Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 21

• Google Adds ‘Mobile Friendliness’ to Its Search Criteria: (More here) Many businesses around the world could wake up on Tuesday to discover their search ranking has been downgraded. After a monthslong warning period, Google will add “mobile friendliness” to the 200 or so factors it uses to list websites on its search engine. As a result, websites that don’t meet Google’s criteria will tumble in its all-important rankings. Google has made several big changes. Companies will be docked for shortcomings like displaying links that are hard to click or forcing users to scroll horizontally on a lopsided site. In addition, the company recently announced that in certain cases it would also use information contained within apps as a ranking factor for mobile searches performed on phones that run its Android software. while Google remains the dominant search engine on every computing platform, its grasp on the mobile market is slipping in the face of increased competition from “native” apps expressly meant for mobile devices. Google grabbed 68 percent of the $8.75 billion in mobile search revenues last year, down from an 81 percent share in 2012. But the mobile ad market more than tripled to $8.7 billion over that time, according to eMarketer. Google has for years been the world’s most widely used search engine and a significant generator of traffic to websites, from major news organizations to mom-and-pop shops. Websites have little choice but to adapt to what Google considers important characteristics. “People will kick and scream, they always do,” said Rebecca Lieb, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “But ultimately this serves as a wake-up call that things change and Google is going to change with it.” Google’s search algorithm is a closely guarded secret, so the company would not say exactly how much mobile would factor into rankings. Still, it said in a blog post that the change would have “a significant impact” on search results, and it has tried to prepare websites by telegraphing the move two months in advance and giving them tips on how to improve their performance.

• IBM Earnings: 12th straight quarterly decline in revenue; shares flat on earnings beat. More here IBM reported earnings on Monday that surpassed Wall Street’s estimates, helped by solid sales of its new mainframe computers, even as its revenue fell. Cloud computing revenue surged 75 percent, and IBM’s large data analytics business grew by more than 20 percent, excluding the effect of currency fluctuations. IBM reported a 5 percent decline in net income to $2.4 billion. But the company reported a 4 percent increase, to $2.9 billion, in operating profits from continuing operations. On an earnings-per-share basis, earnings rose 9 percent to $2.91 a share. That was well above the consensus of Wall Street analysts of $2.80 a share. Revenue for the quarter fell 12 percent to $19.6 billion. But the falloff was almost entirely attributable to a strong dollar and the company’s planned exits from less-profitable businesses, especially its industry-standard data center computers, which it sold to Lenovo of China last fall. Most of IBM’s business is outside the United States, so a stronger dollar translates to lower reported revenue. In fact, eight percentage points of the revenue decline, or $1.7 billion, was because of the currency effect. The mainframe business remains critical to IBM. The machines themselves contribute only about 2 percent of the company’s revenue today. But when mainframe-related software, storage, services and financing are included, the overall business represents an estimated 24 percent of corporate revenue and 37 percent of operating profits. Take away the currency effect and the sold-off operations, and IBM’s revenue would have been flat from the year-earlier quarter. Even so, flat revenue is not growth. IBM’s reported revenue has declined for 12 consecutive quarters. Some of the decline has been by design as IBM sheds operations with lower profit margins, as it has for years, getting out of personal computers, disk drives and most recently low-end server computers and chip manufacturing. In a research report last week, Mr. Sacconaghi identified three major challenges confronting IBM. Cloud computing, he wrote, will most likely hurt IBM’s traditional hardware and software business more than the growth in its own cloud business will help. The second threat, according to Mr. Sacconaghi, is the overall effect on hardware and software sales of the decline in its business that sells large servers running the Unix operating system. The third danger, he wrote, is the decline in its traditional outsourcing business, in which IBM runs the computer operations of its corporate customers. Shares in the company were mostly flat in after-hours trading.

• India's Central bank working on integration between e-commerce firms and banks: India's central bank is working on improving the integration between e-commerce firms and the country's banking systems, a deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Monday. "One area which we will now be looking at very closely, which is emerging, is how to provide integration between e-commerce platforms and banks," Deputy Governor H.R. Khan said at a banking industry event. India's fast growing e-commerce market is valued at about $12 billion, however most shoppers still pay for their online purchases through cash at the doorstep. Khan said the central bank is also considering relaxing its requirement for a two-step authentication process for small transactions to make online payments smoother.

