Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 1

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• Facebook is testing a more conservative definition of video views, but is still far more aggressive than YouTube in charging advertisers: While Facebook charges advertisers for videos the second they appear in a news feed, views are defined differently since users can easily scroll past the ads. Facebook considers a view to last three seconds compared with YouTube's 30-second rule. This has resulted in marketers' clips uploaded to Facebook to amass a wealth of views compared with those published on YouTube in recent months. But those views don't necessarily mean people are watching ads. Now, advertisers can start paying for videos with a cost-per-view rate that kicks in after a user watches for 10 seconds, making the ad seemingly more valuable to advertisers who want to pay for qualified views. Until now, advertisers have paid for videos immediately after they show up in a news feed—something akin to a cost-per-impression model. When Twitter launched autoplay video earlier this month, it tried to address concerns by promising brands 100 percent viewability: promising only to charge on video ads that have been seen 100 percent in full view of the user..


• Xiaomi Continues International Push, Starts Selling $160 Redmi 2 Phone in Brazil: Xiaomi made its expected move into the Brazil market on Tuesday, announcing plans to sell its affordable Redmi 2 smartphone for 499 Brazilian reals ($161). To avoid hefty taxes placed on foreign imports, Xiaomi is working with Foxconn to have the devices built in Brazil, with additional products coming soon.


• Online recharge and mobile wallet app MobiKwik targets $700M GTV in 2015-16, profits by 2016-17: MobiKwik.com, is gunning for a nearly four-fold jump in gross transaction value to $700 million (Rs 4,270 crore) this year. “We don’t have the audited numbers right now, but I can tell you that we have crossed the 2014-15 target of Rs 1200 crore ($190 million) sales and are looking forward to $700 million sales this year,” Upasana Taku, co-founder of the company told Techcircle. The Gurgaon-based company aims to turn profitable by financial year 2016-17. “We expect to meet our goal of 100 million users for the mobile wallet by 2016-17 and so next year we anticipate to start generating profits,” she added. Profitability is the holy grail for India’s fast growing consumer internet firms. MobiKwik’s competitor, the Alibaba-backed Paytm saw the gross value of the transactions conducted on its network rise to around Rs 4,000 crore by 2014-end from around Rs 1,000 crore the year before. Paytm is said to be targeting gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of $3-4 billion by March 2015. MobiKwik plans to spend about Rs 100 crore on marketing this financial year. Most of the money will be deployed on television and online campaigns. MobiKwik is also betting big on joining hands with offline service provider. It started a service for offline players in March 2015 and has the likes of quick service restaurants, grocery stores and coffee stores on its platform. It has tie ups with Big Bazaar, Cafe Coffee Day and other players for the same.


• Apple Music First Look: Rich, Robust — But Confusing: Paid streaming music has arrived on Planet Apple, where it was regarded as unworthy for years. Today, the tech giant has entered the streaming music business with its much-anticipated Apple Music subscription service. Like other streaming services, it offers access to tens of millions of tracks for a monthly fee. Would I pay $10 a month — $120 a year — to use it? My answer is a tentative yes, with some caveats. Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods. But it’s also uncharacteristically complicated by Apple standards, with everything from a global terrestrial radio station to numerous suggested playlists for different purposes in different places. One of the most confusing aspects of Apple Music is that it moves all your iTunes Music to the cloud, along with the streaming catalog. On the other hand, the service has three big strengths, in my view. First, it smoothly integrates the existing library of iTunes songs you own with the much larger catalog of music you are merely, in effect, renting. Second, while the service does use some algorithms, it suggests numerous playlists, albums and songs curated by 300 human editors, based on your tastes. Third, while Apple’s $10 monthly fee per user is both standard — and for some, pricey — the company is offering a family plan that cuts the price dramatically.


• LTE-U versus WiFi: The future of mobile data pits cellphone carriers against cable giants: To cellular providers, WiFi represents a huge missed opportunity. Internet consumption on cellular data networks — your 3G or 4G connection - could've grown by a whopping 84 percent last year, according to Cisco. But because consumers shunted so much traffic to WiFi, that figure was much lower, at 69 percent. Carriers could charge you for all that extra access to the mobile data network. Instead they're losing out when you hop onto WiFi at your home or office. And LTE-U is the industry's solution. The cable industry, on the other hand, wants to keep you on WiFi as much as possible. This is the math they fear: By 2019, Americans are expected to consume nearly 10 times more mobile data than they did in 2014. By then, 77 percent of all Internet traffic will be sent and received over mobile devices rather than stationary PCs. That's not good for cable, an industry that built its reputation on running fast (but fixed) Internet service into people's homes and businesses. You're probably familiar with 4G LTE, the current cutting edge of mobile data technology. Under ideal conditions, it provides download speeds that rival what you can get on a wired connection — fast enough to download a song in less than a minute. LTE-U is virtually identical to LTE, but with one key difference: It runs on the same frequencies that WiFi does. Unlike regular LTE, which piggybacks on airwaves owned exclusively by your carrier, LTE-U travels on public airwaves that are free to anyone. Garage door openers, cordless phones, WiFi routers — all also transmit over these open channels. Interference between the two technologies can slash WiFi transmission rates by 75 percent, according to a Google white paper filed last month to the federal government. The cable industry's top trade group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, argued the technology could be "disastrous" without further protections and "will severely degrade consumers' Wi-Fi experience, rendering unusable many services that are widespread today, to say nothing of the innovative new uses currently on the horizon."


• Google's Local Search, unlike Google's Organic Search, Favors Google+ Results, Yelp Claims: According to a highly critical new paper out from legal scholar Tim Wu, Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca and data scientists at Yelp, many of us are totally missing out on the information that’s most relevant, and critical, to our lives. In a statement to The Washington Post, Yelp vice president of public policy Luther Lowe uses this example: If a parent searches “pediatrician NYC,” he or she will, in a prominent first-page listing, see the names of seven pediatricians who happen to have Google+ or Google+ Local pages. “The Google organic ranking algorithm does a great job at identifying helpful content on the Web,” Lowe said. “But it’s sadly not being deployed in the most common user behavior on Google: local search.” According to Yelp, from one-third to one-half of all Google searches are local. They primarily involve something called the “Local OneBox” — the special, extra-prominent list of seven links that Google displays at the top of local search results. Local OneBox takes up a big chunk of first-page real estate, frequently at the very top of the page, which means people are disproportionately more likely to click into it than they are into regular links. Local OneBox also pulls exclusively from Google’s versions of specialized search sites, such as Google+ Local.


