks from Court Square Networks for $1.9 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 27

• Alibaba-backed Paytm pushes deeper into e-commerce, adds mobile marketplace app for e-merchants: Paytm, an Indian online payments platform backed by China’s Alibaba, is pushing deeper into India’s booming e-commerce industry with a zero-commission mobile app marketplace targeted at small and medium-sized firms, the mainstay of the country’s economy. The company said on Friday this push, in addition to its existing general e-commerce platform, would help marketplace operations make up half of its total revenue target of $4 billion by the end of 2015. “This is our move into mobile commerce,” said Paytm Chief Executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma, adding the mobile app was designed to connect small businesses and consumers. Even though only about a quarter of the population can access the Internet, India already has the world’s third-largest population of internet users, thanks to cheap smartphones. That has driven a boom in e-commerce, in a country that had previously shopped largely in informal stalls and bazaars. Paytm, which has yet to turn a profit, will not charge merchants commission on their sales, making money instead on commissions levied when they transfer money earned out of the site. Paytm expects to have 100,000 merchants on its app by the end of the year, up from about 33,000 today on their general web platform. It expects to grow the number of stock-keeping units — essentially, units sold — from 8.5 million today to 100 million by the end of the year.

• Ratan Tata buys a stake in Xiaomi, will also act as advisor (more here) Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of the holding company of India's Tata conglomerate, has acquired a stake in Xiaomi Technology [XTC.UL], a deal that is likely to bolster the Chinese phone maker's presence in the world's third-largest smartphone market. Financial details of the unspecified stake bought by Tata in Xiaomi, the first by an Indian, were not disclosed in the statement issued by the Chinese company on Sunday. Xiaomi, the No. 3 global smartphone maker, was valued at $45 billion after a December funding round. Tata, a respected business leader who was the chairman of salt-to-software Tata Sons for more than two decades, has previously invested in Indian start-ups, including online retailer Snapdeal. Tata'a investment in Xiaomi comes against the backdrop of an aggressive push by Xiaomi in India after entering the market, which has huge growth potential with just one in 10 people using smartphones, in July 2014. On Thursday, Xiaomi hosted its first global launch outside of China in the Indian capital New Delhi, unveiling its feature-heavy Mi 4i model that supports six Indian languages at 12,999 rupees ($205). Xiaomi and other Chinese smartphone makers are drafting in cricket teams and Bollywood stars to conquer India, their largest overseas market and a key testing ground for their international expansion. "Mr. Tata is one of the most well-respected business leaders in the world. An investment by him is an affirmation of the strategy we have undertaken in India so far," Lei Jun, founder and chief executive officer of Xiaomi said in the statement. "We are looking forward to bringing more products into India," he said.

• Alibaba, China Telecom tie up to sell cheap smartphones in China's smaller cities: Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and state-owned China Telecom Corp Ltd have tied up to sell inexpensive smartphones aimed at boosting mobile commerce in smaller cities and rural areas. The phones, dubbed "Tianyi Taobao Shopping Handsets", will come installed with either an app for easy access to Alibaba's flagship Taobao online shopping platform or its home-grown YunOS mobile operating system, it said in a statement late on Friday. Buyers will be eligible for four months of free 2G data service. The partnership is a bid to deepen Alibaba's e-commerce base in less developed parts of the country and promote its mobile operating system in a shrinking, cut-throat handset market. Six models produced by Coolpad, Hisense and TCL would come with the Mobile Taobao app pre-installed. Mobile Taobao is China's most popular mobile shopping app with more than 200 million monthly active users, it said. Another eight models, made by lesser-known brands including Uniscope, Ctyon and Kingsun, will run YunOS, providing buyers with an Alibaba account for shopping and cloud-based storage, and other preloaded services, it said.

• GE is installing sensors into L.E.D streetlights so that city can collect data: Earlier this month, General Electric announced it was selling GE Capital, its financial arm. With less fanfare, G.E. also unveiled plans for computer-connected L.E.D. streetlights, so cities can collect and analyze performance data, for lower costs and better safety. GE Capital was a huge profit center after the financial deregulation of the 1980s, but that was then. Sensor-rich lights, to be found eventually in offices and homes, are for a company that will sell knowledge of behavior as much as physical objects. “The next generation of bulbs have a life cycle of 20 years; we can’t think of that as a transactional business anymore,” said Bill Ruh, the head of G.E.’s software center. “We can put cameras and more sensors on these, and measure motion, heat, air quality.” Retailers might want such lights to steer shoppers, he said, while consumers could better learn about their electricity consumption. This sensor explosion is only starting: Huawei, a Chinese maker of computing and communications equipment with $47 billion in revenue, estimates that by 2025 over 100 billion things, including smartphones, vehicles, appliances and industrial equipment, will be connected to cloud computing systems. The Internet will be almost fused with the physical world.