• Twitter makes it possible to send personal messages to anyone: Twitter has made it possible for any user to send a direct message to any other user, the company announced in a blog post Monday. Under the old settings, users could only direct-message those who followed them -- which sometimes meant that you had to ask people to follow you in order to send them a personal message. Now, those days are over, if you so choose. The change is opt-in, meaning that you don't have to open your mailbox to the public if you don't want to -- and that you can turn it off if you don't like it. Twitter now also allows users to reply to anyone who sends them a direct message, regardless of who follows whom. If you want to turn on the feature, you can head to your settings page and select the "Receive Direct Messages from anyone" option. Once you do that, a new messaging button will appear on your mobile profile pages. (To send a message from the Web, users should still go to the "Messages" tab and hit "New Message.") Twitter makes the case that if would be useful for businesses to field compliments or complaints from their customers without having to follow each of them individually. From a certain point of view, that makes sense: the company has been under pressure lately to up growth, revenue and engagement on its social network. Catering to businesses, and giving them an easy way to interact with customers, is a way to accomplish all those goals. But the feature can also increase the chances for spam or abuse. To address those issues with this new feature, company said on its help page that users who've enabled this feature can block the sender to stop receiving messages. Obviously, this won't prevent that sender from creating a new account and sending more messages -- a common trolling and spamming tactic -- but it's a start. Twitter also limits the number of direct messages anyone can send per day to 1,000 messages, and reserves the right to suspend an account temporarily if someone sends identical messages to multiple accounts in a short period of time.

• India Startup Action: Freshdesk - first Google Capital investee outside the US - raises $50M in Series E funding from Tiger Global, Accel & Google Capital: Chennai- and US-based Freshdesk Inc, a provider of SaaS-based customer support platform for enterprises, has raised $50 million (Rs 314 crore) in Series E round of funding from its three existing investors. Tiger Global led the investment with Accel Partners and Google Capital also participating in the round, it said on Monday. The funds will be used in enhancing its products for its Freshdesk and Freshservice support platforms. Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support platform, which aims to make it easy for brands to talk to their customers and for users to get in touch with businesses. It was started to provide email and website integration customer support, and later launched phone-based Twitter and Facebook support as well. It recently launched Freshservice, a SaaS IT service desk that is providing a modern alternative to complex legacy IT support systems. In June 2014, it had raised $31 million (Rs 195 crore) in a Series D round of funding led by Tiger Global. Original early-stage investor Accel also participated in that round which also saw Google Capital coming in as a new investor. Freshdesk competes with California-headquartered Zendesk Inc, which went public last year, and Salesforce.com, which offers customer service tools aimed at SMBs and larger enterprises. First Google Capital investee outside the US: Freshdesk was the first company outside the US to get backing from Google Capital, one of the two venture capital arms of the American search giant. While Google Ventures is more of an early stage investor, Google Capital focuses on the growth stage. So the doubling down on the Chennai-based startup recognizes that it’s on a fast track to scale up globally. “Freshdesk offers a compelling, modern customer experience delivered with cloud-scale cost and flexibility. We are excited to support Freshdesk with additional investment,” says Gene Frantz, general partner with Google Capital. According to Mathrubootham, the association added to the Freshdesk mojo in more ways than one. On the marketing front, especially. For example, after Google Capital came on board, an expert from Google India did an in-depth analysis that helped Freshdesk zero in on the geographies where there was high demand for its software. It threw up insights like where people were searching for Freshdesk software, how the overall market for customer support was evolving, and how Freshdesk’s marketing campaign was working in different markets. “It had county-by-county data for the US on how the Freshdesk brand was being perceived. It was brilliant. We were able to see where we were strong or weak and tweak our Google AdWords campaign to exploit it more,” Mathrubootham shares with Tech in Asia, adding that he is still working closely with Google on this.