• Samsung, HTC suffer blowback from phone financing schemes of years past, as consumers turn slow to upgrade: It’s payback time for handset makers that long profited from Americans’ tendency to upgrade their mobile phones early and often. U.S. consumers got a taste for phone financing two years ago and never looked back. They bought fancy new devices for a few more dollars a month with no service contract attached. Now they’re holding on to their old smartphones longer than they did when they signed two-year contracts and got freebies, spelling further trouble for manufacturers like Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. that have struggled with declining sales. “When people spend $600 to $700, they are not in the mood to upgrade every year,” said independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma. Thrifty consumers are starting to buy devices every 20 to 24 months instead of every 15 months when carriers subsidized all of their devices and made up the cost through higher service charges, he said. While iPhone maker Apple Inc. -- whose customers tend to be less price sensitive -- has remained largely unaffected, Samsung and HTC may see the most impact, analysts said. In a sign that the end of subsidies is on the horizon, Dallas-based AT and T asked in May that retail partners like Apple and Best Buy stop offering subsidized phones with two-year contracts and to sell them on its Next financing program instead. Verizon, which has been slower to move to phone financing, expects 50 percent of new sales to be on its Edge installment payment plan this year.


• Cisco to buy OpenDNS for $635 million to boost security business: Cisco said it would buy OpenDNS, a privately held cloud-based security firm, for $635 million, the latest move to boost its security business as cyber attacks increase in number and sophistication. Cisco has been buying a number of security companies, which has made its relatively tiny security business one of its fastest growing areas in the past two years. OpenDNS uses predictive intelligence to block malware, botnets and phishing threats that antivirus and firewalls miss. Cisco was a minority investor and was one of the backers that invested $35 million in OpenDNS in May last year. When Cisco buys stakes in startups, it often receives defensive rights that give it an edge to acquire companies it has invested in ahead of competitors. Cisco, whose security business is known for its firewalls, expanded into intrusion detection and prevention systems with the $2.7 billion acquisition of Sourcefire in 2013. Cisco, which has acquired dozens of companies over the years, is transitioning towards high-end switches and routers and investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers. It bought malware analysis company ThreatGRID in 2014 and security advisory firm Neohapsis this year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 30

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• Amazon looks to offer loans to sellers in eight countries including India: Amazon.com will start a business loan program for small sellers in the United Kingdom on Tuesday and is looking to launch it this year in seven more countries including India. Until now, the e-retailer has offered the service only in the United States and Japan. Amazon Lending, founded in 2012, plans to offer short-term working capital loans in other countries where it operates a third-party, seller-run marketplace business. The countries are Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and China, where credit is becoming a key factor in competing for new vendors and grabbing market share. The service is on an invite-only basis and is not open to all sellers on Amazon's platform. Amazon said it can safely offer loans based on internal data and because it takes loan payments out of the sales proceeds it pays sellers. Amazon offers three- to six-month loans of $1,000 to $600,000 to help merchants buy inventory. It makes money on interest and takes a cut of all sales on its marketplace, which now account for about 40 percent of total Amazon site sales. Amazon said it has offered hundreds of millions of dollars in loans since 2012, with more than half of its sellers opting for a repeat loan. Sellers interviewed by Reuters and writing on Amazon forums cited interest rates on Amazon loans ranging from 6 percent to 14 percent, in line with loans from banks and business credit cards. Stephan Aarstol, chief executive of Tower Paddle Boards, an Amazon seller, said he has taken four loans from the company starting in March 2014 because of the speed and simplicity of the process. It took him five days to get his first loan.


• Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 Jobs: Microsoft is shutting down its Web display advertising business and handing operations over to AOL and AppNexus, a person with knowledge of the matter said. About 1,200 jobs at Microsoft will be impacted, with some positions to be moved to AOL and AppNexus. Some people will be offered other positions at Microsoft, while other jobs will be cut, the person said.


• Uber Bonds Term Sheet Reveals $470 Million in Operating Losses on $415 Million in Revenue: Uber is telling prospective investors that it generates $470 million in operating losses on $415 million in revenue, according to a document provided to prospective investors. The term sheet viewed by Bloomberg News, which is being used to sell $1 billion to $1.2 billion in convertible bonds, doesn’t make clear the time period for those results. The document also touts 300 percent year-over-year growth. Investors in this round will be able to convert the notes at a compounded 11.5 percent discount if the company sells shares on the public market, the document shows. The bonds mature in 2022, with an 8 percent annual return if held through maturity. Uber aims to complete the deal by Tuesday, according to the document. The car-booking startup has been on a spree to raise cash. Uber is negotiating a $2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks, a person with knowledge of the situation said last week. Earlier this year, it raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt from Goldman Sachs wealth-management clients, which valued the company at $40 billion. “These are substantially old numbers that do not reflect business activities today,” Uber spokeswoman Nairi Hourdajian said in an e-mail. Hourdajian declined to say why the numbers are being used to promote a current funding round.


• Uber to Acquire Mapping Technology and Know-How From Microsoft: Uber will acquire a portion of Microsoft’s maps technology and extend employment offers to around 100 engineers on Microsoft’s mapping team. Uber would not discuss the terms of the acquisition, which will bring it a data site outside Boulder, Colo., as well as cameras, image-analysis software and a license to the intellectual property. Although most Uber services rely on digital maps, much of its interest in mapping is focused on how to improve its carpooling service, UberPool. While Uber relies heavily on mapping technology from Apple, Baidu and especially Google, the company has taken strides to bring as much mapping expertise in-house as possible. Microsoft said the deal on Monday was part of a broader strategy to focus on its core products.


• The Apple Watch Hasn't Killed Fitbit: Two months after the Apple Watch launch, the leading wrist-based fitness tracking company is doing just fine. The Apple Watch was expected to be a disaster for companies like Fitbit. It hasn’t been. While Fitbit’s sales dipped as anticipation for Apple’s smartwatch grew, the company has bounced back this spring and appears to be doing just fine, according to data provided exclusively to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. After Apple’s monster first week, Fitbit products have actually outsold Apple Watches, according to Slice. Slice collects data from the e-mailed receipts of about 2.5 million people. Over the past year, Fitbit has outsold the rest of the fitness tracking market combined (excluding Apple). While the entire industry saw a bump during last year’s holiday season, companies such as Jawbone, Garmin, and Samsung saw their wearable sales decline quickly after Christmas. Fitbit’s never dropped to their pre-holiday levels, and began ramping up again this spring. People are seeking out Fitbit products specifically. When people buy Fitbit products online, the most common place they’re doing it is on the company’s own website. More than 43 percent of Fitbit sales take place on Fitbit.com, slightly edging out Amazon, which accounts for 40 percent of online sales of Fitbit devices. Apple Watch's and Fitbit's consumer bases don’t overlap much. Fitbit is tightly focused on fitness. Apple pitches its product as a more general-use device. There's also a significant difference in price, with Fitbit devices ranging from $60 to $250 and the Apple watch starting at $350 and going straight up to ridiculous. According to Slice, less than 5 percent of people who bought a Fitbit since the end of 2013 have also purchased an Apple Watch. For now, it seems like there’s room in wearable computing for both companies—but maybe not anyone else.


• Quikr is reportedly in talks to acquire Housing.com: Online classifieds firm Quikr is in talks to acquire real estate portal Housing.com.When contacted, co-founder and CEO of Housing.com Rahul Yadav confirmed the news but only to retract it later. SoftBank had invested in the promising online realty startup close to $90 million in December 2014 valuing the company around $270 million. SoftBank is said to have initiated talks with the potential acquirer Quikr, which has been looking to strengthen its newly launched property sales vertical QuikrHomes by way of inorganic expansion. The sale efforts seem to have been initiated by its investors as they are trying to salvage their investment in the company.


