Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 9

• Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet. 

• Apple's WWDC 2015: notable announcements from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference: Apple Streaming Music Service Launches June 30th At $9.99 A Month, $14.99 Family Plan. iTunes App Store Passes 1.5M Apps, 100B Downloads, $30B Paid To Developers To Date. iOS 9 Is Coming This Fall - Yep, Apple Maps Will Include Transit Directions In iOS 9. Apple Just Cloned Flipboard And Named It News. Apple Just Turned The iPad Into A Real Computer With QuickType. Apple Lets You Search Within Apps With A Deep Link Search API In IOS 9. Apple Rebrands Passbook To Wallet. Apple’s New Developer Program Offers iOS, OS X And watchOS Tools For $99. Apple Launches Beats1, A 24/7 Worldwide Radio Station. Apple Revives Ping As “Connect,” Letting Artists Share A Feed Of Music, Videos And Social Media.

• Uber Spends Heavily to Establish Itself in China. Fat with almost $6 billion in venture capital, Uber, based in San Francisco, is doling out bonuses up to three times the amount of its fares, in a bet that its exceptional rise in the United States can be matched in China. So far, its strategy is working, shattering prevailing assumptions that young American tech companies cannot compete against local rivals. In late May, Uber said it had created more than 60,000 jobs in China over the past month, with the spread of its service spurring protests from some taxi drivers. While China represents huge scale as a market, it has fended off the entry of just about every major Western technology start-up. Uber, a five-year-old company that operates in more than 310 cities and 58 countries worldwide, faces homegrown Chinese rivals like Didi Kuaidi, which has more than 90 percent of the market and is backed by two of the largest Chinese Internet companies, Alibaba and Tencent. It may also have to grapple with a fickle central government that could shut it out of the market overnight. Yet more affluent and cosmopolitan Chinese have flocked to Uber’s service, attracted by fares that are on average at least 35 percent cheaper than taxis, with the cars generally more luxurious than cabs and drivers who offer free water and are typically more polite. Uber is providing more than 100,000 rides a day in China, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s internal metrics, who declined to be identified because the numbers are confidential. That is about 10 percent of the total one million rides a day that Uber said it was getting companywide in December.

• Square Unveils Mobile Wallet-Friendly Credit Card Reader; Will Give Away 250,000 Devices To Drive Adoption. Square, the San Francisco-based payments processing start-up, unveiled a new credit card reader on Monday, one capable of accepting mobile payments like those made through Apple Pay and Android Pay, among other methods. The new reader, which Square said will be widely available this fall, operates wirelessly for merchants who want to accept contact-less mobile payments. It also accepts so-called EMV enabled Credit Cards, a technology that includes a chip built into credit cards for added security. Square said the new reader will cost $49. The company is giving away about a quarter of a million of the new devices to encourage adoption by small and medium-sized businesses. For Square, the timing of the release is crucial. Credit card processors and merchants across the greater retail industry are up against a deadline later this year, when merchants must switch over to accepting EMV-based credit cards. If they fail to do so, the merchants will become liable for any potential credit card fraud on the transactions they process. But to prepare for EMV — which stands for EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa, the major credit networks that created the new standard — merchants must update their payments acceptance terminals, a process that for some may prove costly. That is where companies like Square — along with rivals like First Data‘s Clover, Poynt and Shopify — are inserting themselves. To capitalize on the EMV shift, these companies are offering their next-generation payment-acceptance terminals to small and medium-sized businesses that are required to switch to updated technology in any case. Many larger retailers are already rebuilding their own in-house payments infrastructures to accept EMV transactions and, in many cases, mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Android Pay. But options like Square’s reader, as well as those like Clover and Poynt, cater to small businesses that need only buy an off-the-shelf hardware terminal to become EMV compliant. In the long run, that’s good for companies like Apple and Google. The more EMV readers small merchants buy, the more places those companies’ mobile wallets will be accepted.

• Alibaba’s Jack Ma Visits U.S. to Lure Businesses Into China As Domestic Growth Sputters. Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma will visit New York and Chicago this week, seeking to pitch China’s middle class as a growth opportunity for American business and his e-commerce company. Ma is looking for revenue beyond China, where the nation’s economy is projected to grow at its slowest pace since 1990. One strategy is to position Alibaba as a cross-border e-commerce solution, enabling China’s 557 million Internet users to buy things from anywhere in the world. Alibabas chairman is scheduled to arrive Monday in New York City and plans a dinner with leaders of select global brands, the company said. His calendar on Tuesday includes lunch with members of the Economic Club of New York at the Waldorf-Astoria New York. Already, Costco and Macy’s Inc. are among U.S. companies reaching Chinese shoppers through Alibaba. Ma has set a goal of raising the company’s revenue from outside China to 50 percent from the current 4 percent. Cross-border sales into China and sales through Alibaba platforms to consumers outside China would constitute international revenue. Shares of Alibaba fell 2.7 percent to $88.29 in New York on Monday, extending this year’s decline to 15 percent.
  

