Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 15

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Foxconn Starts Manufacturing Smartphones in India Amid Modi Push: Foxconn Technology Group started making its first smartphones in India as part of the Taiwanese company’s plan to expand in the South Asian nation. Production has started in Andhra Pradesh state in the nation’s south east, Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo said, declining to comment further. Models for clients Xiaomi Corp. and InFocus Inc. have started shipping from a facility in Sri City according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because it’s not been officially announced. Foxconn is looking to expand in India amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to boost manufacturing in Asia’s third-largest economy. Billionaire chairman Terry Gou, whose business empire gets half its revenue from Apple expects to open as many as 12 factories and create one million jobs in India by 2020, Foxconn said in a statement citing Gou. FIH Mobile, Foxconn’s phone manufacturing unit, expects to have multiple manufacturing sites in India, with none employing more than 10,000 people, the company said in May.


• Elaborate Hoax Sends Twitter Shares up 8% on Takeover Rumors - Until Story Confirmed False: A report claiming that Twitter received an offer to be acquired for $31 billion attributed to Bloomberg LP is fake, Twitter and a spokesman for the news and financial data provider said on Tuesday. Twitter shares jumped on the report, which was distributed on the Internet and closely resembled Bloomberg's news website. Its origins could not be immediately established. Cybersecurity experts said the fake website and report did not require a high level of skill. The domain name was registered anonymously and it may take months for authorities to determine who created the site. The report appeared on a site named bloomberg.market, rather than bloomberg.com. The bloomberg.market account was suspended at mid-afternoon Tuesday. The website carrying the false report was registered on July 10, according to a domain search on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The domain was registered in Panama to WhoIsGuard, a company which puts its own information as a web site registrant to mask the identity of the actual owner. Twitter options were heavily traded on Tuesday with overall options activity surging to 330,000 contracts, or more than twice normal volume, according to Trade Alert data. A large buyer appears to have bought 12,000 near-dated call options across multiple strikes at 11:37 am ET as the fake report went out and the shares started rising. Calls betting on shares rising above $37 by Friday were bought across multiple exchanges. "If I am an attorney at the SEC, I want to contact that person to ask about the reasoning behind the large positioning in the short-dated contracts,” said Steven Spencer, partner at proprietary trading firm SMB Capital in New York. Twitter ended the session up 0.9 percent at $36.72. Earlier, it jumped as much as 8.5 percent.


• Uber having trouble raising China fund, expects to lose $3B over next 3 years, says report in rival-backed tech site: On Tuesday, a report emerged on Chinese tech news site Sina Tech citing a “source close to Uber” as saying that the company has had trouble finding first-tier Chinese investors. Uber has reportedly asked Goldman Sachs for help with finding Chinese investors (a technique it has used before) but the company has thusfar been met with mostly rejections from top-tier Chinese and Asian investors. According to Sina Tech’s anonymous source, when Uber first started looking for investors, it wasn’t giving out detailed financial information about its China business beyond the somewhat questionable one-million-rides-a-day number it “leaked” earlier this summer. But when investors balked at the lack of information, Uber was forced to cough up more, and those numbers apparently don’t look great. Uber reportedly expects to do US$1.1 billion in total sales in China in 2015, but it also expects to post losses of US$1.1 billion there this year. Over the next three years, Uber apparently expects its China business to lose $3 billion. Any report in the Chinese tech press that cites only anonymous sources is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. And Sina Tech’s parent company Sina, through its Sina Weibo subsidiary, does own a share in Uber rival Didi Kuaidi, so “black PR” certainly can’t be ruled out. But it does seem odd that Uber still hasn’t announced its funding round despite having reportedly nabbed one of Didi Kuaidi’s top investors weeks ago.


• Google Takes on Apple With Smartphone Location Tracking Tools: Google is stepping up efforts against Apple’s location technology with new tools to link smartphones to nearby objects. The search giant on Tuesday introduced a new format called Eddystone that lets electronic beacons provide more specific locations and other information within applications, the company said in a blog post. The tools, which compete with Apple’s iBeacon technology, will enable smartphone users at a museum, for example, to get more information on a painting they’re looking at or to gain easy access to electronic bus tickets when they’re near a bus stop. Apple rolled out iBeacon in 2013. Using a low-energy Bluetooth signal, the software makes an iPhone’s proximity to certain items easier to track with the help of $10 signaling device beacons mounted on shelves and ceilings, each no bigger than a hockey puck. Other providers also have introduced location technology. Google’s Eddystone will be open to other platforms and has features that work on Android and the iPhone, the company said. Also, the company wants to integrate the system in its Google Now service, which gives users contextual information around them before they need to search for it.


