Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 8

• Amazon plans to sell $50 tablet: WSJ. Online retailer Amazon.com Inc plans to release a $50 tablet in time for the holiday season, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The 6-inch screen tablet comes with a mono speaker and is priced much lower than Amazon's Fire tablet, the cheapest variant of which is sold at $99. The company was not immediately available for comment. Amazon also plans to release 8-inch and 10-inch screen tablets, the report said. While other Amazon Fire tablets show advertisements as screen savers, it was not clear if the new 6-inch tablet's cost included ads, according to the report.

• Apple's New Ad Blockers Threaten to Remove Publishers' Mobile Ads: When Apple unveils its new iPhone and iOS 9 operating system this week, it could also drop a bomb on publishers, introducing ad-blocking technology that threatens to impact the revenue they make from smartphones. Ad blockers have been available on desktop browsers for years, but analysts say Apple's backing has the potential to make ad blocking more mainstream, making it available to a wider group of consumers. With Apple's new tools, developers can build ad-blocking apps that consumers can download to wipe out ads on mobile sites. Run-of-the-mill ads like banners and display placements are easy targets for ad blockers. But a small test by Adweek of a handful of apps shows that they remove native and branded content, too—putting the business model of publishers that have been at the forefront of native advertising—including BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Forbes and The Atlantic—at risk.

• Didi Kuaidi raises $3 billion as rival Uber China brings in $1.2 billion. Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Kuaidi is set to raise about $3 billion through its latest fundraising round, said two people familiar with the matter, just as funding at the Chinese unit of rival Uber reaches $1.2 billion. The inflow of cash raises the stakes between two of the world's most valuable start-ups. It also illustrates how investors are undeterred by the two companies spending heavily as they subsidize rides to gain market share, betting on China's Internet-linked transport market becoming the world's biggest. Didi Kuaidi, which has the largest market share of car-hailing apps in China, in July said it raised $2 billion, and that the amount may rise another "few hundred million" due to what it said was tremendous interest from global investors.

• One of Bollywood's biggest studios is betting it can win the online streaming race. Encouraged by an activist investor, the executive chairman of Eros International Plc is making its Eros Now streaming service a priority -- shelving a plan to create an old-fashioned television network to focus on video-on-demand optimized for mobile devices and priced for widespread adoption. The idea is to use the Mumbai studio’s bulging catalog of more than 2,000 films and new, exclusive series to build a critical mass of devoted users before Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. plant their flags in the world’s second-most populous country. “We thought, ‘We have the market share, we have the movies,”’ Lulla, 53, said in his London office on the city’s Georgian-era Manchester Square, looking every bit the mogul in a crisp, open-necked white shirt and slip-on shoes. “Why don’t we create our own platform?” Thanks to a production machine built by his father Arjan, who founded Eros in 1977, it releases upwards of 70 movies a year -- more than any U.S. rival. Eros is “exactly where Netflix wants to be in the next three to five years,” Lulla said. “I’m already there.”  Since a largely marketing-free soft launch about a year ago, Eros Now has attracted more than 26 million users. The official hard-sell unveiling was in July, with promises that movies will be available to stream immediately after they hit theaters. Promotions tease new digital series including “Khel,” a drama about “the twisted characters that populate the world of cricket,” and “Ponniyin Selvan,” based on a 2,000-plus-page novel about an ancient Tamil kingdom. A basic, ad-supported tier is free, while premium services cost from 50 rupees (about 80 U.S. cents) to 100 rupees monthly. Prices are higher outside India, where there’s opportunity in diaspora communities. In the U.S. it’s $7.99 -- which happens to be Netflix’s base cost.

• Samsung to Cut 10% of Headquarters Staff, Economic Daily Says. Samsung Electronics is preparing to cut 10 percent of workers at its headquarters, according to a Korean newspaper, as the world’s biggest smartphone maker loses sales to Apple and Chinese vendors. Samsung is targeting workers in the human resources, public relations and finance departments, Korea Economic Daily reported Tuesday, citing people it didn’t identify. The Suwon, South Korea-based company also plans to cut some expenses next year, the report added. Samsung declined to comment in an e-mail. The moves come after new high-end Galaxy smartphones failed to impress consumers, triggering five straight monthly declines and wiping out more than $40 billion in Samsung’s market value since April. The company’s share of global smartphone shipments fell more than 3 percentage points in the second quarter, and it’s no longer the top seller in China, the world’s biggest mobile-phone market. Samsung, which had 206.2 trillion won ($171 billion) in sales last year, is estimated to post about 200.2 trillion won in sales this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• Baidu to Boost Spending on India, Indonesia as Mobile Sales Boom: Baidu plans to boost investments in India and Indonesia as China’s largest Web search provider tries for a greater presence on smartphones. “They have a lot of characteristics that mimic China’s development,” Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Li said during an interview in Beijing on Monday. “There is no legacy of PC user behavior and probably mobile is going to have a very speedy development.” Baidu is spending on new businesses while locked in competition with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. In July, Baidu forecast sales below estimates, and Chairman Robin Li pledged to tap its $12 billion of cash to build out its shopping, taxi and delivery services amid China’s economic slowdown. China saw its first decline in smartphone shipments in six years during the first quarter, while India’s shipment volume surged 44 percent in the second quarter. India is now the world’s third-largest smartphone market. During the past two years, Baidu spent almost $1 billion on more than 20 investments, including Uber, travel website Qunar and video-streaming service iQiyi, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company is now exploring investments in the local education and medical sectors, Li said. The spending likely will be small, with Baidu interested in minority stakes as well as full acquisitions, she said. Baidu also is keen to make use of its relationships with educational institutions by providing student loans, President Zhang Ya-Qin said in a separate interview. It has issued 100 million yuan ($15.7 million) in loans, averaging 20,000 yuan each, since starting its lending program last month, he said.

