Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 20

Uber Gets Investment From Tata Fund to Expand in India: Tata Capital said a fund it advises will make a “significant investment” in Uber. to help the ride-sharing service expand in India. The investment by Tata Opportunities Fund will allow Uber to benefit from its network in the country, Tata Capital said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday, without elaborating. Tata Capital is part of the $109 billion coffee-to-cars conglomerate with over 100 group firms. The fund typically invests up to $100 million in its deals, its managing partner Padmanabh Sinha said. Uber in July said it would spend $1 billion to fan out to more Indian cities as the ride-hailing company targets to reach 1 million trips per day in the next six to nine months. Microsoft Corp. is said to have agreed to invest about $100 million in Uber valuing it at about $50 billion.

Taxi app GrabTaxi raises $350 million from CIC, others: Taxi-booking app GrabTaxi said it raised over $350 million from investors including sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation, in the Southeast Asian company's largest ever fundraising round. Other investors include hedge fund Coatue Management LLC and China's mobile car-ride hailing company Didi Kuaidi, GrabTaxi said in a statement, adding that it would use the funds to expand its private vehicle hire and motorbike booking services and invest in technology. Singapore-headquartered GrabTaxi competes with the likes of Uber and Rocket Internet's Easy Taxi in the city-state and some of the other Southeast Asian markets in which it operates.

Hacker's Ashley Madison data dump threatens marriages, reputations: Love lives and reputations may be at risk after the release of customer data from infidelity website Ashley Madison, an unprecedented breach of privacy likely to rattle users' attitudes towards the Internet. Hackers dumped a big cache of data containing millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations late on Tuesday, the latest cyber attack to raise concerns about Internet security and data protection. The hacker attack has been a big blow to Toronto-based assignation website firm Avid Life Media, which owns Ashley Madison and has indefinitely postponed the adultery site's IPO plans. The data dump began to make good on the hackers' threat last month to leak nude photos, sexual fantasies, real names and credit card information for as many as 37 million customers worldwide of Ashley Madison, which uses the slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair." The hackers' move to identify members of the marital cheating website appeared aimed at maximum damage to the company, which also runs websites such as Cougarlife.com and EstablishedMen.com, causing public embarrassment to its members, rather than financial gain.

Chinese Consumers are skipping straight from cash to mobile finance: Financial innovation is bubbling up around the globe, but China is where digital banking, investing, and lending have gone mainstream. Technology companies armed with financial apps are challenging banks and other intermediaries for a market with 1.3 billion people and $7.8 trillion of deposits. Tencent’s WeChat (called Weixin in Chinese), Alibaba’s Alipay arm, and Baidu are leading the way with digital wallets that let consumers manage their money via their phones. Traditional banking in China is balky, backward, and inefficient—creating ample opportunities for nimble tech companies such as Alibaba and Baidu. The huge, state-owned banks do some lending to consumers and private businesses, but they typically prefer making loans to state-owned enterprises that provide implicit government guarantees. For consumers, the government banks offer low interest rates on savings accounts, making new online funds and financial products with higher rates attractive. Regulators have indicated they are open to innovation. For one thing, digital banking leaves a trail that cash doesn’t. And it might help the Chinese government get a clearer snapshot of economic activity.

Mood-based playlists: How Spotify reinvented the playlist: Increasingly, music listeners are shifting away from genre labels like Hip-hop, R&B and Jazz, according to Spotify. What they really want is a set of tunes to fit their mood. It took Spotify a great deal of testing and data-crunching to arrive at that revelation. And it isn't stopping there. It's taking what it's gleaned from millions of users' listening habits to craft a new kind of song entirely: One that intensifies along with your running workout, matching its beats to your precise pace. When you speed up, it speeds up. When you slow down, it does, too. When Spotify began mixing its own playlists and tagging them ("Focus" for people who needed music to work to, or "Dinnertime Acoustic" for unwinding) it noticed a big uptick in interest, particularly when mood-based playlists were displayed right beside a traditional genre, according to Mark Silverstein, Spotify's head of product, tech and policy. Mood-based playlists aren't just different collections of songs; in the case of Spotify's commuting playlists, the company will occasionally mix in news, weather reports, even audio clips of Jimmy Fallon for some comedic diversity. As a result, fewer people began selecting genre playlists, and many more began opting for the mood-based playlists. And that carried over into the playlists people were making for themselves. That prompted Spotify to begin thinking about running more closely. For years, scientists have theorized about a link between music and exercise. One 2007 study suggested that fast, loud music was associated with faster running speeds and an increased heart rate. Another found in 2011 that music helped triathlon runners stave off exhaustion and run nearly 20 percent longer than their peers who ran in silence.

Snapchat’s leaked financials show just how big a bullet Facebook dodged: Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.: People are all abuzz about Snapchat's financials, which were leaked online Wednesday. If you haven't seen them, the outlook isn't good: Snapchat lost $128 million during the first 11 months of 2014. And it took in just $3 million in revenue over the same period, according to records obtained by Gawker. It's clear whom the leaked numbers hurt the most: chief executive Evan Spiegel and his investors. But if there's a winner in all this, it's Mark Zuckerberg. Snapchat, of course, was the company that famously rebuffed Facebook's offer of a $3 billion acquisition. Spiegel could have walked away with a huge sum of money. Instead, he's managing a struggling business that — almost four years, a big data breach and a Federal Trade Commission settlement later — still lacks a clear road to profitability. There's also nothing particularly surprising about a startup losing money; it would be unreasonable to expect massive profits right out of the gate. But of course, Snapchat has been out of the gate for some time now, and it's part of an ecosystem that's only grown more crowded and less compelling as a representation of The Future. Snapchat is also struggling because it's working in a market that's grown increasingly commoditized. There's an app for everything these days. Tell the average consumer you've come up with a hot new app and they're as likely to roll their eyes as to download it. Snapchat may be valued at $15 billion, but it's also part of a recent explosion in so-called "unicorns" (companies valued at $1 billion or more) that some venture capitalists think is unsustainable. Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.

Adoption of ad blockers is rising steeply, and could have serious consequences for the online advertising industry: Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.But in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail. In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast, increasing 41 percent globally in the last year. Today ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to see ads on the iPhone’s version of Safari and possibly in other apps that open web links. PageFair also sells technology that allows web publishers to determine if users are running blocking software — and then serves them ads anyway, going around the blockers. PageFair’s software, which Mr. Blanchfield said is currently being tested with a number of large websites, circumvents ad blocking by using “low-level networking” technology that he declined to detail in order to stay ahead of ad companies. Showing ads to people who have downloaded ad blockers sounds a little spammy. But in a twist, it may also lead to better ads. Here’s how: PageFair’s canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. That means the ads won’t feature animations, they won’t block content, and they won’t load “trackers” that monitor and report back to some unknown server what you do on a web page.