• With New Budgeting Tools, AWS Makes It Easier For Developers To Manage Costs: Amazon today announced two new tools that make it easier for developers to control their expenses on its AWS cloud computing platform. The first tool, called Budgets, allows AWS users to define a monthly budget for their AWS cost. As the name implies, this means you can now set up a budget for all of your AWS spending, or set up a specific budget for just the EC2 service, for example. Then, when you get close to exceeding your monthly budget — or when your forecasted cost exceeds 100 percent — AWS will send you an alert. In addition, AWS is launching a new tool for its Cost Explorer service today that tries to forecast monthly cost up to three months into the future. This service can look at data on an aggregate level, but more interestingly, it can look at specific services, tags, availability zones, purchase options and API operations. Given that there is probably some variability in how you use AWS in a given month, the service will also show confidence intervals for its prediction. Estimating AWS cost is something of an arcane art, which is only complicated by Amazon’s granular pricing structure. The more complex the app you’re hosting on AWS, the harder it gets to figure out how much it’ll cost to run it on Amazon’s service (which also makes it hard to compare AWS cost to other cloud platforms). These new services will hopefully make it a bit easier to at least keep track of AWS cost without having to resort to third-party tools.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 29

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• ZestFinance and JD.com announce a joint venture to provide a consumer credit scoring service in China, rivaling Alibaba's offering: The venture, JD-ZestFinance Gaia, will initially be used to assess credit risk and offer installment loans for purchases on JD.com, which has 100 million active customers and generates yearly revenue of $20 billion. The venture intends to eventually offer the credit-analysis service to corporate customers throughout China. JD.com is also making a minority investment in ZestFinance, though the companies would not disclose the size of the investment or the valuation of the start-up. There is a lot of enthusiasm for the data science approach to credit analysis, and venture funding is flowing into this emerging field. The promise is that high-tech tools can give greater depth and detail to the basic principle of banking: know your customer. Start-ups in the field, beside ZestFinance, include Affirm, Earnest, Elevate and LendUp. The start-ups’ methods vary, as do the data sources they tap. But their algorithms sift through data that can include a person’s social-network connections, web-browsing habits, how they fill out online forms and their online purchases. The software looks for patterns and correlations: digital signals that help assess an individual’s willingness and ability to repay. China’s leaders are seeking to stimulate consumer spending to make its economy less dependent on industrial exports. Expanding consumer credit is part of the formula, and the government is allowing private companies, like JD.com, to innovate. JD-ZestFinance Gaia and competitor Sesame Credit, part of Alibaba-affiliated Ant Financial Services Group, hope to use the e-commerce sites' vast swathes of shopping data to turn out a reliable credit risk score.


• This Driver in China Explains How He Is Helping Rip Off Uber: James Li was unhappy with his pay as a security guard in Shanghai so he started driving on weekends for Uber. He’s almost tripled his pay -- in part by scamming the company. Li, an alias since he feared retribution if his real name was made public, is taking advantage of Uber’s efforts to break into the China market. The U.S. car-booking company is spending millions on free rides and driver bonuses, betting the cash will help train China drivers and market Uber services to customers. Instead, people like Li have figured out how to cash in on Uber’s largesse without giving anyone a ride. He’s part of a cottage industry that has developed so drivers can use modified smartphones and software to place fake bookings and trick Uber into paying out cash for phantom trips. While there are no reliable estimates on how prevalent the scams are, interviews with Uber drivers, equipment vendors and reviews of postings on dedicated online forums suggest at least some of the $1 billion that Uber has pledged to spend to expand the service in China this year is being siphoned off by fake bookings. To create a fake trip, an Uber driver has essentially two options, according to drivers interviewed by Bloomberg. The first is a do-it-yourself option where the driver buys a hacked smartphone that can operate with multiple phone numbers and therefore multiple Uber accounts. Drivers use one number to act as a rider and request a lift, and then accept the trip as a driver with another phone number. The second option involves working with other scammers over the Internet. If a driver doesn’t have a hacked phone, he can go into one of several invitation-only online forums and request a fake fare from professional ride-bookers. These bookers are referred to as “nurses” because they use specially tailored software to put an “injection,” or location-specific ride request near the driver. The driver, or “patient,” then makes the trip while the booker monitors remotely, confirms the journey was made and then pays Uber when the trip is complete. The nurse gets a small fee, usually about $1.60, and the reimbursement for the fare from the patient. The driver in turn collects the fare and a driver bonus that can be three times the fare from Uber, which thinks it is building brand awareness by giving away free rides. The drivers interviewed by Bloomberg spoke of a cat-and-mouse game with Uber and the fear of being caught. A recent software upgrade has made it more difficult to successfully game the system, they said.


• Intuit Lays Off 399 Employees In Company Realignment: Intuit has confirmed to TechCrunch that it has laid off 399 people, or just under 5 percent of the company’s roughly 8,000 employees, in a re-alignment of the company. Patrick Barry has also stepped back from leading Demandforce, though he remains an employee of Intuit. In the past year, Intuit’s stock has risen more than 28 percent, and the company is currently worth more than $28 billion based on its market cap. Intuit is best known for its tax preparation services like TurboTax and financial services like QuickBooks. In January the company partnered with Uber and Stripe to help those on-demand workers keep track of their finances. The tools help workers quickly figure out what their tax bills and write-offs will be for work-related expenses. In January, Intuit also bought ZeroPaper, a startup that offers online accounting services for small businesses, as it began to take an interest in Brazil. It also bought a payroll services startup Acrede in December this year.


• The Mouth Is Mightier Than the Pen: New research shows that text-based communications may make individuals sound less intelligent and employable than when the same information is communicated orally. The findings imply that old-fashioned phone conversations or in-person visits may be more effective when trying to impress a prospective employer or, perhaps, close a deal. In the first of a series of experiments presented in the paper, the researchers recruited 18 MBA. candidates from Booth. The students were asked to prepare a brief pitch to a prospective employer — a roughly two-minute proposal that the researchers recorded on video. Separately, the researchers recruited 162 people who were visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago to evaluate these pitches. Some of these museum-goers watched the video, a second group listened to the audio without watching the video, and a third group read a transcript of the pitch. What the researchers found was that the evaluators who heard the pitches — whether in the audio or video version — “rated the candidates intellect more highly” than those who read the transcript, the paper reported. Those who listened or watched also rated the candidates more likable and, critically, more employable. The results are said to validate and expand upon previous research showing that the cadence and intonation of voice allows listeners to do a better job of gauging a person’s thoughts than the same information communicated in writing.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 26

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• Marketers Will Drool Over Facebook’s New Signup Ads That Auto-Fill Your Email Or Number: Businesses desperately want your email address, but it’s annoying to enter it on mobile. Cue Facebook’s latest News Feed ads. A marketer can buy an ad asking for you to sign-up for a newsletter or request a sales call, and with two-taps you can auto-fill your email address, phone number, or other info you’ve registered with Facebook. Facebook is testing these “Lead Ads” with a small group of businesses around the world to gain feedback before considering rolling them out. Google has tested similar contact form ads for years, but they always required users to manually enter their info. To make Facebook’s ads privacy-friendly, Facebook won’t just hand your info over. You have to click the call-to-action button like “Subscribe,” and then “Submit” your info once you’ve reviewed what was auto-filled. Users can edit that info inside the ads, and businesses only get what’s voluntarily submitted. From there, advertisers can only use the data in accordance with a mini-privacy policy they embed in the ad, and can’t resell it to anyone else. Rather than ads that lead you offsite to fill out sign-up forms, it’s pulling that experience into the News Feed, so when you’re done, you keep right on social networking. Removing the click away and manual data entry could drastically boost conversion rates on these kinds of ads, making them easier to sell at higher prices.