• America's car market is being disrupted by online retailers: To say that Beepi is disruptive, in this age of disruptions, sounds clichéd. Yet after just a year of operation in California, Beepi is now buying and selling hundreds of cars a month and is on track to book revenue of $100 million over the next year, the company said. The start-up has raised nearly $80 million in financing and it plans to expand to seven additional regions nationwide by the end of the year. Beepi’s rapid growth illustrates something deeper about the role the digital world keeps playing in our lives: There’s no limit to it. A few years ago, it seemed reasonable to assume there were some sectors of the economy that would resist the pull of the Internet and which most people felt were better left offline. Shopping for groceries or eyeglasses, say; now both those tasks are moving online. Beepi and similar competitors, including Carlypso and Carvana, are pushing people to cross another threshold on the way toward a digital-only life. Although auto experts doubt that online-only car-buying experiences will become the norm, it would be wise not to discount their rise, for the simple reason that the Internet remains hungry. As people grow more accustomed to doing pretty much everything over computers and phones, the Internet tends to consume everything in its path. When Mr. Resnik began investigating the auto sales industry, he found that more than 90 percent of American car buyers consulted the Internet for purchases and a rising number of people worldwide say they would buy a car entirely online. According to a study by the research firm Capgemini, about a third of Americans and two-thirds of Chinese who were asked said they would buy a car over the web. To Mr. Resnik, the latent consumer interest was a starting point, and along with a friend, Owen Savir, he set out to create a system to bring to car shopping all the conveniences we’ve grown used to with other online purchases. “We just thought that the car market was broken,” Mr. Resnik said. At the core of Beepi’s business model is a pricing trick. There are three relevant prices for any used car. The trade-in price, which is what a dealer will give you for your car; the private sales price, which is what you can get if you sold it directly to someone else; and the retail price, which is the price the car will command at a dealership. Dealers pay the trade-in price for vehicles and then sell them at the retail price. On some cars, that spread can be worth 50 percent. Beepi thinks it can make a profit while operating within a tighter pricing band. When you list your car with the site, the company’s pricing algorithm, which consults data on historical car sales in your area, offers a price at least $1,000 more than you can get by trading in your car at the dealer. That is still less than what you would get selling privately, but Beepi’s price is guaranteed. If your car doesn’t sell within 30 days of listing on Beepi, the company will buy it from you. On the other side of the transaction, Beepi sells cars at prices lower than comparable certified used cars at dealerships. It can do so, the founder says, because its overhead is lower — it doesn’t have to maintain parking lots to house cars, because the vehicles stay with the sellers until they are sold. Also, because it buys and sells cars over a wide area — currently, any city in California and Arizona — it can take advantage of supply and demand disparities in different regions. Finally, Beepi caps its own fee at 9 percent, depending on price and demand (it will take as little as 1 percent). “When you put it together, we think you can give more to sellers, more to buyers, and make up to 9 percent of the price,” Mr. Resnik said. But if Beepi is faster, more convenient, and a better financial deal than the traditional car market, it also suffers one huge downside. Beepi does not let buyers test-drive cars before buying. Instead, it takes a page from other online retailers’ return policies. Like a pair of shoes from Zappos, Beepi’s cars come with a 10-day, try-it-out money-back guarantee. If you aren’t satisfied, the company will send a truck to take the car away free. The company positions this as better than a dealer’s test-drive. “It’s a 10-day test drive,” Mr. Savir said. But that could be a tough sell. Mr. Resnik of Beepi said only a handful of people have returned their cars, at a rate “much, much lower than 1 percent.” And he isn’t worried that there won’t be consumer demand in buying cars without a test-drive. “As people buy more and more online, they’re getting used to it,” he said. “It’s going to happen.”