• At the 11th annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago: Doing E-Commerce While Avoiding Amazon. US e-commerce is showing the first signs of maturing as a business. Figures from the research firm eMarketer show the rate of domestic growth falling from 16.5 percent in 2013 to 14.2 percent this year to 11.6 percent in 2018. By that point, e-commerce in the United States will still be less than 10 percent of all retail. The death of the physical store, so widely anticipated in the last few years, is nowhere in sight. One increasingly popular technique: allowing the customer to name his price. Members of PriceWaiter were doling out snacks and explaining how letting customers of a website decide how much they are willing to pay (within, to be sure, a narrow range) works out for both parties. “The merchants win by keeping the sale, and the customer gets a psychological victory — it feels like a win,” Another customer retention method, this one somewhat more fraught with peril: Put reviews on your site. This, of course, is an attempt to take away or at least neutralize one of the features that drove Amazon’s initial success. “Reviews instill trust in your brand and keep the customer coming back,” said Alex Rosen of PowerReviews, a back-end platform to making reviewing easier. He added that brands like to know, must know, when they are getting bad reviews. But strong indeed is the brand that will keep bad reviews on its own site. If many of the exhibitors at IRCE were trying to avoid Amazon, a few were taking it on directly. Justin Singletary said he spent $500,000 a few years ago to buy the Fulfillment.com web domain from eBay. “We saw a void in the marketplace — an opening to take care of the merchants themselves rather than the merchant’s customers,” he said. Asked who the merchants were, he demurred, saying they operated under nondisclosure agreements.With about 60 employees and one domestic warehouse, Fulfillment.com is still an early-stage start-up. Newegg, founded way back in 2001, is by comparison practically an institution. It says it is the second-largest online retailer in North America, with 28 million registered customers, about a tenth of Amazon’s. “Amazon wants to do everything,” said a spokeswoman, Claire Lin. “We want to be really good at one thing: selling tech products.”

• SEO for Images: Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping policies on Images. Amazon Suppresses Listings Without Images. The online world is becoming more and more image-centric. For retailers, images are an essential way to stand out from the crowd and attract shoppers across online channels. Good pictures are now a prerequisite on many marketplaces, and failing to comply with image requirements could lead to a drop in visibility or even suppressed listings. Amazon requires you to include an image with your listing, otherwise the listing will be suppressed from search and browse bars (which would make it very difficult to find). Shoppers would have to search using the product’s actual code rather than via search terms or browse nodes. To meet Amazon’s image requirements, your products must appear as close to reality as possible, meaning no props or accessories that don’t come with the product. Text, inset images, watermarks and logos are all no-go’s, too. Items must be pictured on a white background, with the product taking up most of the background space (ideally 85%). Pictures must be at least 500 pixels on one side to enable users to zoom in. We suggest going a step further and making your images at least 1600 pixels on the longest side for optimum quality. If you need help creating images with white backgrounds, try apps like Remove the Background.EBay Requires You to Have at Least One Image Per Listing. EBay requires images to be at least 500 pixels on the longest side (again, 1600 is better). Like Amazon, eBay asks for clean images without any text or artwork. Unlike Amazon, however, eBay does allow you to add watermarks, but only for distribution – not marketing – purposes. Watermarks should be no bigger than 5% of the total image area, have an opacity of no more than 50% and never obscure the item. Links from watermarks are also prohibited. You can no longer use stock images for your listings so as not to confuse buyers about the quality of the items. You can use eBay picture hosting to optimize your listing for mobile buyers. With eBay picture hosting, you can include up to 12 pictures in your listing, which will be visible on a variety of mobile platforms. EBay picture hosting can handle images of up to 7MB. Just remember not to compress your images before uploading. Google Shopping adverts rely heavily on product images, so making your photos great is essential for differentiating your items from the competition. Take images on a white, grey or light-color background and use images that are a minimum of 800 pixels so they look clear on high-resolution displays.