• Facebook’s Messenger And The Challenge To Google’s Search Dominance. When Facebook announced M—an A.I.-powered personal assistant that lives inside Messenger—it fired a massive shell across Google’s bow. Indeed, if Facebook can successfully scale M to its entire audience (and WhatsApp’s, as well), this new product represents a direct assault on search and AdWords—the lifeblood of Google’s business. To understand how a digital personal assistant that lives inside a mobile messaging app represents a disruptive threat to Google, let’s look at why Google is in this situation in the first place. Google faces the classic innovator’s dilemma: somewhere in the recesses of its collective corporate mind, Google knows that keyword search—the current foundation of its empire—is not the future. Because Larry Page and Sergey Brin are visionaries, they know that the next-generation solution to the problem of search looks less like a clickable list of links and more like a primitive Star Trek computer or an early version of the A.I. from the movie Her. The future of search is an intelligent digital assistant that can complete tasks. Like Google today, the search engine of the future will be able to mine the vast expanses of the internet for relevant information and deliver it to you in milliseconds. But much unlike today’s Google, the future’s search engine will behave like a digital personal assistant that can understand and predict your needs, then deliver on them without requiring you to navigate to any web pages or tap around a bunch of apps. When you do ask for something, this search engine will not respond with a list of blueish links. Instead, it will respond with a definitive result or a completed task. When it doesn’t have the definitive result or can’t complete the task on the first pass, it will ask you further questions to get closer and closer, until the machine gets it right. it’s not yet clear if Larry Page and Sergey Brin would be willing to invest in an Alphabet spin-off that threatened to kill their golden goose: the risks are just so big, and the scale of the rewards so uncertain. Meanwhile, Siri remains a wildcard, Facebook is testing M, Microsoft is bringing Cortana to Android, and Slack is making a long-term run at the A.I. assistant game, too. This is why they call it a dilemma.

• AOL Scoops Up Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media for $238 Million: AOL has acquired mobile ad network Millennial Media for $238 million, or about $1.75 per share. The Millennial deal is the newest step in building out AOL's tools to compete in mobile advertising against behemoths like Facebook, Yahoo and Google. With the deal, Verizon-owned AOL is getting access to mobile inventory in Millennial's 65,000 apps—equivalent to 1 billion active global users in markets like Germany, France and Japan. It will also help build out its cross-screen programmatic platform called One. AOL's move is the latest sign of the times for mobile ad networks like Millennial (which spent more than $300 million on its own acquisitions in recent years) that have struggled in recent years to keep up in a fast-paced industry. With Millennial now off the table, it could set off a wave of other deals for tech companies to gobble up smaller mobile ad networks that specialize in video and location-based targeting. To stay ahead, Millennial zeroed in on building up its automated capabilities the past couple of years by acquiring two other big mobile players. In 2013, it bought real-time bidding platform Jumptap in for $209 million. Then in September 2014, Millennial acquired ad network Nexage for $107 million. 

• Zomato raises $60M from Temasek, Vy Capital, is a Unicorn now: Restaurant listings and review firm Zomato, which is expanding its business into food ordering and table reservation, has entered the coveted ‘Unicorn Club’ as it has just raised $60 million (Rs 390 crore when it sealed the deal) in a fresh round of funding from Singapore government’s investment company Temasek and existing investor Vy Capital. Although it has not disclosed the valuation, back-of-the-envelope calculations show Zomato is now valued around $1 billion. This would make it one of the eight odd Indian unicorns, a tag meant for startups sporting over $1 billion valuation. Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ola, One97 Communications, InMobi, Quikr and Mu Sigma are the other known Unicorns from India. Though some of these firms were launched years ago, their current core business took shape just around five years back. For Zomato, this is its third round of funding since last November when it bagged $60 million and followed it up with another $50 million this April. It was valued at $660 million (post money) in November 2014.