Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 15

• Amazon's smart speaker Echo now can be used to place orders: Amazon Echo Can Now Do Some Of Your Shopping For You, Prime Members: Amazon’s Echo speaker/intelligent tube/listening pal revealed a bit more of its true nature today: It can now field voice-powered buying requests, translating your spoken desire for more paper towels into more actual paper towels, for instance. The catch is that it’s restricted to Prime members, it only works with Prime-eligible goods, and you need both a U.S. billing address and a U.S.-based payment method. To command your smart cylinder to conduct commerce on your behalf, all you need do is use your Wake word, then tell it to reorder whatever item you’re after. This is designed to be an easy way to order again things you’re often already buying rep eats of anyway, so ostensibly Amazon is positioning it as a convenience feature, not a full-fledged shopping alternative.

• Alibaba to invest more abroad as globalization top priority: CEO Zhang Alibaba Group Holding Ltd will invest heavily in existing and new ventures abroad, making its push beyond the China market a top priority, the Chinese e-commerce leader's new CEO, Daniel Zhang, said. Zhang's comments come at a time when Alibaba aims to maintain its rapid growth even as the prospect of e-commerce saturation at home looms over the company. "We must absolutely globalize," Zhang said in his first speech since taking up his new post this week, according to a report on Thursday on Alibaba's news and commentary website, Alizila. The vast bulk of Alibaba's revenue comes from its dominant domestic online marketplaces, but the company has been investing in a range of sectors abroad. Just this week it announced it would set up a cloud computing base in Dubai, and boosted its stake in U.S. e-retailer Zulily Inc. Zhang said if Alibaba does not globalize it won't be able to last 100 years - a goal set out by Executive Chairman Jack Ma. In the three months ended March, Alibaba's revenue from China commerce grew 39 percent to $2.2 billion. International commerce grew 27 percent to $264 million and only accounted for 9 percent of revenue, compared to 11 percent in the same period a year earlier. Alibaba says some of its larger overseas markets include Brazil and Russia. The company and its affiliates are also making overtures in India, where it is in talks with phone maker Micromax Informatics to buy a $1.2 billion stake, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter.

• PayPal to Trade Under Old Symbol PYPL After Split From EBay: PayPal, the payments division that’s separating from EBay Inc., will trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market as PYPL, its original ticker symbol before being acquired by the online marketplace in 2002. EBay announced the split last year after activist investor Carl Icahn said PayPal was being held back by its parent company’s slower-growing Web marketplace business. All of EBay Inc.’s 15 board members will remain with the company or become new board members of PayPal when it spins off from EBay in the third quarter. EBay Chairman Pierre Omidyar, who founded the online marketplace in 1995, will be a director for both companies, EBay said Thursday in a statement.

