Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 22

• Zomato rolls out online ordering of food in updated app, to allow cash-less payments at restaurants: Zomato.com, has entered the online ordering space as a mobile-only offering. Its updated version of mobile app comes integrated with a meal ordering option. The service has gone live with 1,000 restaurants currently and users can look for those outlets offering the option within the ‘Nearby’ tab in the app. It then throws up those names which offer online ordering as a sub-set of the overall list of restaurants in the location. We have not checked the process throughout but it involves a mobile verification while placing the order. The users would have to make cash payments as restaurant delivery boys come with the package. The updated app also shows an option of cashless payments which is not active yet. Zomato spokesperson told Techcircle.in that this option is currently active only in Dubai and will soon be launched in India. This would allow users to pay after a meal at a partner restaurant through the Zomato app, instead of paying cash or using credit/debit cards to settle bills at the restaurants.

• Alibaba Expands Seller App - Wants Merchants to Ditch their PCs: The ecommerce titan has rolled out new tools into its Taobao mobile app (pictured above) that allow the marketplace’s 8.4 million annual active merchants to run their stores solely from their phones. The shift to mobile-only is optional for now, but an Alibaba representative tells Tech in Asia that two million merchants have already opted for the smartphone-only method in the two weeks since the new tools have been available in beta. “The growing adoption of smartphones and mobile shopping in China means that online merchants should shift their focus from PC to mobile,” said Zhang Kuo, director of Alibaba Group’s mobile business division, in a statement. That means an online seller will run their store and add new products to it just from their phone rather than using the desktop browser-based interface. To make that process easier on mobile, merchants can scan a new product’s barcode with their phone to add it to the store’s inventory using the Taobao app. “To complete product dispatch procedures, merchants can simply scan barcodes on shipping bills to enter package tracking numbers, without the need to manually input them,” added a spokesperson. Brand-new Taobao merchants can even start their store from scratch within the Taobao app without the need to fire up a laptop. Across Taobao and sister site Tmall (a marketplace aimed at larger merchants and major brands), Alibaba has 334 million shoppers. Of the total RMB 787 billion (US$126.4 billion) in consumer spending (GMV) on the two estores in Q4 2014, 42 percent of that tally was spent by people shopping on mobile devices.

• Amazon Targets Priceline, Expedia With New Hotel Booking Site: In its push to expand beyond an online store for books and merchandise, Amazon.com Inc. is entering the travel-reservations business. The e-commerce retailer Tuesday introduced Amazon Destinations, which provides maps, lodging deals and information about restaurants at popular weekend getaways near Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. The new site is a travel-focused expansion of the Seattle-based company’s Amazon Local, which connects Amazon shoppers with deals close to them. The world’s biggest online retailer by revenue will be competing with Priceline Group Inc., Expedia Inc., startup Airbnb Inc. and others for a piece of the online hotel booking market. Tourism in the U.S. is a $960 billion industry, according to researcher IBISWorld.

• Yahoo Q1 Earnings: Revenue $1.23B, +9% Y/Y, Net Income: $21M, down from $312M Y/Y; Shares Fall, Then Rise on Hope of Alibaba Stake Sale: At Yahoo, the turnaround that investors are hoping for remains elusive. The Internet company reported first-quarter financial results that showed strong growth in newer areas like mobile advertising. But costs rose even faster, depressing profits. Yahoo posted net income of $21 million, or 2 cents a share, down sharply from the $312 million, or 29 cents a share, the Internet company reported a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, Yahoo made a profit of 15 cents a share, falling short of the 18 cents a share that Wall Street had expected on that basis. Revenue for the first quarter was $1.23 billion, up slightly from the $1.13 billion that the company brought in during the same period last year, as search revenue and even old-fashioned display ads increased. After deducting payments to advertising partners, however, revenue was $1.04 billion, below the $1.07 billion predicted by analysts. Yahoo’s stock initially fell in after-hours trading following the release of its results. But it rose during Yahoo’s conference call with analysts, when Ms. Mayer said that Yahoo had hired advisers to explore how to maximize the value of the company’s 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, which is worth nearly $9 billion. Since Ms. Mayer joined the company in 2012, Yahoo’s stock has traded more on the value of its investments in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, a leading Chinese e-commerce company, than on its core business. In January, she announced plans to spin off Yahoo’s 15.4 percent stake in Alibaba. In Yahoo’s operating businesses, Ms. Mayer is trying to refocus the company around mobile apps, native ads, video services and the Tumblr social network, while reducing staffing in the company’s other divisions, like its traditional web offerings. In the first quarter, Yahoo cut net employment by 1,100 jobs, Ms. Mayer said on the call. Since her arrival, she has reduced the number of full-time employees by 2,800 jobs, or 20 percent. Last week, Ms. Mayer renewed the company’s partnership with Microsoft on search results and advertising, which accounted for 35 percent of Yahoo’s revenue last year. Under that deal, the two companies will continue to work together for five more years, with Yahoo now getting the ability to serve up its own search results and ads for up to 49 percent of queries.