• Alibaba affiliate launches Internet bank for small enterprises: Alibaba's financial affiliate launched on Thursday Internet bank MYbank, targeting the small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises that have struggled to obtain credit from major financial institutions. MYbank, which is 30-percent owned by Alibaba-linked Ant Financial Services Group, has 4 billion yuan ($644 million) of registered capital and will offer loans of up to 5 million yuan. It will only be able to take in deposits when regulators approve a facial recognition technology that allow its customers to remotely open bank accounts, an Ant Financial spokeswoman told Reuters. MYbank follows in the footsteps of Alibaba arch-rival Tencent Holdings Ltd, which began trial operations of its WeBank, China's first online bank, in January. Credit conditions have remained tight for SMEs, despite a series of policy easing, as banks avoid the companies worst hit by an economic slowdown. State-owned banks have also avoided customers such as farmers and smaller businesses because of the difficulties in assessing their credit worthiness and they have little to offer as collateral.


• Clashes Erupt Across France as Taxi Drivers Protest Uber: Irate taxi drivers blocked roads, burned tires and attacked drivers who they thought were working for Uber, the ride-hailing company, during a day of protests Thursday that disrupted Paris and slowed traffic to a crawl. Fights broke out on streets, a couple of cars were burned and travelers were frustrated all over Paris and in major cities elsewhere in France, where the labor battle snarled several cities’ streets. “Economic terrorism” is the favored term of Parisian taxi drivers for Uber’s lower prices, flexible hours and the way it is operating outside French law. In France the UberPop service is illegal. It allows anyone who wants to become a driver to sign up without a professional chauffeur license and to pick up fares through the Uber smartphone app. Other Uber services are permitted under strict conditions, and the company is contesting the constitutionality of parts of the law limiting UberPop. The company has instructed its drivers to keep working. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who met Thursday evening with the taxi unions, deplored the violence, but saved his most angry words for Uber. He said the company behaved with “arrogance” in its flouting of French law and declared that “the government will never accept the law of the jungle,” referring to Uber’s stark form of competition.


• Amazon wants the Echo to be your personal robot butler: Amazon's fuller ambitions for the Echo and its Alexa cloud-based voice software have become a little clearer. The company announced Thursday that it is opening up the system to developers, so that anyone can design their own programs to work with the sleek cylindrical in-home assistant. The company announced that its new developer's kit will make it easy for programmers to work with the device, even without previous knowledge of how to work with voice-recognition systems. That means amateur and professional developers alike can make programs for themselves. That means they could make custom commands for smart appliances such as thermostats and sprinklers, or custom programs that work with Web sites so you can get news updates fed to your Echo. It also means Amazon's set up the Echo to potentially be the central point from which you run your whole life. The Echo itself can't vacuum your home, but it could theoretically tell your vacuum when to start going. It may not do your dishes, but it can prompt your dishwasher to fire up as well. So while it won't be your robot maid, it could theoretically be your robot butler. Earlier this week, Amazon began selling the Echo widely -- it had previously been an invite-only device. Those moves set Amazon up a little more solidly as a competitor to Apple and Google, which have also laid out ambitions to create hubs for the smart homes of the future. Earlier this week, Apple released a new set of home-related prompts that will work with its Siri voice assistant for individual smart devices -- "turn on the coffee maker" -- as well as for groups of smart devices. So you can tell Siri to "turn off the upstairs lights," for example, if you want to save a little energy while your family is gathered in the living room.


• IBM Pushes Networking and Research to Catch Rivals in the Cloud - Mulls India Data Center: IBM will expand the networking services available through its SoftLayer cloud technology, trying to catch up with deep-pocketed rivals. IBM researchers and engineers are now making regular trips to SoftLayer’s headquarters in Dallas to discuss product plans and get educated about cloud operation, said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s chief technology officer. Increasing cloud revenue is critical for IBM. It has tried to boost sales for operations like cloud computing and data analytics but that hasn’t been enough to make up for declines in longstanding operations -- such as services and hardware -- and revenue lost from divestitures. The initiative comes almost two years after the Armonk, New York-based company acquired SoftLayer for $2 billion to help IBM compete against Google, Microsoft and Amazon. SoftLayer also plans to open a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is looking at a location in India.


• Uber growing 40% month-over-month in India: Uber’s Asia Head: Uber may have had its share of challenges in the Indian market, but the ride sharing app has been growing at over 40 per cent month-over-month here. In fact, Bangalore and Kolkata are some of the fastest growing cities for Uber globally, Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Asia, Uber told Techcircle. The team at Uber India has their work cut out. The regulatory overhang over Uber, which started after a passengers’ sexual assault by an Uber driver in December, continues to play out. It has been facing ban calls in Delhi and other places. Earlier, it came under the RBI scanner over its payment system which automatically debited a user’s credit card after a ride.


• Amazon Puts a Store on Wheels, Continues to Flirt With Physical Retail: Amazon continues to explore new ways to bridge the gap between online and offline retail, even if the most recent example seems stunt-ish. The company today is introducing the Amazon Treasure Truck in Seattle, which will carry a limited quantity of one product each day that shoppers can order on Amazon’s app and then collect from the truck at a designated pickup location. The company said the truck will feature hard-to-find, heavily discounted or limited edition products and food, ranging from paddle boards to beach bikes to steak — yes, steak. The Treasure Truck introduction comes as Amazon flirts with physical retail: Amazon product vending machines have popped up in some airports, and a recent patent application lays out a vision for a new kind of technologically advanced retail store.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 25

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• Driven by smart acquisitions, Facebook stock at all-time high; Company valued at ~$250 billion : Facebook set an all-time high today, closing at $88.86 per share, valuing the company at just under $250 billion. However, what’s most interesting in the Facebook bump isn’t the simple fact that it is now worth more — shares and markets gyrate. Instead, it’s the reasons why analysts are more bullish that are notable: Piper cited the Oculus Rift headset as a coming revenue source, while RBC gave the top line potential of Instagram as key to Facebook’s value. Translating those points slightly, it seems that investors are taking into account the revenue side of Facebook’s past purchases, and are adjusting their expectations higher as those acquisitions mature into income streams. That concept underscores how well the social company has done its recent acquisitions.