• Meet Miip, the Ad Monkey in Your App, From InMobi: Naveen Tewari, chief executive of InMobi, thinks the 1.2 billion people who see ads served by his company’s mobile ad network are tired of being bombarded with generally irrelevant marketing messages. He says advertising should be friendly, more tour guide than tout, and help people discover new products and services that they actually want to buy. To test that proposition, InMobi has developed Miip, an animated monkey character that follows you from app to app, watches what you’re doing and suggests products that you might want to buy. The Indian company unveiled the technology at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday evening. The idea is that instead of seeing a regular ad in your app, Miip would appear, with a text bubble inviting you to check out products from advertisers that it thinks are relevant. If you’re playing classic rock on an app like Spotify, for example, Miip might suggest a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd T-shirt and offer you the option to buy it right from the app. Over time, if the monkey makes smart suggestions, the company hopes, you will be more inclined to click on it when you see it pop up in other apps and perhaps even take the time to tell it what kinds of things you most want to see. InMobi has been quietly testing Miip (pronounced Meep) for six months, trying it with about 5 million users. Early advertisers include the streaming music service Spotify, the travel agents Expedia and Orbitz, niche retailers like Joyus and TheRealReal, and several major American retailers that weren’t willing to publicly disclose their involvement. The Miip ads will begin appearing in 40,000 apps on Wednesday, and InMobi hopes to eventually convert most of the 200 million ads served by its network each month to the format.


• As tech firms track your location, advertisers zero in for the sale: In recent years, major retailers have restricted mobile to 10 percent or less of their ad budgets because of difficulty gauging their effectiveness and a limited ability to target shoppers by location. Targeting is now much easier, to the extent that a consumer walking past a given retail outlet can receive ads in his or her Facebook or Google app showcasing some particular product available at that store - perhaps offering a discount coupon to lure them inside. That is a tantalizing prospect for companies if it leads to actual sales. For Facebook and Google there are early signs the new technology is already paying off. Six advertising firm executives representing more than 50 clients combined, told Reuters in interviews that clients have invested significantly more since the holiday season in mobile ads as a result of this new technology. In some cases, these advertisers, including major retailers they declined to name, are investing up to 40 percent of their advertising budgets on mobile ads, four times as much as at the end of last year. Facebook and Google are widely considered to be at the forefront of this shift. Google claimed 37 percent of U.S. mobile ad revenue share in 2014 and Facebook had 18.5 percent, according to data from research firm eMarketer. Twitter, which had the third-largest share, was far behind with 3.6 percent of the share.


• Product developers are preparing to offer a variety of items to consumers that will allow scent to become a part of digital messaging.: This fall, the start-up Vapor Communications, for example, will introduce several devices to include subtle scents with books, movies and clothing. And the company will start mass production of its oPhone Duo, a tabletop device that can emit scents based on how an iPhone photo is labeled. Another company, Scentee, already has a scent product on the market. The product, also called Scentee, is a cartridge that plugs into a smartphone’s headphone jack. It can be set up with an app to emit a puff of fragrance when a text message or email arrives. Smells tended to linger and become muddled with other smells, but Vapor Communications says it has overcome that problem with a system that includes small plastic pellets with scents that are activated when air flows over them. The scent is not dispersed widely; users have to lean in close, as if sniffing a flower, to smell anything at all. All of the products depend on a small pellet called an oChip — the “o” in the product names is for olfactory. In the oPhone, each chip contains from one to four aromas. The chips are sold in packets of eight, grouped into “families” of similar smells, called Coffee, Foodie and Memory. A person who wants to describe the smell of a pasta sauce, for example, could choose notes of tomato, rosemary and parsley, which would then command the player to position those chips so the air would flow over them, combining the scents.