• "Apple Won’t Always Rule. Just Look at IBM" In a few short years, Apple has become the biggest company on the planet by market value — so big that it dwarfs every other one on the stock market. It dominates the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as no other company has in 30 years. Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity — and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be — there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict. But even if Apple still has some room to run, there are some early warning signs. After all, the company has already crossed a significant threshold. In February, it grew to twice the size of the next biggest company in the S.&P. 500, a rare feat of financial dominance, and one that hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan was president. I checked the numbers with Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S.&P. Dow Jones Indices. He found that the last market colossus to tower over its competitors by a two-to-one ratio was IBM, which did it in three successive years: 1983, 1984 and 1985. “That was when PCs were new,” he said, “and just about everyone thought IBM would rule the world.” Now it’s Apple’s world. Apple is the most widely held stock in American mutual fund portfolios. IBM, the former undisputed heavyweight champion, isn’t even in the running anymore. It ranks 62nd, according to a Morningstar analysis performed at my request. IBM is still an important company, but it is struggling. Investors judge it to be worth less than one-quarter of Apple’s market value today. What happened to IBM — how it became this small, in comparison with Apple — is worth remembering. IBM thrived for years afterward, but just as Jobs had predicted, it turned out to be vulnerable to disruptive change, as all big companies are. For decades now, IBM has engaged in a sometimes painful transition, and as it revealed in its quarterly earnings report last week, it is still hurting: Its revenues have declined and it has endured wrenching business shifts. My colleague Steve Lohr wrote last week that IBM has been getting out of slow-growing old businesses, like personal computers, disk drives, low-end server computers and chip manufacturing — but its new initiatives in fields like data analytics, cloud computing and mobile apps for corporate customers haven’t entirely succeeded yet. In a turnabout, IBM’s mobile app strategy relies on a partnership with the current giant, its old nemesis Apple. IBM is leveraging its prowess with supercomputers and artificial intelligence with a new initiative, Watson Health, that includes Apple. That alliance could help both companies grow — in Apple’s case, by ensuring that its products work more seamlessly in corporate environments where IBM is deeply entrenched. Rapid growth, after all, isn’t a sure thing, especially when you’re already the biggest company in the world. IBM has proved that. Sooner or later, Apple investors will have to take that lesson to heart.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 24

• Amazon earnings: revenue $22.7B, +15% Y/Y, net loss of $57M, but shares surge on cloud computing revenue, profitability: The retailer lost 12 cents a share for a net loss of $57 million, as revenue rose 15 percent — a little more steeply than expected, especially in light of the company’s size — to $22.72 billion. Analysts had projected a loss of 13 cents a share on revenue of $22.39 billion, according to Thomson Financial. Last year, Amazon had a profit of 23 cents a share in the first quarter. AWS had net sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter, up 49 percent from $1.05 billion in the first quarter of 2014. Shares in Amazon usually move forcefully after the earnings release — often down, but strikingly up after fourth-quarter results were announced three months ago. The stock has risen about 25 percent since then. In regular trading Thursday, the stock barely moved, but were up 8% in extended trading. 

• AWS is unexpectedly large $1.57B quarterly revenue - and very profitable! Amazon.com Inc's first-quarter revenue grew more than expected as rising sales in North America and its burgeoning cloud-computing services unit offset new business investments, boosting its shares nearly 7 percent. The e-commerce company for the first time broke out financial details of its secretive cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, on Thursday, saying revenue jumped almost 50 percent to $1.57 billion, or about 7 percent of total revenue. The unit's operating income grew 8 percent to $265 million. Amazon shares rose $26.01 to $416 in extended trading, after closing slightly higher at $389.99 on Nasdaq. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos revealed in a statement that Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and its growth is accelerating. "We're putting a lot of capex (capital expenditure) there, and we think over time we will be able to generate significant free cash flow," Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak said on a conference call. Cloud computing has turned out to be more lucrative than expected, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter noted. "Amazon's Web service is profitable, and apparently was a year ago as well. Everybody thought it was losing money ... and is probably a bit smaller than people thought it was." 

