Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 22

• Uber’s Carpool Version, UberPool, Lands in India Before Palo Alto: Uber’s taking UberPool global, testing it soon in Bangalore, India. This is one of the first times the company has offered its carpooling version in another country (it’s also in France). Funnily enough, India will have access to UberPool before many suburban Uber markets in the United States like Palo Alto and San Jose. It’s possible the company plans to focus UberPool in dense cities, where it’s more likely to find matches between passengers heading the same way, instead of sprawling suburbs. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said recently at the Salesforce conference that UberPool isn’t as profitable as its original UberX service. UberPool in India might face some major challenges. GPS and mapping tools are a different beast in the South Asian country, where the city landscape changes daily, roads start and stop in unexpected places and businesses launch and disappear unexpectedly. With a population of 4.3 million — by comparison, San Francisco is at 1 million — Bangalore is known for major traffic issues. UberPool requires picking up people from different destinations quickly and efficiently so carpooling doesn’t add too much more time to a person’s commute. It’s a tough enough problem in the U.S.; navigating the maze of streets and traffic in India might be even harder. Uber will also be taking on its competitors — sources tell Re/code that Ola Cabs is launching its carpool version, Ola Share, in five cities soon. Long distance travel app BlaBlaCar, which offers a more traditional form of carpooling, is already live in India.

• Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over Profit: Many technology start-ups aim to become “unicorns,” the companies that get valued at $1 billion or more on their way to probable vast riches. Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen have no interest in that. As co-founders of Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding website that lets people raise money to help fund all manner of projects, including cooking gadgets and movies, Mr. Strickler and Mr. Chen could have tried to take their company public or sell it, earning millions of dollars for themselves and other shareholders. Instead, they announced on Sunday that Kickstarter was reincorporating as a “public benefit corporation,” a legal change they said would ensure that money — or the promise of it — would not corrupt their company’s mission of enabling creative projects to be funded. Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013. Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the public (such as Kickstarter’s mission to “help bring creative projects to life”) and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact. Kickstarter’s move builds upon its decision last year to become a B Corporation, a voluntary designation certified by a nonprofit group called B Lab. To become a B Corp, companies must meet rigorous environmental and social-responsibility standards, which they report annually to shareholders — though taking on the status has no legal impact. Other companies, including the e-commerce site Etsy, which went public in April, and Warby Parker, the eyeglasses retailer, have also opted to become B Corps.

• China cyber espionage is more than an irritant, must stop: U.S. U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice on Monday issued a stern warning to China before President Xi Jinping's visit that state-sponsored cyber espionage must stop, calling it a national security concern and critical factor in U.S.-China relations. "This isn't a mild irritation, it's an economic and national security concern to the United States," she said during remarks at George Washington University. "It puts enormous strain on our bilateral relationship, and it is a critical factor in determining the future trajectory of U.S.-China ties." President Barack Obama and Xi are expected to have an intense back-and-forth about the issue when the Chinese leader comes to the White House this week. "Cyber-enabled espionage that targets personal and corporate information for the economic gain of businesses undermines our long-term economic cooperation and it needs to stop," Rice said.

• Zumper: One-Third Of San Francisco’s Rent Is Attributable To VC Funding: Zumper, a venture-backed startup that focuses on creating a more efficient and transparent apartment rental marketplace, ran a study of housing costs in tech hubs across the United States. They’re arguing that one-third of San Francisco’s rents are attributable to venture capital funding. Last year, venture firms invested $49 billion across the United States. The vast majority of it, or 78 percent, went to just 10 American cities. The company looked at 3 million active listings across the United States last year. The study, done by the company’s housing economist and MBA student Andrew Duboff, isolated for factors including population, median household income, median home values, rental housing vacancy rates, and impact of local rent control ordinances. The Zumper study did not account for zoning regulations. “It was tough to isolate an apples-to-apples comparison for zoning regulations, so we ended up not including it,” said Devin O’Brien, who heads up marketing for Zumper. “That being said, vacancy rates does include a lot of this as a secondary measure. However, at the end of the day, we had an adjusted R-squared correlation of 0.83 for venture capital investment. It’s very strong.” Another study last year from UC Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti and University of Chicago’s Chang-Tai Hsieh argued zoning regulations are incredibly costly to the American economy. They found that if highly-productive cities like New York City, Boston and San Francisco had a more elastic housing supply, it could add 9.5 percent to the U.S. GDP.