Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 7

• Facebook's Oculus to sell virtual reality headsets for consumers from early 2016. Virtual reality technology company Oculus said it would start shipping the much-awaited consumer version of its Rift headset in the first quarter of 2016. Pre-orders for Rift will start later this year, Oculus, which Facebook Inc bought for $2 billion last year, said. Previous versions of the VR headset, available since 2012, were aimed at developers to make games and run tests. The consumer version was widely expected sometime this year. "In the weeks ahead, we'll be revealing the details around hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming to the Rift," the company said on a blog post.

• Apple Is Planning Another Big Bond Sale: Apple Inc. is planning to sell bonds in the iPhone maker’s fourth multi-billion dollar offering since 2013 as it borrows to return capital to shareholders while preserving its cash holdings abroad. The company will issue the securities in as many as seven parts today, with the longest-dated bonds maturing in 30 years, according to a person with knowledge of the offering. Proceeds will back stock repurchases, capital expenditures, acquisitions and debt repayment, said the person, who asked not to be identified because of a lack of authorization to speak publicly. Apple may sell the bonds due in 2045 at a yield of 1.5 percentage points more than similar-maturity Treasuries and 10-year notes at a 1.10 percentage-point premium, said the person. The company is also planning to issue fixed and floating-rate notes maturing in two and five years and a seven-year fixed-rate bond. The Cupertino, California-based company has issued the equivalent of $40.35 billion of bonds since April 2013, including the $17 billion it sold in what at the time was the biggest corporate-bond offering ever. The company may also sell its first yen bonds and has arranged a series of fixed-income investor calls starting Thursday, Goldman Sachs, one of the underwriters of that offering, said in an e-mailed statement. A sale would be the first in the Japanese currency for Apple, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• Affirm, consumer lending start-up raises $275M to lend to young borrowers using data science: Affirm is adding $275 million in debt and equity to accelerate its growth plans. The big Series B funding round is a vote of confidence by investors in one of the more ambitious entrants into the emerging field of financial technology. The firm is at the forefront of start-ups trying to use the new math of data science to more accurately assess credit risk than traditional scoring, which relies heavily on a person’s credit history. Conventional techniques, the new lenders say, do not do a good job of predicting the default risk on people with limited credit histories, like young people and recent immigrants. Traditional credit analysis tools, they add, tend to overly punish borrowers for single missteps such as a missed student loan payment or falling behind on medical debt. Affirm is building its business by focusing on lending to the millennial market, those under 35 years of age. They tend to have thin credit histories, and surveys show they generally have a lowly opinion of banks. “We’re building a financial technology company for the next generation,” said Max Levchin, the chief executive of Affirm, who was a co-founder of PayPal. To date, Affirm’s main product is a credit-card alternative for online merchants — installment loans from three months to a year. To seek a loan, an applicant provides a few items of personal information — name, cellphone number, birth date and the last four digits of the person’s Social Security number. Then, Affirm’s algorithms pore through all kinds of data from credit bureau reports to social networks. Affirm’s technology makes the underwriting decision almost immediately. More than 100 online merchants have signed up with Affirm, which has made more than $100 million in loans. Merchants using Affirm, the company says, report 20 percent higher sales, reflecting the appeal of Affirm’s alternative to credit cards. The tryout phase for the two-year-old company’s technology, Mr. Levchin said, is over. “We’ve come of age, so we want to have the resources to expand,” he said. New products, Mr. Levchin said, are part of the plan, including a credit-card offering.

• SAP Takes SuccessFactors and Concur to the Cloud: The new integration is being offered as a sort of “multi-tenant” business, akin to the public clouds of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, only for a set of fewer, but more high-level, functions. What that means is that it will be possible for customers of SAP, along with independent software developers, to make software applications that can take data from different elements of their business and build new kinds of information services. Both Ariba and SuccessFactors were independent online software companies that SAP purchased to hasten its transition from selling packaged software to a rental model. The features and data from another SAP acquisition, Concur, which does travel procurement and management, will also be integrated into S4 in the near future. Cloud-based revenue in the first quarter of the year was about $564 million, up 129 percent from a year ago. That was still a relative sliver of the $5 billion in total revenue the company scored, but total revenue was up 22 percent.

• India Start-up Action: Logistic services firm Delhivery raises $85M to ride on India’s ecommerce boom: Riding on the back of an ecommerce boom, India-based logistics service Delhivery raised a series D round of US$85 million led by Tiger Global Management. Last year, the company received US$35 million from Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Nexus Venture Partners, and Times Internet Limited. These investors have also participated in this round. This has so far been the biggest deal for an ecommerce support venture in India. Delhivery has a range of proprietary commerce technologies that they’ve built in-house to tackle logistics problems. The company has over 10,000 employees in more than 200 cities along with nearly a million square feet of warehousing space in 11 fulfilment centers. It handles over 3 million monthly transactions for 70,000 merchants and 1,500 ecommerce companies. With the funding, it plans to tap into India’s rural market and build 2.5 million square feet fulfilment centers. The startup aims to expand its reach four-fold. Delhivery is also expected to invest heavily in expanding the senior management team. It has recently appointed Sandeep Barasia, senior partner of Bain and Company and Suraju Dutta, ex-FedEx executive, as managing directors.