• How Beacons Are Helping People Network at Cannes, As Festival Tests the Technology for a Second Year: The Cannes Lions festival is testing out beacon technology in the official Cannes Lions app for the second year in row, upping the number of location-based devices set up around venues from fewer than 10 last year to 100. The Around Me section of the app employs location-based targeting to find people who have check into venues. Festival goers can also see which sessions are the buzziest. On top of the geo-targeting, the app crawls LinkedIn profiles to connect online connections offline. And as many ad executives know from cold LinkedIn pitches, that often means meeting someone in real life for the first time. The app sends out mass push notifications to everyone about schedule changes and information about the event. If the beacons detect that someone has stayed in a session for 15 minutes or more, the app will automatically save the session as a favorite. The liked panels then serve as a virtual icebreaker for attendees to find common interests.


• What Online Retailers Should Know About Amazon Business: Amazon Business has replaced AmazonSupply. Amazon Business features a simplified layout with fewer ads and includes products suitable for business purchase. Plus, unlike AmazonSupply, third-party sellers are invited to join Amazon Business. Sellers must be approved to sell on Amazon Business. There are 45 active professional categories within this new marketplace umbrella. To be accepted on Amazon Business, you must meet a sales minimum and have an acceptable seller rating to demonstrate a high level of customer satisfaction. Once approved, you’ll need to set up a Business profile. You’ll then be able to use special features like business-only pricing, quantity-based pricing and more. Buyers must be approved to buy on Amazon Business. To get a buying account on Amazon Business, shoppers need to create a new account and register tax information. Once done, they can add buyers and share payment and shipping information. Amazon Business supports business credentials. Credentials include “ISO 9001 certified,” “Minority Owned” and other quality, sourcing and social responsibility goals.


• The Internet of Things Has Vast Economic Potential, McKinsey Report Says: A study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the Internet of things, a term for sensor-laden machines connected to the web, will in the year 2025 create between nearly $4 trillion to $11 trillion in economic benefits globally. That includes profits to device-makers, efficiencies, new businesses and savings to consumers from better-run products. It is difficult to measure the current economic benefit though, because most people now working with the technology are still in the early investment phase. The biggest gains will be made by companies that figure out how to adapt to the new technology, the report said. On an oil-drilling platform, for example, this might mean knowing by the temperature or chemical changes in a pump that something may have happened upstream, away from the pump. In managing city traffic, this could mean learning how to correctly balance information from cars, roads and traffic lights. “This puts a premium on predicting incidents based on data from a multitude of sources,” said Michael Chui, one of the report’s authors. But it will be a challenge for companies to find ways to both organize and take advantage of that information.


• Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up: Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No.?2 Box and No.?3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.


• Now you can use Facebook Messenger without Facebook: Are you one of the 1.44 billion people who use Facebook? Then this post isn't for you. The company made an announcement Wednesday for those other folks -- the Facebook holdouts who are probably tired of being pestered by their friends to give in and sign up already. Now they can talk to their friends on Facebook without having to open account, via Messenger. The option is limited, for now, to people in the United States, Canada, Peru and Venezuela. But non-Facebook users in those countries can use all of the Messenger features, including group and multimedia messaging, by simply signing up for a Messenger account. "With this update, more people can enjoy all the features that are available on Messenger – including photos, videos, group chats, voice and video calling, stickers and more," the company said in an official blog post. "All you need is a phone number."Communication, generally, has become a bigger focus for Facebook, which is attempting to to build a family of social apps that extends beyond its core social network. Giving Messenger a larger potential install base is an easy way for Facebook to continue that spread, although its growth shouldn't worry WhatsApp users. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no plans to merge the two services any time soon.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 24

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• Gloves Off in China as Banks, Alibaba Invade Each Other’s Turf: This week, Alibaba is launching MYbank, an online lender that will tap into Chinese savers’ record $7.8 trillion of deposits and a banking revenue stream that’s forecast to double by 2020. Banks have been striking back by pushing into the business Ma pioneered in China, online malls. The moves are blurring the lines between banking and e-commerce as China’s government continues encouraging competition in the finance industry and as Chinese increasingly use computers and mobile phones to bank and shop. “China’s banks have woken up and realized that the challenge from Alibaba’s entry into banking is for real,” said David He, a Hong Kong-based partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group Inc. “For them, doing e-commerce is a defense as well as a counterattack.” Banking giant ICBC, which as the world’s most profitable company dwarfs Alibaba’s net income by more than 10 times, set up a platform allowing retailers to sell the bank’s customers wine, shampoo, appliances and more. China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and others are also getting into the action. ICBC’s site, called Easy to Buy, is forecasting sales of 300 billion yuan this year, after tallying 130 billion yuan so far since January. By comparison at Alibaba, its Tmall logged 763 billion yuan in sales last year. JD.com ranked second at 260 billion yuan.


• Google launches free streaming service ahead of Apple Music debut: Google launched a free version of its music streaming service on Tuesday, as it sought to upstage the debut of Apple's rival service next week. Google Play Music has offered a $9.99 per month subscription service for two years but Tuesday's launch is the first free version of the streaming service. It is available online and will be available on Android and iOS by the end of the week, Elias Roman, Google product manager, said. Apple said earlier this month it would launch a music streaming service on June 30 for $9.99 per month along with a $14.99 per month family plan, with a free three-month trial. As with other streaming services, such as Spotify and Rhapsody, Google Play Music curates playlists. Users can tailor playlists based on genre, artist or even activity, such as hosting a pool party or "having fun at work. Unlike Google's subscription music service, the free service will carry ads, be unavailable offline and exclude certain songs.


• Instagram Overhauls Search Feature to Surface More Trending News: Instagram unveiled a massive overhaul to its search feature on Tuesday in an effort to bring users into the app more often, particularly during breaking news events. The new feature lets users search for images by location and includes a section for trending places and hashtags, none of which was available before. The trending places feature will surface both local and national trends so topics will differ based on your location. Instagram is also getting into the curation game that has become popular with other social networks like Snapchat and Twitter over the past few months. Instagram will feature two themed, rotating categories at a time with titles like “Extreme Athletes” or “Towering Rocks.” The images in these feeds will be selected based on a mix of computer algorithm and human curation by the company’s community team. Instagram is often lauded for its simplicity. But in the case of Instagram’s old search feature, simplicity may have actually been holding the app back. The old version of the app allowed for hashtag and people searches, but required different tabs for each. The new search feature will return hashtags, people and locations all from the same search bar in addition to the new trending sections. A useful search tab should benefit Instagram in multiple ways. For starters, it’ll help people find more content they want to see and make the app more useful in the process. More importantly may be the trending places and hashtags feature. Systrom says that Instagram can be a place for news, where people go to learn about and follow along with the day’s important trending topics.