• Deal Talks for 'Here' Mapping Service Brings Spotlight to the Lucrative B2B Location Data Market: When people look up a company’s Facebook page on their smartphones, the address is overlaid on a digital map provided by Here, Nokia’s mapping unit, which is for sale. The same goes for the mapping services offered by Amazon and Yahoo. The tech giants are just three of the many companies, including SAP, Verizon Wireless and Baidu, the Chinese search engine,​ that rely heavily on Nokia’s geospatial data. Companies are grappling to stay relevant in a world where smartphones — and people’s geographical information — are at the heart of nearly every tech leader’s plans. That is why companies like Uber, the ride-booking service, and an alliance of German automakers have submitted rival bids of up to $3 billion to acquire the Nokia division. A deal is widely expected by the end of the month. If one happens, there is likely to be a lot of angst to go around in the tech industry. Nokia’s mapping service is the main global competitor to Google Maps. But if a new owner decides to restrict access to Here’s vast, 30-year-old trove of mapping data, some of the largest tech companies could find themselves relying on Google’s mapping services once more. That could put companies like Amazon and Yahoo in a difficult position, potentially requiring them to share valuable location and routing data with one of their most powerful rivals in Silicon Valley. “There are too many businesses out there that want an independent service,” ​said Harold ​Goddijn, chief executive of TomTom, the Dutch digital mapping company that licenses data to Apple for its mapping service. ​“They don​’​t want to share customer data with ​Googl​e. ​They want users to stay within their domain.” As part of the German automakers’ bid, the companies, which include BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, want to give access to Nokia’s mapping service, under licensing agreements, so others can still use its global geospatial data, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It remains unclear whether Uber would follow suit if it acquired the unit. “Mapping is an extremely hard thing to do and takes years to replicate,” said Shyam Kumar, a senior analyst whose firm, TT Focus Fund, is an investor in both TomTom and Nokia. “If you cannot get access to another independent map, you might end up having to license from one of your major competitors. There’s obviously an inherent tension here.” The sudden interest in Here belies its often overlooked position in the technology world. While Google Maps is used in more than one billion smartphones worldwide, the Nokia unit, which until recently was somewhat hampered by the Finnish company’s close relationship with Microsoft, has instead focused primarily on offering mapping services to other companies, instead of directly to consumers. FedEx, for example, has used Here’s mapping data to manage its fleet of delivery trucks worldwide. Deutsche Telekom, the German carrier that owns T-Mobile, has built smartphone apps with Nokia’s services that allows people to share their locations with friends and family through their cellphones. But it’s the automotive industry, where Here holds up to an 80 percent global market share for built-in car navigation systems, that has become a main focus. The mapping service has becoming a crucial component for the automakers pursuing driverless car projects. In 2013, for instance, Mercedes-Benz teamed up with Here to test an autonomous car around 60 miles of German roads. The trial included instant 3-D modeling of nearby cars and constant corrections from the car’s computer. So far, many automakers have preferred to use Nokia’s services over those provided by Google because of the search giant’s own ambitions in the nascent driverless car industry. Yet Nokia’s mapping technology may become unavailable if a new owner of the mapping unit decides to limit what other companies can do with the data.

• Uber Lures Top Google Executive and Shifts David Plouffe’s Duties: Continuing its quest for top Silicon Valley talent, Uber said on Wednesday that it had hired Rachel Whetstone, Google’s longtime head of communications, to be its senior vice president for policy and communications. While Ms. Whetstone’s appointment is a prominent talent grab for Uber, the ride-hailing start-up, it also shuffles the highest ranks of the company. She will take over the role of David Plouffe, the political strategist and former campaign manager for President Obama. Uber simultaneously confirmed that Mr. Plouffe will move to a position as chief adviser to the company and to Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, as well as take a seat on Uber’s board. It is an abrupt change to the six-year-old start-up’s communications team, as Mr. Plouffe was hired less than a year ago to run the company’s communications strategy. At the time of his appointment, the company described his role as similar to that of running a political campaign, with Uber as “the candidate.” His abilities were even praised by executives outside Uber. “David is uniquely suited to scale and lead the same kind of insurgent campaign he did in 2008 for a Silicon Valley tech company, bridging the worlds of business and politics,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, said at the time. Since Mr. Plouffe joined Uber, the company has been more aggressive about polishing its image, engaging in fewer public skirmishes and offering a gentler public tone. Uber has tried mending fences with European regulators who are wary of the service, and has undertaken numerous charitable efforts, including pickups for clothing donations and food-drive charity efforts. Over time, it has reduced the number of headlines about its pugnacious tendency to play rough with competitors. Ms. Whetstone, who will join Uber in June, has been at Google 10 years, helping lead it through antitrust battles across two continents and investigations by the Federal Trade Commission, as well as numerous consumer privacy inquiries. Her move to Uber was first reported by the tech news site Recode. She is another in a string of Google communications employees who have left the company to join hot start-ups. Last fall, Jill Hazelbaker left for Snapchat, while others have left for companies like Square, Pinterest and Tesla. But Ms. Whetstone’s departure is different. Uber and Google have long been partners in certain areas — Uber relies on Google’s mapping technology and has taken hundreds of millions from Google’s venture capital arm — but both companies have started to distance themselves from one another. Uber has made a bid for Nokia’s mapping unit, Here, which could lessen the company’s reliance on Google.