• Amazon's North America business up 24% Y/Y, international business continues to drag - down Y/Y Amazon's sales from North America rose 24 percent to $13.4 billion in the quarter ended March 31, the company said. The company said it is continuing to build its Prime delivery business with its one-hour delivery service called Prime Now. It is also investing in original content for its Prime instant video services and devices. The international unit, which accounts for about 35 percent of total sales, remained a drag, with sales for the quarter slipping 1.77 percent to $7.75 billion. Szkutak said Amazon has stepped up its investments, particularly in India, and remains selective in China. "The growth rate in India is very rapid," he said. "A big part of the challenge there is helping sellers to succeed and grow their online businesses."

• Microsoft earnings: revenue $21.7B, +6% Y/Y, net income $4.99B; shares up on cloud strength: Microsoft reported net income of $4.99 billion, or 61 cents a share, down from $5.66 billion, or 68 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Revenue rose to $21.73 billion from $20.4 billion a year ago, Microsoft said. Wall Street analysts were especially pleased that Microsoft exceeded their profit forecasts. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters was for earnings of 51 cents a share and revenue of $21.06 billion. Microsoft shares jumped more than 3 percent in after-hours trading. Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets, said that Wall Street was expecting to give Microsoft a C grade for the quarter after the company delivered disappointing results over the holiday period. He said the company ended up delivering a B-plus performance, adding that “it appears Microsoft is back on the right track after a head-scratching performance last quarter.” 

• Microsoft Cloud Strength: Azure revenue is $1.57B quarterly revenue A bright spot for Microsoft was the growth in its cloud business, a catchall category that includes Office applications that are sold as subscriptions and its Azure business, through which it rents computing capacity in Microsoft data centers to clients. The company said its commercial cloud revenue grew 106 percent during the quarter, and amounts to a $6.3 billion annual business based on its recent performance. The company said its commercial cloud-related revenue for the quarter more than doubled, and was now running at $6.3 billion a year. Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday its quarterly cloud revenue rose almost 50 percent to $1.57 billion, suggesting a similar annual number. Microsoft's overall revenue rose 6 percent to $21.7 billion, above Wall Street's average forecast of $21.1 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Taking out the effects of the strong U.S. dollar on currency rates, Microsoft said revenue would have risen 9 percent. Earnings per share declined to 61 cents per share from 68 cents in the year-ago quarter. Analysts had expected 51 cents, on average.

• Google earnings: $17.3B, +12% Y/Y, net income $3.6B; shares up despite earnings miss: Google on Thursday reported first-quarter revenue of $17.3 billion, up 12 percent over the same period last year. That figure was driven substantially downward by the strong dollar. Absent currency fluctuations, revenues would have been up 17 percent. Google missed Wall Street’s expectations for the sixth time in the last nine quarters. Net revenue, which excludes payments to the company’s advertising partners, was $13.9 billion, up from $12.2 billion. Analysts had expected net revenue of $14.04 billion, according to Bloomberg. Net income in the first quarter, which ended March 31, was $3.6 billion, or $5.20 a share, compared with $3.5 billion, or $5.04 a share. Excluding the cost of stock options and related tax benefits, Google’s profit was $6.57 a share, compared with $6.27 a year ago. Analysts had expected $6.63 a share. During its first-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the search giant tried to assuage analysts’ long-running concern that its growth is slowing because mobile phones, with their tiny screens that can be clumsy to click through, are a less lucrative advertising medium than the desktop computers with which the Google empire was built. In doing so, Patrick Pichette, the company’s chief financial officer, who is leaving, noted that Google’s YouTube video site has been growing fast but for now is simply a less lucrative business than Google’s highly targeted search ads. Google shares were up about 3 percent in after-hours trading.

• With Mi 4i Smartphone, Xiaomi Turns to India: For those who think the West is the center of the tech world, Xiaomi has a different opinion. The upstart Chinese maker of smartphones just hosted its biggest event outside of its home country to introduce a new flagship phone, and it wasn’t in the United States or even Europe, it was in India. The phone, the Mi 4i, was introduced on Thursday by Hugo Barra, a former Google executive. The phone includes impressive specs and special features in India — like extra language options — and will go on sale April 30 in India, and in May in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. As the company’s Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s chief executive, normally does in China, Mr. Barra guided an enthusiastic audience through the phone’s range of features. But for all the attention Xiaomi gives to technical details and its operating system, the denouement came when Mr. Barra announced the price of the phone: 12,999 rupees, or roughly $200, a low price for a flagship device. While there are a huge number of reasons for Xiaomi, valued at $45 billion after its latest December fund-raising round, not to push into markets like the United States — from potential patent lawsuits to having to develop relationships with carriers — perhaps the primary reason Xiaomi is entering India is because the country looks quite a bit like China several years ago. Most importantly, Indians are expected to buy far more smartphones this year than they did in 2014, according to IDC, the research firm. IDC estimates that the country will buy 111 million smartphones this year and 149 million units in 2016. India is expected to outpace the United States in sales in the coming years. Yet the $200 price point makes the Mi 4i far cheaper than the leading phones from other companies like Samsung, HTC and Motorola. Even so, in India, the Xiaomi phone still ranks as expensive, about double the price of the cheap mainstays of companies like Micromax.

