Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 27

• An auto-generated audio version on SoundCloud (experimental)

• Foxconn Unit Seeks the Next Xiaomi in India: For FIH Mobile Ltd., being the unit of Foxconn Technology Group that doesn’t make iPhones has been a challenge. Its former name, Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., was constantly being confused with the parent, while its business model was tied to fading phone labels including Nokia and Sony. So it changed both. Two years later, FIH has a new marquee client in fast-growing smartphone brand Xiaomi Corp. and vastly-improved earnings. In anticipation of shipments climbing 50 percent this year, it’s now looking to India in its hunt for the next big thing after profit doubled in 2014. FIH will assemble its first smartphones in India before the end of this year, prompted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to raise import tariffs, Tong said. The company will have multiple sites in the country, none employing more than 10,000 workers, he said. “We still see the growth rate will be in the emerging market brands,” he said. India could see smartphone sales of 85 million to 100 million this year in a region where emerging Asia-Pacific markets will collectively outpace China over the next four years, Tong said, citing figures from Gartner Inc.

• Oppo of China to Start Handset Assembly in India for Local Push: Guangdong OPPO Electronics, a Chinese maker of smartphones, will start having its own-brand handsets manufactured in India in August as a saturated home market pushes it to seek growth abroad. Oppo will have its handsets assembled by a partner in the South Asian country, rather than replicate its experience in Indonesia, where it owns a factory, said Vice President Sky Li, who oversees the company’s international mobile business. He declined to identify the partner. “India is the top priority in our expansion in South Asia,” Li said in interview in Beijing on May 20. The company “plans to boost sales volume in the country to a comparable level with China market in five years.” The Chinese phone maker is betting on demand from consumers abroad to drive growth after the domestic market recorded first decline in smartphone shipments in six years in the first quarter, with a year-on-year drop of 4 percent to 98.8 million units, market research company IDC said on May 10. Oppo isn’t alone in seeing India in its future. Xiaomi , the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, released the MI 4i model in the South Asian country last month. Rivals Huawei Technologies and Lenovo Group are also targeting India.

• In Bid to Revive Itself, EBay to Roll Out Cost-Per-Sale Ads for Web Merchants: EBay Inc. is introducing ads that merchants will pay for only if they lead to actual sales, seeking new revenue opportunities for the online marketplace before a planned split from the PayPal payments division. The service, called Promoted Listings, will let EBay sellers specify what percent of a product’s sale price they’re willing pay in order to run an advertisement. The higher the percentage, the more prominent the ad will be, although EBay will also consider a product’s popularity and the seller’s reputation. The cost-per-sale approach is unusual because websites risk running ads that don’t generate revenue. Instead, most companies, such as Google Inc., rely on cost-per-click ads, which charge marketers each time someone clicks on a link. EBay’s new ad offering will help smaller merchants, which make up the bulk of the company’s 25 million sellers, because they won’t have to track the effectiveness of ads or pay before a sale, according to Alex Linde, EBay’s vice president of advertising and monetization. “This way, there’s no upfront risk for the seller,” Linde said. “The only lever these sellers had in the past was price, and nobody wants to grow only by discounting.” While Linde didn’t specify any revenue goals for promoted-listing ads, he said EBay’s extensive data on consumers and sellers will help it direct ads to the most likely buyers. “It’s risky to guarantee a return on an ad,” said Lauren Fisher, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. “They could end up giving away a lot of advertising.” The advertising push is part of a larger effort to reinvigorate EBay’s e-commerce business, which is lagging behind the rest of the industry. Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., sees marketplace revenue falling 4 percent to $6.7 billion, while EMarketer predicts that global e-commerce sales will rise 21 percent to $1.59 trillion in 2015. Advertising hasn’t been a priority for EBay in the past. Ad revenues are lumped into a segment that brought in $2.76 billion last year. Most of that came from banner ads promoting brands, rather than particular products. Promoted Listings will be rolled out gradually, starting in June with a few hundred sellers in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Germany. EBay also plans to come up with ways for larger merchants to promote special deals more effectively, Linde said.