• Shyp, an On-Demand Mailing Service, Raises $50 Million: Shyp, a company that lets customers summon workers to quickly pick up, pack and ship parcels, said on Tuesday that it has raised $50 million in venture capital, the largest funding round in the start-up’s history. The new round values Shyp at just above $250 million, according to two people with knowledge of the financial terms, who requested anonymity because the deal talks were private. A Shyp spokesman declined to comment on the company’s valuation. The funding is another significant bet on the future of on-demand start-ups by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied venture capital firm that led Shyp’s new financing round and that recently won a case against a former partner who alleged gender bias at the firm. With the round, which also includes participation by previous investors Homebrew and SherpaVentures, John Doerr, a Kleiner executive, will join the board of directors at Shyp. Kleiner has also put money in to other on-demand companies like Uber and DoorDash. Uber, the on-demand ride-hailing service, has also dabbled in the business of moving goods from one place to another, signaling its ambitions to become a way to transport anything and everything to different places around the world. Shyp, on the other hand, piggybacks on existing transportation networks like UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service. Instead of doing all of the shipping itself, Shyp hires contract workers to pick up items from customers, and pack and ship them, eliminating the hassle of standing in line at the post office or finding the proper packaging supplies to send the items. “We asked ourselves, what is the ideal way to ship something?” said Kevin Gibbon, chief executive of Shyp. “Can we scale this business to happen in multiple cities? Can we improve operations and logistics to make it cheaper and faster?” Mr. Gibbon said his service was complementary to the shipping networks already in place, as Shyp’s local logistics networks gather many packages together to hand them off to the actual companies doing the transportation, a task that he said would cost companies like DHL and FedEx much more in time, labor and resources to offer. Shyp makes a $5 service fee on each package it delivers. Shyp also announced it is opening up a pilot version of its service in Los Angeles; it currently operates in San Francisco, New York City and Miami.

• "Notifications Are The Next Platform" TC Columnist Opines Push Notifications Replacing Search as Primary Engagement Point: Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.” This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and without any real category killers, consumers are swapping new apps in and out at a regular pace. Most importantly, our engagement is now defined by push-driven notifications rather than the traditional pull-driven experience. We’re “hunting and pecking” through our app grid a lot less; the apps that notify us (without over-notifying to the point of uninstall) are rewarded with our engagement (and our dollars). Based on this data, our fundamental belief is that notifications represent the future access and discovery point for mobile services — that notifications will be the starting point (or “front door”) for all of the interactions on your phone. Snowball data shows that over 60 percent of notifications are social messages (almost 40 per day). Will Facebook Messenger subsume the notification panel? Our data shows some interesting trends. As noted above, 60 percent of all notifications are social messages. However, our data also shows that users on average interact with 5.5 messaging apps weekly (does not count email)*. Though users regularly use over 5 social messaging apps, Facebook + WhatsApp represents an astounding 79 percent of all messaging by volume. This is incredibly high. Notifications represent the future app interface, and Facebook is making a bold play to own them. Whatever party is successful will have to be thoughtful about social messages, as they represent the bulk of notifications by volume. What we’re seeing today is the first step toward monetization of the OS and the emergence of a new important distribution channel, and apps and platforms would be wise to think critically about it.