• Quikr valued around $890M in latest funding round: Classifieds site Quikr, which raised $150 million in fresh funding from existing investors besides a new investor Steadview Capital Management, was valued at around $892 million, as per a note by its Swedish investor Investment AB Kinnevik. Kinnevik said its own stake had an implied value of $158 million and the fair value of ownership of its holding is $93.2 million which gives a fair value of around $517 million to Quikr. Kinnevik had also participated in the latest round with an infusion of $40 million as part of a larger $150 million funding early this month. It also saw participation from other existing investor Tiger Global. With the September deal, the total capital raised by Quikr stood at around $350 million. The latest funding comes barely seven months after it raised $60 million in a fresh round of funding led by Tiger Global with participation from its existing investors, including Matrix Partners India, Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Warburg Pincus and eBay Inc, besides Kinnevik. In the last disclosure, Kinnevik had pegged a fair value of Quikr at around $340 million. Founded in 2008 by Chulet and Jiby Thomas (who quit the firm later), Quikr was originally started as Kijiji India. The firm later rebranded to Quikr. It is a large scale cross-category classifieds business with over 30 million consumers. These consumers come to Quikr to sell, buy, rent or find products and services in a variety of categories such as electronics and household goods, real estate, cars, bikes, jobs and services. The firm claims that small businesses across 1,000 cities are using the site. It recently announced the launch of a new classifieds website for real estate called quikrhomes.com to allow B2C as well as C2C discovery of properties up for sale as well as those available for rent. It is also launching separate verticals and new sites with separate URLs for around half a dozen areas. Early this year, Quikr launched Nxt, an instant messaging service to enable buyers and sellers to interact with greater convenience and privacy.

• Twitter invests in Swirl, a beacon-based ad-targeting startup: Swirl, which offers a platform for retailers and brands to market to customers via beacons, announced Thursday it has raised $18 million from a handful of investors, including Twitter Ventures.Other investors in the Series C round include Hearst Ventures and Softbank Capital, both who have funded Swirl in the past. Beacons are a young, Bluetooth-powered technology that provides the potential for companies to specifically target in-store customers. A retailer could realize that a customer has been dwelling near its TVs for 15 minutes, and send a coupon for a 4K TV via a smartphone push notification. In one recent success story, American Eagle Outfitters found it was able to increase the likelihood of a customer trying on clothes when it used beacons to send customers a push notification. Still, beacons have a ways to go before gaining mainstream adoption. A sticking point has been ensuring customers have the relevant app installed on their smartphone, which acts as a tripwire of sorts and tips off the store of the consumer’s location. If a customer doesn’t have the right app, they’ll never receive the notification. This is what makes the interest of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook so noteworthy. “Everybody’s got one of these widely distributed apps on their phone,” said Swirl chief executive Hilmi Ozguc. “That’s where the whole picture is completed, and that’s what’s exciting about this.” Facebook announced in January it is testing using beacons at eight stores in New York City. Twitter declined to comment on its interest in beacons. With a treasure trove of information about users, social networks are already well-positioned to target advertisements at an extremely granular level. Facebook and Twitter could potentially take this another step forward, and fine-tune ads for users’ exact locations at a given moment. They could likely charge a hefty premium for such ads. “There’s a vast market potential here. And it’s going to be a big source of new mobile advertising revenue for a lot of companies,” Ozguc said. “From Facebook to Twitter, to you name it. So I think you’ll see a lot of these big guys start to make some moves and bets on the space and start offering the benefits they bring, this massive audience reach.”