• Report suggests millions of Uber rides in China are fakes reported by drivers in order to collect Uber’s high driver subsidies.: A new report on Chinese tech site Tencent Tech suggests that millions of Uber’s booked rides in the country are fakes – fraudulent fares reported by drivers in order to collect Uber’s high driver subsidies. Faking fares – which some drivers refer to as “acupuncture” – works like this: first, you buy an Uber driver account. There are plenty available for sale on sites like Taobao, and many even come with helpful “how to fake rides” guides. Once you’ve got your account, you partner up with a passenger using the consumer Uber app. With location services turned off, the passenger submits a fare from point A to point B. You drive the fare with no passenger, return the money paid by the passenger, and then split the driver subsidies Uber will pay you – which may be several times the price of the fare itself. This “acupuncture” phenomenon it doesn’t only affect Uber. But drivers told Tencent Tech that because Uber’s subsidies are the highest, virtually all of the faking right now is taking place on Uber’s platform because it is the most profitable. Uber reportedly does have the technological capability to shut down fake rides entirely, but is concerned that doing so would slow its genuine organic growth because being overly strict could result in false positives, banning real drivers and passengers who aren’t cheating the system.


• Qualcomm in Venture With Chinese Chip Maker: China’s largest maker of chips has a new plan to help it close a wide gap with rivals, and the company has found some unlikely partners to help. The company, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, also known as S.M.I.C., said on Tuesday that it would form a new company with a leading Belgian microelectronics research center and Qualcomm, the American chip giant, to help it develop and produce new generations of advanced semiconductors that work as the brains of numerous electronics products, like smartphones and servers. Four months ago, China imposed a $975 million fine on Qualcomm, saying it violated anti-monopoly law, and forced it to reduce sharply the licensing fees it charges Chinese smartphone makers for its communications chips. This really is Qualcomm playing nice with the Chinese government,” said Mark Hung, a semiconductor analyst with Gartner. Chinese companies like SMIC. have greatly lagged behind rivals like Samsung Electronics and Intel, partly because of export restrictions on the sophisticated tools and machines required to produce the most advanced chips. In 2013, China imported $232 billion worth of semiconductor materials, more than it spent on petroleum. To close the gap, Beijing has pledged a huge amount of resources. “The Chinese government has been very persistent and insistent in their policies. They want local chip manufacturing there, and this is another leak in the dike. It’s another part of the steady progress on their side.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 23

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• India's government proposes tax benefits for merchants for promoting card payments: Government today proposed income tax benefits for people making payments through credit or debit cards and doing away with transaction charges on purchase of petrol, gas and rail tickets with plastic money. In a draft paper for moving towards cashless economy and reduce tax avoidance, the government also proposed to make it mandatory to settle high value transactions of more than Rs 1 lakh through electronic mode. In order to incentivise shopkeepers, it has proposed tax rebate to them provided they accept a significant value of sales through debit or credit cards. The proposals are aimed at building a transactions history of an individual to enable improved credit access and financial inclusion, reduce tax avoidance and check counterfeiting of currency. “Tax benefits in terms of income tax rebates to be considered to consumers for paying a certain proportion of their expenditure through electronic means,” said that draft proposals for facilitating electronic transactions on which the government has invited comments till June 29. The paper said the tax benefits could be provided to merchants for accepting electronic payments. “An appropriate tax rebate can be extended to a merchant if at least say 50 per cent value of the transactions is through electronic means. Alternatively, 1-2 per cent reduction in value added tax could be considered on all electronic transactions by the merchants,” it added.


• Facebook gaining ground on YouTube in video ads: Facebook is gaining ground on Google's YouTube as an outlet for big companies to market their products via online videos, the fastest growing category of Internet ads, a report published on Monday said. London-based Ampere predicts a new advertising "arms race" between the two rivals, neck and neck in terms of audience sizes with around 1.4 billion to 1.3 billion monthly active users, respectively for Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is morphing from a platform most advertisers use for building general brand awareness to one that can deliver "pre-roll" advertisements that marketing companies prefer for ensuring their messages are actually viewed. Currently, YouTube remains a more flexible marketing platform, offering advertisers the full range of video ads which run before, during or after a video program is shown. Differences in ad formats translate into the rates the Internet platforms can charge advertisers. While YouTube charges advertisers when an advertisement has been viewed, Facebook offers the less advertiser-friendly model of charging once three seconds of the video have been delivered, Ampere noted. Most content providers now use Facebook for branding and awareness purposes, but trial revenue-sharing deals with the National Football League and Fox Sports in the United States pose a serious challenger to YouTube's lead. Online video is now growing faster than any other digital category or subcategory, rising 33 percent in 2014, and is forecast to grow 29 percent a year through 2017, Zenith said.


• Oracle extends cloud offerings, looks to compete with Amazon: Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition with Amazon. "We're prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price," said Ellison in a webcast presentation on Monday, after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle's cloud. The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud. Oracle, which calls its cloud offering the Oracle Cloud Platform, will provide a cost-effective alternative to Amazon, said Ellison. "Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it's one-tenth their price," said Ellison. Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. Oracle's cloud business is growing quickly, running at a rate of about $2.3 billion a year in revenue, based on last quarter's figures. By comparison, Amazon and Microsoft get about $6.3 billion each in cloud revenue per year.


• Tech Titans Come Together To Develop Common Container Standard: Docker, CoreOS, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are now working on a new standard for software containers with the help of the Linux Foundation. Docker may have become synonymous with containers, but it’s not the only container format around and not everybody agrees that it should become the standard format. Docker and CoreOS had looked like they were on a collision course, and having even more container formats wasn’t likely going to help the overall ecosystem. Now, however, the two companies are going to work together with other stakeholders on the Open Container Project (OCP), which will be housed under the Linux Foundation. The OCP is a nonprofit organization that is “chartered to establish common standards for software containers.” The Docker container format and runtime will form the basis of the new standard, and Docker is donating both the draft specifications and the code around its image format and runtime engine to get the project started. The main idea here is that developers should be able to package their applications in a container and be confident that it will run in any runtime, whether that’s Docker, CoreOS’s rkt, or projects like Kurma or Jetpack. That standard should be vendor neutral and development should happen out in the open. Containers are isolated user instances that allow applications to be deployed easily; Docker uses resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces to allow independent "containers" to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines.


• As Quick as a Taylor Swift Tweet, Apple Had to Change Its Tune: Taylor Swift’s victory in a one-day battle against Apple this week showed she has a rare power to influence the music business itself, at a time of deep anxiety among artists big and small about the value of their work. On Sunday morning, Ms. Swift wrote a diplomatic but stern Tumblr post taking Apple to task for not paying royalties on test drives of its new streaming music service, set to open on June 30. “We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she wrote. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” By midnight Sunday, Apple — one of the most powerful companies in the world — had capitulated to the 25-year-old pop star, saying it would pay royalties on all music for the three-month trials. One of its senior executives, Eddy Cue, even said he called Ms. Swift personally to give her the news. The backdrop to that decision was much more complex than the quick exchange might have indicated. For more than a week, independent labels around the world had been complaining about Apple’s proposed terms, saying that even for 90 days, a big drop in revenue from Apple — by far the music industry’s largest sales outlet — could be devastating. But even though Mr. Cue carefully noted in interviews that the company’s decision had been made with those labels in mind, its hurried announcement late Sunday suggested that it was Ms. Swift’s shaming that led Apple to change its tune. “She is the most powerful person in the music industry,” said David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and an advocate for artists’ rights. “She is able to bring the debate to the mainstream.”


