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.