• Zomato embeds Uber button to its own app for hailing cabs to reach restaurants in 13 countries: Zomato.com, owned and operated by Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, has entered into a partnership with Uber Technologies Inc (Uber) to enable users to book cabs to the restaurant they are planning to eat at, right from its own app. The feature has gone live for Zomato users in London and South Africa, and will now be rolled out to users in other key markets. The partnership would cover Zomato users in 27 cities across 13 countries where both the firms have a presence – India, Australia, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Turkey, UAE and the US. “This partnership makes eating out more convenient with the Zomato app connecting to Uber services seamlessly,” said Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder and COO, Zomato. “Through this API integration, Zomato users in 13 countries will now be able to reach those hidden gems in their cities seamlessly and in style,” said Eric Alexander, head of business, Asia, Uber. How it works:Once a user has found a place to dine at or have drinks at using the Zomato app, a single tap on the Uber button on the restaurant page will allow him/her to find the nearest Uber cab. In addition to seeing the estimated fare and how long it will take for the Uber to arrive, one will also be able to choose the Uber service that best suits one’s need.

• Details on Alibaba's Cloud: After keeping the world waiting for nine years, Amazon finally broke out earnings for its Amazon Web Services on Thursday. The $1.57 billion in sales for the quarter suggest that the company is far ahead of rivals in the cloud computing business. But as AWS expands globally, it faces strong competition from a familiar foe: Alibaba. Amazon already has 28 percent of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services, followed by Microsoft with 10 percent, according to a report by Synergy Research Group. To expand its share, Amazon has spent the past few years plunking down gigantic data centers around the globe to help it quickly serve customers outside the U.S. In some cases, it did so to abide by local regulations as to where these servers should be located. Unlike many of its rivals, Amazon has targeted China, opening a data center near Beijing in 2014. Alibaba opened its first overseas data center in Silicon Valley in March to help provide cloud computing services to Chinese customers, Yu says. At the time, Alibaba said it served a 22.8 percent market share of the Chinese infrastructure-as-a-service market in the first half of 2014. It currently has five data center hubs in Asia: Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. Like Amazon, Alibaba has a strategic partnership with Intel to do custom chips. Unlike Amazon, it has been more public about its experimentation with low-power server processors based on designs from ARM Holdings. Alibaba joined a cross-industry engineering organization named Linaro in April to develop software to get the most out of new chip designs from ARM. The company is looking at ARM closely, says Yu, and will have more details to share next year. By adopting a non-standard processor architecture, Alibaba would be able to save money on its mammoth electricity bills by tailoring its chips to its software. In doing so, it would join a small club of companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, with the scale and engineering talent needed to make such a move. Aliyun has more than 1,200 employees, 80 percent of whom are engineers, says Yu. The company began looking at doing heavy engineering on hardware and software about 10 years ago, predating the formation of its cloud. As is typical of large Chinese technology companies, Alibaba is woven into China's bureaucracy. The company currently has strategic agreements with 12 Chinese provinces, regions, and municipalities, as well as an undisclosed number of government agencies, including the China Central Government Procurement Agency. That guarantees it a lot of business in China and ensures that its infrastructure is stress-tested in the same way that large clouds from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are. This helps to make its service more resilient.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 23

• Facebook reports strong earnings: revenue up 42% Y/Y to $3.54B, ad sales up 46%; DAU of 936M up 17% Y/Y; stock down 4% on topline miss driven by FX: Sales rose 42 percent to $3.54 billion, when they could have risen 49 percent without the currency effects, Facebook said Wednesday in a statement. Advertising sales gained 46 percent to $3.32 billion from a year earlier, and would have increased 55 percent excluding currency fluctuations, Facebook said. Ad sales make up about 94 percent of the company’s annual revenue. Facebook said its main application has 1.44 billion monthly active users, compared with 1.39 billion in the fourth quarter and analysts’ estimates of 1.43 billion. About 73 percent of ad revenue came from mobile phones, an increase from about 59 percent a year earlier, the company reported. more people are visiting Facebook daily, with the company reporting daily active users of 936 million on average in March, an increase of 17 percent from a year earlier. Facebook’s sales failed to meet analysts’ estimates for the first time since April 2012, and shares declined as much as 4.3 percent in extended trading after closing at $84.63. The stock has increased 8.5 percent so far this year, compared with a 2.4 percent rise in the S&P 500 Index. Shift to Mobile Accelerates: Facebook is now so thoroughly a mobile service that its original website may soon become a footnote in the company’s financial statements. The world’s largest social network reported on Wednesday that almost three-quarters of its advertising revenue and most of its 1.44 billion users came from cellphones and other mobile devices in the first quarter of the year. And Facebook is beginning to make a similar transition from text to video, with its users already watching four billion videos a day, an average of four per person (although the view may be more like a glance, since Facebook considers three seconds long enough to count). Usage in Asia continues to grow: In Asia, the headline number is that Facebook has now grown to 471 million monthly active users (MAUs) in Q1 2015, up from 390 million MAUs the same period the year earlier. That’s out of a global total of 1.44 billion MAUs in the newest figures.