• Uber Is Negotiating a $2 Billion Credit Line With Banks: Uber is negotiating a $2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks. The car-booking company that has roiled transportation markets worldwide by letting people hail rides from their smartphones, had initially sought a $1 billion revolving loan before boosting the size as more banks sought to participate, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. San Francisco-based Uber raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt at the beginning of the year from Goldman Sach’s wealth-management clients

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 22

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• Amazon Upgrades Its Review Software: Amazon is giving its reviews system an overhaul, using new software it says will surface more helpful commentary from buyers. The company says it is using machine learning to provide more frequent, more useful updates to reviews on its U.S. site. Among other things, that means that more recent reviews will show up near the top of a product listing, and a product’s five star review score may change more often. Via CNET: “The new system will give more weight to newer reviews, reviews from verified Amazon purchasers and those that more customers vote up as being helpful. A product’s 5-star rating, which previously was a pure average of all reviews, will also become weighted using those same criteria.” While Amazon doesn’t mention this, it’s also reasonable to assume that the company hopes the overhaul will help push down bogus reviews, a problem that has long-plagued the site but which it usually doesn’t want to talk about.


• Twitter Expands Shopping Experience With Product Pages: Twitter is finally taking advantage of its massive amount of tweet data to encourage its users to shop.The social network is rolling out product pages and what the company calls Collections on Friday, distinct pages within the service where you can see info on specific products or places and actually make a purchase. A product page will include things like tweets about the product, user reviews, pricing and, in some cases, a buy button. Collections are more of a browsing experience, which include a handful of recommended products and places selected by a brand or high-profile curator. For example, Ellen DeGeneres has a Collection highlighting the “Best of the Ellen Shop,” where you can browse Ellen-branded products or others she has featured on her show. The new feature is a pretty expansive change to Twitter’s previous shopping experiments. Those were limited to promoted tweets that included a buy button for a single item. The Collections and product pages aim to take advantage of the fact that Twitter already has lots of information about products and services from its user base. It’s now collecting that info to help educate a potential buyer. For now, Twitter is simply getting the product off the ground and isn’t taking a cut of sales revenue from most partners, but taking a slice off the top seems like a logical next step.


• How Oculus and Cardboard Are Going to Rock the Travel Industry: Relegated to geeky fantasy for years, Virtual Reality hardware is suddenly cheap, portable, and there for the travel-brand taking. Travel companies such as Thomas Cook, Qantas Airways, and Destination BC in Canada are also creating their own promotional VR videos. Currently, in 10 select Thomas Cook store locations in the U.K., Germany, and Belgium, you can strap on a Gear VR headset and try your tour before you buy: Walk through the billowing blue curtains of a Santorini hotel balcony, ride a helicopter above Manhattan's skyline. This year Cook has seen VR-promoted New York excursion revenue increase 190 percent. The next step, according to Ryan, is to go beyond brick-and-mortar stores and deliver VR brochures into homes.


• China to promote cross-border e-commerce as incomes rise: China will increase support for cross-border e-commerce as the world's second-largest economy shifts from manufacturing to higher-value services, the government said. The government released policy guidelines on Saturday that include tax policies aimed at boosting domestic consumption and pilot projects to ease overseas payments. Chinese e-commerce firms will be given state support on international projects while credit insurance services will also be introduced. Customs will streamline clearance of goods and quality supervision agencies will allow collective declaration, examination and release of goods. There will be tax sweeteners on e-commerce retail exports and settlement of payments in yuan will be promoted, it added. The policy document followed Friday's announcement that China will allow full foreign ownership of some e-commerce business to boost competitiveness.


• Chinese firms pour money into U.S. Research and Development in shift to innovation: Surging investment by Chinese companies in U.S. research labs is yielding a fast-growing trove of patents, part of a push to mine America for ideas to help China shift from being the world's factory floor to a driver of innovation. Largely absent from American research hubs a decade ago, Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE Corp are now using U.S. researchers to create patents ranging from new software to internet infrastructure, according to an analysis of Thomson Reuters' global intellectual property database. Patented inventions by Chinese firms that involved at least one U.S. researcher roughly doubled worldwide in each of the last three years, reaching 910 in 2014.


• Attack Gave Chinese Hackers Privileged Access to U.S. Systems: Undetected for nearly a year, the Chinese intruders executed a sophisticated attack that gave them “administrator privileges” into US government networks. The hackers began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China, investigators told Congress last week in classified briefings. The hackers’ ultimate target: the one million or so federal employees and contractors who have filled out a form known as SF-86, which is stored in a different computer bank and details personal, financial and medical histories for anyone seeking a security clearance. “This was classic espionage, just on a scale we’ve never seen before from a traditional adversary”


• US carrier Sprint bows to net neutrality, saying it won’t throttle data anymore: To make sure it stays on the right side of net neutrality, Sprint will no longer slow down its customers' mobile data when its cell sites are congested, the company says. The decision is an early sign that the federal government's new rules for Internet providers are having an effect. Sprint's policy, which it said lasted for less than a year, was to slow down mobile data temporarily for data hogs in a congested area. The throttling affected the heaviest 5 percent of data users covered by a given cell site, and when the congestion eased, the restrictions were lifted.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 19

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• Alibaba Finance Arm Is Valued Above $40 Billion in Latest Funding Round: Alibaba’s finance affiliate, which runs China’s biggest online payments business, closed a private placement valuing the unit at more than $40 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ant Financial sold stakes to external investors, including China Development Bank Capital Company. China’s National Social Security Fund has become a strategic investor, the finance arm said on its official microblog account, without giving details of the investment. The pension fund acquired about 5 percent. Ma spun off the finance operations into a new company he controls in 2011, citing the risk of foreign ownership restrictions. Yahoo and SoftBank held a majority of Alibaba at the time. Prior to Alibaba's record $25 billion IPO in September, the companies struck a new deal that entitled the e-commerce operator to a share of earnings at Ant Financial, which is moving into new businesses, including money-market funds. Alipay, which has more than 800 million registered users, is a service similar to PayPal. Alibaba is entitled to either a third of Ant Financial shares or a one-time payout equal to 37.5 percent of the equity value, according to Alibaba’s IPO prospectus. Alibaba also holds perpetual claim to 37.5 percent of Ant Financial’s pretax earnings until it receives a third of the financial arm’s equity.


• Chinese government deals help nurse Alibaba's bottom dog cloud business: Alibaba is an underdog in the global cloud computing industry, but it has one thing going for it: it's Chinese. The firm scored a minor deal with China's northeastern port city of Dalian to build a cloud computing center and provide online government services such as bill payment.The pact is a small part of a growing portfolio of similar cloud services tie-ups between Alibaba and government bodies around China and comes against a backdrop of Beijing's deepening paranoia about foreign technology. The domestic alliances will help Alibaba's cloud unit Aliyun, literally "Ali Cloud", build scale and gain experience before any global campaign to challenge market leaders Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google. "China wants control of its information, of its data, of its news, of its technology food chain, and so there are huge opportunities." For the time being, Aliyun is small.It accounted for just 1 percent of Alibaba's overall revenue for the year ended March 31. But it says in China it has the biggest market share in cloud computing. Aliyun has forged cloud agreements with more than a dozen Chinese provinces and cities including Hainan, Guangdong, Tianjin and Shanghai. It also works with China Meteorological Administration, China Central Government Procurement Center and the state railway service center. The deals range from developing cloud storage solutions to helping the government of the southern province of Guizhou gather and crunch data to optimize its traffic lights. Aliyun in April announced a deal with state oil and gas giant Sinopec, to create a cloud system to track its petrochemical production chain and emissions. Cheng Jing, an Aliyun director who deals with government agencies, said his primary consideration was the bottom line. "First, we have to be sure that our services can make money. If these services can also promote Ali's relationship with the government then that's a good thing."