• Your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000: This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission. The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each. How is this okay? First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince after he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.” In other words, Prince could make slight adjustments to the photos and call them his own. This is what he did with the Instagram photos. Although he did not alter the usernames or the photos themselves, he removed captions. He then added odd comments on each photo, such as “DVD workshops. Button down. I fit in one leg now. Will it work? Leap of faith” from the account “richardprince1234.” The account currently has 10,200 followers but not a single picture — perhaps so you can’t steal his images in return? “New Portraits” first debuted last year at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, the same location where the artist displayed the Rastafarian images he was sued for. Knowing that more legal action is unlikely, Prince appears to be enjoying the attention. He has been re-tweeting and re-posting his many critics.

• TiVo earnings: Revenue $44M, +16% Y/Y. Share Rise 6%: Digital video recorder maker TiVo reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit, helped by higher subscriptions. Shares of the company, which also said it bought Poland-based Cubiware, rose 6.2 percent in extended trading on Tuesday. TiVo's set-top boxes are in high demand from cable users as they also allow access to online video services such as Netflix , Hulu and Google 's YouTube. TiVo, whose clients lude DirecTV, is trying to partner with more cable TV operators to grow its business. TiVo sells subscriptions directly to consumers with its video recorders and also licenses its technology to cable TV operators that rent recorders to subscribers. The company sells its products through cable TV partners such as Virgin Media in the UK, ONO in Spain and Com Hem AB in Swede Total revenue costs rose about 16 percent to $44.1 million. Net revenue rose about 7.2 percent to $114.7 million.

• In Freewheeling Interview Snapchat CEO Outlines Monetization Plans, Talks Tech Bubble, IPO: Evan Spiegel is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and profane enfant terrible behind one of the largest and fastest-growing social networks on the Internet. At 24, he runs a startup with 330 employees and a valuation north of $15 billion, which claims more than 100 million mostly young users. He’s also incredibly secretive about his business plans and an unknown (and arguably underestimated) figure in the intersecting gossip circles of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Now he’s ready to talk about a major turning point for his company. More than three years after Spiegel founded Snapchat at Stanford with his fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy, 26, he’s trying to turn it into a real business. After starting to run select video ads earlier this year, Snapchat is about to begin soliciting other big advertisers with some new numbers that assert its audience is bigger, younger, and more obsessive than anything on television. In a 23-page sales pitch it’s sending to ad agencies this month, the company says more than 60 percent of 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service and together view more than 2 billion videos a day. That’s already about half the number of videos people watch on Facebook, which is seven years older and has 10 times as many members. The service isn’t accessible on the conventional Web, only via smartphones, and a central tenet of the company is that video and photos should take up the entire smartphone screen. He “believes his audience is young people on mobile,” Lasky says, “and he does not believe that the audience is being appropriately serviced by the existing Silicon Valley elites.” Actual teen behavior tells a slightly different story. Seventy-one percent of all U.S. teens age 13 to 17 use Facebook, while only 4 in 10 use Snapchat, according to a study this year by the Pew Research Center. And Snapchat’s rivals aren’t sitting still. Twitter has acquired the video-sharing services Periscope and Vine, and Facebook has another way it taps young Internet users—the photo-sharing service Instagram, which it acquired in 2012. Half of all teens use Instagram, according to Pew. Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Big advertisers with large experimental budgets chalked the rate up to research and development costs and fell in line, just to be first with a chance at wooing a millennial audience. Occasionally the ads do find a satisfying symbiosis with the content. Earlier this month, for example, spots from Coca-Cola and the jobs site Indeed.com congratulated students in ads that were interspersed in daily stories culled from snaps on college campuses during graduation day. Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Big advertisers with large experimental budgets chalked the rate up to research and development costs and fell in line, just to be first with a chance at wooing a millennial audience. Occasionally the ads do find a satisfying symbiosis with the content. Earlier this month, for example, spots from Coca-Cola and the jobs site Indeed.com congratulated students in ads that were interspersed in daily stories culled from snaps on college campuses during graduation day.