• As Amazon parties on, some large fund managers take their leave: For many years, investors have been very tolerant as Amazon.com has sacrificed profits for rapid growth in sales and as it built new businesses. That patience may finally be wearing thin. The average large-cap fund that holds Amazon has 1.4 percent of its assets in the stock, down 23 percent from this time last year, according to the latest available Lipper data. There are 116 funds with more than $1 billion under management that have either reduced or sold all of their holdings in the Internet retailer over the past 12 months. They include such well-known names as Fidelity Contrafund, Washington Mutual Investors Fund, Touchstone Sands Select Growth fund and the T. Rowe Price Growth fund. Some investors and analysts said that such a drop in fund ownership - in a period when Amazon's shares have been climbing - suggests that large-cap managers increasingly see the company as over-valued, particularly at a time when it is spending tons of cash branching off into everything from selling its own smartphone to producing a Woody Allen TV series. What strikes some investors as different this time around is the widening divergence between Amazon's valuation and that of its large technology peers like Apple Inc and Google Inc, both of which are growing at similar rates. Amazon trades at 16.2 times its book value. Apple, by comparison, trades at 6.5 times its book value, according to Thomson Reuters data. Google, another company which has expanded beyond its core business into lines as far afield as driverless cars, is valued at 3.4 times its book value. The others made big profits last year while Amazon was unprofitable. While Google has posted more than $68 billion in profits before taxes between 2010-2014, Amazon has netted just $2.6 billion over the same time frame, according to Thomson Reuters data. The cashflow is a better gauge of how the company is doing, according to Robert S. Peck, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, who downgraded the company to "neutral" on March 9 because he views the shares as overvalued. He estimates its free cash flow from operations will climb to $8.9 billion this fiscal year from $3.4 billion in 2010, yet nearly all of that additional cash is being used to expand into businesses like grocery delivery or web services.

• Ebay earnings: revenue up 4% Y/Y to $4.45B; marketplace revenue shrinks first time since 2009, but PayPal growth compensates. Stock up 6%. EBay on Wednesday reported earnings of $626 million for the quarter that ended March 31, swinging back to profitability after a $2.32 billion loss in the same period a year ago that included a hefty one-time tax charge. Excluding the charge, the company’s income grew 4.8 percent from a year ago. Revenue rose 4 percent, to $4.45 billion, surpassing estimates of $4.42 billion. The results illustrate a divergence in eBay’s two businesses. Sales in the company’s marketplace business fell 4 percent to $2.07 billion from a year ago, a lackluster showing that continued the trend of declining e-commerce growth over the past four quarters. It is the unit’s first year-over-year revenue drop since 2009. In contrast, the company’s PayPal electronic payments unit posted revenue of $2.1 billion, up 14 percent from $1.85 billion a year ago. It was the first time PayPal’s sales exceeded that of the marketplace business. With the separation, the company is also cutting 2,400 positions, or 7 percent of its global work force. EBay has also said it would explore a sale or a possible initial public offering of eBay Enterprise, the warehouse and logistics unit for third-party sellers. A split may leave the marketplace business particularly vulnerable. For months, executives have pointed to problems with Google’s search algorithms and fallout from a huge security breach as reasons for weak e-commerce momentum. The company is in the process of updating its systems to improve search results both on eBay and in outside search engines, Mr. Donahoe said, a process that could take more than a few quarters. Analysts are eager to see positive results. PayPal is still growing, fueled by high-performing assets like Braintree and Venmo, which are mobile-focused payments divisions that eBay acquired in recent years. Venmo, Mr. Donahoe has said, is enormously popular with young audiences. Braintree is angling to reinvent PayPal’s payments business to be easier to use on mobile devices. But there is wariness that such growth will not come soon enough, especially as large companies like Apple, as well as payments start-ups like Stripe and Adyen, gain market share.