• IBM and Facebook in Marketing Partnership: Personalized marketing — the product pitch or message that really hits its target, the right person at the right time — is the much-discussed ideal in advertising and sales. The truth is that personalized marketing is, well, mostly marketing today. With modern tools of data analysis, it is becoming increasingly possible to identify customer groups in smaller segments than the big demographic buckets of the past, which filtered by age, gender, income and place of residence. But smaller audiences are still a long way from personalized marketing. On Wednesday, IBM and Facebook are announcing a partnership to take a step closer to the ideal. The partnership stems from how the companies bring complementary strengths to the lucrative business of data-fueled marketing. IBM’s data analytics business caters to major retailers and big consumer product brands. And Facebook, the social networking giant, does too. IBM’s data scientists do a lot of social media and sentiment analysis, but not with the vast laboratory of human behavior and preferences that Facebook has. The partnership is intended to combine data that marketers have on customers — like purchase behavior, responses to a marketer’s email campaigns and call center inquiries — with Facebook data including likes, comments and complaints. IBM’s data analytics will then be used to help big brands find and communicate with more finely targeted audiences on Facebook. Mr. Chandlee called this “personalization at scale.” And the insights gleaned from analyzing Facebook and other data should also help companies better target consumers in other marketing channels, such as ads on the web and email programs. Facebook will also be the first company to join IBM’s new Commerce ThinkLab. The new lab is a collaborative setting for applied research involving teams from major consumer brands and retailers, IBM industry experts and data scientists, and teams from Facebook as well. For IBM, the Facebook partnership is the most recent alliance the enterprise technology company has forged with consumer-focused technology companies, notably Apple and Twitter .

• Two Retail Veterans Take Aim at Amazon’s E-Commerce Reign: In the last few months, two retail veterans have been working on companies that explore these different avenues of breaking into online commerce. Ron Johnson, who, with Steve Jobs, created Apple’s lucrative physical stores, has been working on something out of left field — a selective online store called Enjoy, which, for no additional cost, will send an expert to hand-deliver tech products and spend an hour helping people set up and learn to use their new things. The service, Mr. Johnson said, is a smartphone-era take on his past at Apple — an effort to create the friendliness of an Apple Store in people’s homes and offices. Then there’s Marc Lore, an e-commerce veteran who in 2010 sold his company, Quidsi, to Amazon for about $550 million. Mr. Lore’s new service, Jet.com, represents a frontal assault on Amazon. Mr. Lore has raised more than $200 million — a staggering sum before even opening up shop — to create a nationwide e-commerce giant to compete with Amazon on selection, service and, especially, price. Jet’s promise is simple and, if the company can keep it, potentially momentous: to offer the absolute lowest price on just about everything, from paper towels to oatmeal to tennis rackets, guaranteed. Enjoy is starting small. The company, which has raised around $30 million from investors, is starting out in just the San Francisco Bay Area this week and in New York City next Wednesday. Enjoy does not compete with Amazon on selection; it offers only about a dozen or so high-margin tech products for sale, among them laptops, GoPros, drones and, in an exclusive deal, smartphones and tablets purchased from AT&T. Mr. Johnson believes that by limiting selection, Enjoy can offer free delivery and setup. Because it only needs to stock high-end products, the company hopes to squeeze enough out of each purchase to cover delivery and personal consultation. Enjoy is in stark contrast with Jet, which, when it opens to the public in early July, does not aim to start small. Right out of the gate, it makes a huge promise: “You should never find an item that’s more expensive on Jet than anywhere else,” Mr. Lore told me this week. Mr. Lore says he believes he can keep that promise thanks to an unusual business model. Like Costco, Jet will charge an annual membership fee, in this case $49.99. That fee is intended to free Mr. Lore from making any profit on each item — and thus pass all potential savings to customers. Right now, Jet is working well enough to bolster Mr. Lore’s basic claim — on dozens of items I searched for, Jet was cheaper, sometimes unbelievably so, than Amazon, Walmart or anywhere else online. For instance, a 40-pack of Duracell AA batteries on Amazon sells for $16.99. On Jet, the same pack is $13.70. If you add more items to your cart, Jet reduces the cost further. So, by ordering the batteries as part of a larger cart, I cut the price down to just under $11, about a third less than Amazon’s price. I noticed this effect on multiple orders across a wide range of household staples I usually order, from cooking oil to aluminum foil to shampoo to baby diapers. Jet’s sticker prices are low, but when I created large carts, the prices shrank even more. My child’s diapers, ordered in bulk, cost me 21 cents each, compared with 29 cents at Amazon. Still, there are some disadvantages: Jet’s fastest items ship in two days, slower than Amazon’s next- or same-day shipping, and a huge number of its goods ship in three to five days. It also does not offer an Amazon Prime-like free shipping service; you pay $5.99 for all orders under $35, after which your order ships free. These limitations suggest that Jet is going after an audience that’s different from Amazon’s — one that is less affluent, less hooked on impulse buying and more interested in discounts. “For most households, the proposition of paying $50 to Jet and saving $200 for the year, that’s a no-brainer thing,” Mr. Lore said. Over the holidays, Amazon sold a record $29.3 billion in merchandise, more than many large e-commerce companies combined. But Americans spent around $1.2 trillion in the same period, meaning that Amazon accounted for just 2 percent of our purchases. In other words, there’s lots of room for new ways to get Americans shopping online.