• Traders bet on Twitter near-term gains as takeover chatter persists: Dick Costolo's decision to step down as Twitter's chief executive last week failed to stem the weeks-long slide in the company's shares, but options traders appear to be betting on a near-term rebound. The stock has shed more than a third of its value since Twitter reported first-quarter results in April. It edged up 6 cents to $34.62 on Thursday, after touching a year-low of $33.51 on Tuesday. Since May, open interest in calls, usually used for bets on the shares rising, has swelled at a faster pace than the open interest in puts. For every open put contract, 1.7 calls are open, the most bullish for this ratio since early March. Traders have bid up near-dated options, with the demand for upside reflected in options skew - the difference between expectations for volatility priced into puts versus calls. Normally, puts tend to have a higher premium relative to calls, because people are willing to PAY more to protect against risk of losses. For Twitter, calls have become more expensive than puts. "The upside skew in Twitter most likely reflects the possibility of an upside event between now and July expiration," Place said."It seems that everyone and their uncle is betting that Twitter will be bought by another firm"


• A Fearless,“Fail fast, fail often” Culture Fuels America's Tech Culture, and Why Europe Trails: Here’s a stark comparison: In the United States, three of the top 10 companies by market capitalization are technology companies founded in the last half-century: Apple, Microsoft and Google. In Europe, there are none among the top 10. There are institutional and structural barriers to innovation in Europe, like smaller pools of venture capital and rigid employment laws that restrict growth.Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures. “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States. Bankruptcy codes are far more punitive, in contrast to the United States, where bankruptcy is simply a rite of passage for many successful entrepreneurs. There is also little or no stigma in Silicon Valley to being fired; Steve Jobs himself was forced out of Apple. Europeans are also much less receptive to the kind of truly disruptive innovation represented by a Google or a Facebook

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 18

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• Profitable and Growing Fast, Fitbit Prices I.P.O. at $4.1 Billion Valuation, Above Top of Its Range: Fitbit begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the symbol FIT. The company, which sells popular wearable fitness-tracking devices like the Fitbit Surge bracelet, priced its initial public offering at $20 a share on Wednesday, a dollar above its already heightened price range of $17 to $19 a share. At that level, the company will raise $732 million for itself and its selling stockholders after increasing the number of shares to be sold to 36.6 million from 34.5 million. The price values Fitbit at $4.1 billion. Its debut is a bet that consumers will continue to buy fitness bands as other, more complex smartwatches like the Apple Watch and various Android competitors hit stores. In addition to tracking users’ heart rates and steps, the newer devices offer access to email, text messages and other applications. Fitbit faces another challenge in the form of legal fights from a rival, Jawbone, which filed two lawsuits over the last month. One accuses the company of patent infringement, which could lead to a ban on importing Fitbit devices or important parts. The other accuses Fitbit of poaching employees who then illicitly stole confidential information from their former employer. Fitbit has denied those accusations. Investors for now appear undaunted by those challenges. Last year, Fitbit earned $131.8 million, reversing a nearly $52 million loss in the previous year. Its sales more than tripled during that same period, to $745.4 million.


• GitHub to Seek $2 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round: GitHub, a startup that helps companies and developers build software, is seeking to raise about $200 million in a new Series B round that may value San Francisco-based GitHub about $2 billion. The company works as a social coding platform, where a software developer can display a project and others can contribute. The company says more than 8 million people use the service, and it charges monthly subscriptions to store programming source code.


• Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, California regulators say: California's Labor commission has ruled that an Uber driver was an employee, not a contractor, a potentially costly precedent for the ride-sharing company. Uber unsuccessfully argued to the commission that drivers on its ride-hailing smartphone platform aren't employees, because it doesn't set their hours or force them to pick up riders. The commission ruled that Uber was more than a passive platform connecting drivers and riders. Instead, the commission said in its ruling, Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation,” vetting drivers, setting standards and establishing non-negotiable rates. The company can also kick drivers off the service if customers give them a low rating. Currently, Uber drivers take an 80 percent cut of fares, but they cover their own costs and pay their own taxes. The ruling could set a broad precedent if it is upheld. For Uber, the implications of counting its drivers as employees rather than contractors are substantial. It would suddenly have to pay for employees' health care benefits, worker’s compensation and payroll taxes, and be on the hook for costs like gas and car maintenance.


• Oracle sales, profit miss estimates; shares fall: Shares of Oracle, often seen as a barometer for the technology sector, fell 6 percent to $42.15 in extended trading after the company's earnings report.Revenue fell 5.4 percent to $10.71 billion. Revenue rose 3 percent on a constant currency basis. Net income fell to $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $3.65 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales from Oracle's cloud-computing software and platform service, an area keenly watched by investors, rose 29 percent to $416 million.


• Location Intelligence firm AdNear expands into Europe: Bangalore and Singapore-based AdNear Pte Ltd, which helps brands reach out to audiences by analysing time-bound location data, has ventured into Europe by establishing a beachhead in London. The company has appointed Ken Parnham, former managing director of data privacy management company TrustE, as general manager of Europe. AdNear was founded by Anil Mathews, who is also the company’s CEO, back in 2009. The company’s advertising platform is built on a proprietary hybrid geo-location platform, which helps to provide location awareness on mobile phones without GPS or operator assistance. It serves clients in India, Singapore, Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. AdNear leverages real geo-location, combined with consumer behaviour, to target relevant users within a geo-fence. All ads are displayed within mobile apps and they ensure further engagement as users can find their way to the advertised stores and use coupons among other things. Recently, the company had raised Series B funding of $19 million from Telstra Ventures, Global Brain, Sequoia Capital and JPM Private Equity Group. In November 2012, Adnear had raised $6.3 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners.


• 4 Microsoft Executives to Leave in Top-Level Shake-Up: Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under Satya Nadella, its chief executive. Mr. Nadella said that three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into fewer groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, former chief executive of Nokia, who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, head of its business solutions group. While Microsoft has a long history of bureaucratic reshufflings, they do not typically involve the departure of so many executives at once. Mr. Nadella’s decision to merge several groups into others effectively left a handful of Microsoft executives without clear roles. By far, the most significant of the changes is the merging of devices, which includes Xbox, Surface tablets, smartphones and other hardware products, with the Windows organization under Mr. Myerson. By grouping hardware and operating systems under one leader, the move undoes part of the reorganization by Mr. Ballmer.