Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 10

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

• Asia is driving Facebook's growth - Facebook now earns 51 percent of ad revenue overseas - Asia revenue growing 57% Y/Y; by contrast Europe lags the US. For the first time, Facebook has detailed ad sales outside the United States and Canada as a percent of worldwide sales. Overseas markets bring in more advertising revenue than the United States for Facebook, amounting to 51 percent of global ad sales in the first quarter. Growth in Asia was the fastest at 57 percent. While Europe is growing slower than the United States, the Asia Pacific region is ahead and a focus for Facebook. By comparison, Google said that 57 percent of its revenue was from international markets in the first quarter, although it did not break out ad revenue specifically. Mobile advertising represents more than 70 percent of Facebook's total ad revenue, and mobile is particularly strong and attractive to advertisers in emerging markets. Facebook is benefiting from exporters in China trying to reach people outside its country and from an influx of venture capital funding into India, giving start-ups funds for advertising. Total advertising revenue for the quarter increased 46 percent to $3.3 billion, the vast majority of Facebook's $3.5 billion in quarterly revenue. International advertising revenue rose 36 percent from a year earlier, Facebook said.

• Google Talent Departs for Unicorn Herd: Cloudera taps Google VP as Engineering Head, DropBox poaches Neal Mohan for top job: Cloud analytics software company Cloudera said today it has named Daniel Sturman as its VP of engineering. Sturman previously spent eight years at Google, where as VP of engineering he was in charge of keeping its computing infrastructure for services like Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine. Neal Mohan, Google’s VP for display and video advertising, is leaving for the top product job at Dropbox. He is part of a wave of execs departing the search engine in recent months for fast-growing, pre-IPO startups. More recently, Uber claimed Tom Fallows, who had led Google’s same-day delivery service, in November, followed by communication and policy chief Rachel Whetstone. Jawbone nabbed Fallows’s boss, Sameer Samat. Indian e-commerce unicorn Flipkart snatched two Googlers: The VP of product at Motorola and the person who ran the low-cost handset Android One project. On the smaller startup side, the ads product head at YouTube recently headed to Luxe, an on-demand parking startup. There’s more, but you get the idea. Google downplays exits, citing them as regular industry churn. But they come as Google’s core business faces rising threats and fears that it has grown too large and too uninspired to retain ambitious top tech talent. Apparently, the Google bench is not as rewarding for some as the thrill of a unicorn ride.