• Algorithms to find online trolls - trolls focus on a small number of stories and attract the most responses: Scientists have figured out how to tell when someone is an online troll: Spotting an online troll is pretty easy for your average Internet user: They're the jerk hijacking otherwise earnest online conversations for their own amusement, often with the help of straw man arguments and profanities. And a lot of online moderation schemes today rely on a large-scale version of this individual model: There are literally people whose job is reviewing posts that users marked as abusive or otherwise in violation of a site's commenting guidelines. But there could be a better way. What if there was software that could predict if a user was going to be a troll before their behavior could tear online communities apart? That's one of the questions that a study submitted this month to the 9th International Conference on Web and Social Media by researchers at Stanford and Cornell universities hopes to answer. The researchers -- Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Jure Leskovec -- waded through 18 months of user activity in the comment sections of CNN.com, conservative political news site Breitbart.com, and gaming site IGN.com looking for antisocial activity. Using data provided by commenting platform Disqus, they were eventually able to identify what they called "future banned users" -- commenters who were later blocked from the site for bad behavior. Those users, they found, tended to focus their comments on a small number of stories and were more likely to post things otherwise irrelevant to the overall conversation. Trolls' behavior also tended to get worse over time, according to the researchers -- and they were generally successful at getting a rise out of those in an online community. "They receive more replies than average users, suggesting that they might be successful in luring others into fruitless, time-consuming discussions," the researchers said. Some platforms are looking at ways to limit the impact of disruptive users without actually banning them. Twitter, for instance, said this week that it is testing out a product that flags potentially abusive tweets based on a "wide range of signals," such as account age and similarities to previous messages that staff deemed abusive, and then limits their reach. But regardless of how sites approach it, online harassment is a serious problem: Some 40 percent of adult Internet users have experienced it, according to a Pew Research Center study last year. And controlling the bad actors responsible behind some of the most aggressive behavior is a struggle for many online sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

• Start-Up Blends Old-Fashioned Matchmaking and Algorithms: Dating Ring uses an algorithm to generate potential matches and then a matchmaker combs through those to hand-select dates. The company’s hybrid model represents the tip of a backlash against mobile dating apps like Tinder, where matches are based almost solely on appearance. Mark Brooks, an Internet dating analyst and consultant, said although there is still plenty of interest in online dating, “People also want relationships that begin based on more than your gut reaction to a photo,” he said. “This model is very new, this merging of Internet dating and matchmakers.” Several new start-ups, like SparkStarter, Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel, don’t use matchmakers per se but do use connections — friends and friends of friends on Facebook — to humanize the process and move beyond algorithmic matching. Dave Evans, the founder of Digicraft, an online dating consultancy, said, “The whole industry now is built on smoke, mirrors and a lot of marketing. We’re at the point where I don’t care how old you are, what you find interesting, even where you live. I’m just going to swipe left or right based on how you look.” Melissa Brady, a 37-year-old Dating Ring client in White Plains, N.Y., loves the idea of a matchmaker being involved. “It makes me more excited to go on the date, because I have more hope for it,” she said. Ms. Brady has used other dating sites, including OKCupid and Coffee Meets Bagel, but found those dates less well-suited to her. A key part of Dating Ring’s model is user feedback — given to the matchmaker after every date — which is then used to keep improving a dater’s experience. The matchmakers are all women who work at least 10 hours a week and want a flexible schedule. The company has begun operating in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Dating Ring charges $240 for three months with one introduction each week; anyone can become a member of the database free and be eligible for matches with paying clients. The company’s V.I.P. service includes a one-hour, in-person consultation and multiple Skype feedback sessions in a package tailored to the client. The average price for a V.I.P. package is $3,500 and for that, a client gets five dates in five months. Ms. Kay and Ms. Tessler have also begun setting up speed-dating events for members in New York and San Francisco. “They sold out within two days,” Ms. Kay said. Revenue now averages about $35,000 a month but growth fluctuates, Ms. Kay said. “Some months it’s 50 percent and other months it’s 5 percent,” she says. “Right now, we’re pretty much breaking even.” The company received a $100,000 initial investment from Y Combinator and raised an additional $255,000 from angels.