• Tinder Goes Through A Small Round Of Layoffs; spring-cleaning, not restructuring, company says. Tinder — one of the most popular dating apps currently available across the globe — laid off around 10 percent of its staff last week. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company laid off six members of the 60-65 member team, including three marketing employees and three engineers. TechCrunch was told this wasn’t part of a re-structuring, or even a result of leadership changes with new CEO Chris Payne and VP of Engineering Hugh Williams, but rather a spring-cleaning of sorts. Tinder has gone through much larger transitions before, including a lawsuit waged by former VP of Marketing Whitney Wolfe, the resignation of CMO Justin Mateen, and the transition of Sean Rad from CEO to President. Since then, Chris Payne has joined the team as CEO and Hugh Williams has taken over the engineering squad. The first year of monetization can be tricky for any social startup, and with the complexities of Tinder Plus — ads, premium features, oddball pricing, etc. — it would make sense to double-check that the team is as lean as possible.
• Tesla CFO retires; Firm Will Start Delivering Model X SUV in 3 to 4 Months, Says Elon Musk; Tesla Motors will begin deliveries of the Model X sport utility vehicle in three to four months, keeping close to the timeline the electric-car maker laid out earlier this year, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said. “The Model X will be a better SUV than the Model S is a sedan,” Musk, 43, said Tuesday at Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Musk said he’s been driving the latest prototype of the Model X, which Tesla first unveiled as a concept in February 2012 and previously sought to have ready by the end of 2014. More recently, Tesla told investors that initial deliveries to customers, several of whom have been waiting for more than three years, would begin late in the third quarter. Car-based SUVs are popular among female drivers, and in a January interview with Bloomberg, Musk said that the Model X is drawing more than half its orders from women. This is a contrast from the predominantly male customer base for its Model S sedan and the Roadster, which the Palo Alto, California-based company no longer sells. Tesla is also working on the Model 3, to be released in 2017 with a starting price of roughly $35,000. In addition, the company is readying another software upgrade for the Model S, including so-called autopilot driver-assist technology, and “may be able to get it out to early-access customers by the end of this month,” Musk said. Musk has said the company probably won’t turn net income positive until annual sales reach 500,000. “I expect we’ll achieve profitability in 2020,” he said. Musk is by far Tesla’s largest shareholder with 22 percent. He said in February that at the rate it’s growing, if all goes right, Tesla in a decade could be worth as much as Apple Inc., the world’s largest company by market valuation, is now. Musk also said CFO Deepak Ahuja will retire at the end of this year. Ahuja has been Tesla’s CFO since 2008, coming from Ford Motor and seeing Tesla through its June 2010 initial public offering. He said he’s retiring to pursue other life goals.
• Geek shortage stymies Israel's Tech Boom as Soviet emigre engineers retire, fewer youth study advanced science. Israel's technology miracle is threatened by a dearth of people in the very professions that made it happen: engineers and computer scientists. Companies say finding qualified workers is one of their biggest problems. And the shortage may worsen as fewer students sign up for the most advanced math classes, the building block for tech careers. This in an economy whose health depends on exports—about one-third of them from technology companies. One explanation for the shortage: Engineers who emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s are retiring. "We don't truly appreciate that immigration,'' says Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "Without that I'm not sure we would be 'Start-Up Nation'.Meanwhile, fewer of Israel's youth are choosing to study advanced math, and there's no increase in those studying advanced science, in part put off by the level of difficulty that could bring down overall grades. The number of high school students matriculating in advanced math dropped by a quarter from 2006, to 9,350 in 2014, according to the Trump Foundation, dedicated to improving education in Israel. Almost a year ago, a ministerial committee drew up a program to increase skilled manpower for the industry. Its plan includes recruiting more Israeli Arabs into the industry, training ultra-Orthodox men and women, luring Israeli engineers abroad to return home, and making it easier for non-Israelis to get work visas. It must be approved by the new cabinet and could be passed later this year. Some parts are in place: About 300 academics were persuaded to return to Israel last year out of 4,300 who registered as willing to do so.
• IBM plans Data Analytics push - bets on Spark, open-source software project that aims to be Hadoop successor.IBM has created a Technology Center in San Francisco to focus on a free open-source software project called Spark, according to IBM executive Rob Thomas. IBM hired 20 people within the last month, Thomas said in a video posted online June 3. “We’re going to be scaling this up to hundreds of people that are just focused on Spark open source and how we evolve that for the enterprise,” Thomas said. Spark is a framework developed originally at the University of California at Berkeley that helps companies process large amounts of data rapidly, by storing information within the fast memory of computers. It is seen by many in Silicon Valley as a potential successor to Hadoop, which has spawned a variety of companies including Cloudera, MapR Technologies and Hortonworks. “This is a much more significant bet than even what we have done on Hadoop to be frank,” Thomas said. “We think Spark is going to be enormous and change the face of enterprise IT.”
• Microsoft drops the price of the Xbox One and introduces a 1TB console; will sell $25 adapter that allows streaming games from console to PC. Microsoft announced Tuesday that it's dropping the price of the 500 gigabite Xbox One to $349, which had previously been advertised as a "promotional" price drop from $399. Now, Microsoft will offer a new 1 terabyte model -- that's double the storage of the old standard model -- for $399 instead, the company said in a blog post. The Xbox is still locked in a battle with Sony's PlayStation to control the console world, and this is a clear play to appeal to hardcore gamers. As gaming guide Kotaku and others have reported, Sony is, in fact, expected to release a 1 TB version of the PlayStation soon. Microsoft also had some more news on its growing efforts to mix Xbox and PC gaming; a major feature of its upcoming operating system is that users can stream games from their console to their computer. To that end, Microsoft also announced it will sell a $25 adapter that will allow players to use their wireless controllers with their current computers. The company has redesigned the controller to allow players to plug their gaming headsets into the controller, which gives them the option to control settings such as the volume of their microphone or the game's audio while they play. Microsoft has also improved the quality of the sound that comes through the controller. The new controller doesn't mean, however, that you have to buy all new headsets or other accessories. "All existing controller accessories will work with the updated controller," the company said.
• China's big biotech bet starting to pay off as country's patent portfolio burgeons. Years of pouring money into its laboratories, wooing scientists home from overseas and urging researchers to publish and patent is starting to give China a competitive edge in biotechnology, a strategic field it sees as ripe for "indigenous innovation." The vast resources China can throw at research and development - overall funding more than quadrupled to $191 billion in 2005-13 and the Thousand Talents Program has repatriated scientists - allow China to jump quickly on promising new technologies, often first developed elsewhere. These efforts were illustrated vividly in April - not without controversy - when scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou published results of a ground-breaking experiment to alter the DNA of human embryos using new gene editing technology. Data compiled by Thomson Innovation, a Thomson Reuters unit, shows China is a growing force in gene editing, with a burgeoning patent portfolio. More than 50 Chinese institutions are patenting in the field, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, universities, the Anhui Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Beijing Jifulin Biotech. Nearly a fifth of the 518 families of gene editing patents analyzed since 2004 were associated with Chinese entities. For top-tier institutions, "the level of available resources is incredible in terms of the freedom, the flexibility that gives key leading Chinese scientists to move very, very fast on a given research track if a new opportunity arises".