Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 30

• Alphabet Edges Toward Settling the Android or Chrome Question: For years, Google, now known as Alphabet, has supported two operating systems on two very different tracks: Android and Chrome. But now the company is nodding in the direction of Android. Google is working toward allowing its low-cost Chromebook computing devices to work on the popular Android operating system. The work will take place over the next year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Google is not indicating it plans to stop development of Chrome OS, but making Android work on Chromebooks opens the door to one of the few products that Chrome OS, the lesser-known operating system, had to itself. Chrome OS should not be confused with Google’s popular Chrome web browser. The first Android operating system for mobile devices was introduced about seven years ago as a direct competitor to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Since then, it has become the most widely used operating system in the world. Its development was led by an executive named Andy Rubin, who went on to lead much of the company’s robotics efforts before leaving Google last year. Google introduced Chrome OS about a year later, surprising some who wondered why the company needed two operating systems. Interestingly, its early development was led by Sundar Pichai, who is now the chief executive of the part of Alphabet that is still called Google. Chrome OS has gained a following in academia but very few other places. According to IDC, a market research firm, about 3.9 million Chromebooks were shipped to the American education sector last year. If Google should drop the Chrome OS, it will follow in the footsteps of Microsoft. The latest version of Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system is meant to run on both PCs and mobile devices. Apple still supports separate operating systems for mobile devices and PCs.

• Amazon Launches ‘Pay With Amazon’ Buttons for Mobile Apps: Amazon says it is finally ready to turn its huge customer base into a big payments business outside of Amazon. For real this time. The e-commerce giant is bringing its “Pay with Amazon” buttons to mobile apps, while “tripling down” on placing its Pay with Amazon buttons on websites in overseas markets like Japan. The moves are the latest in the company’s on-again, off-again efforts to take advantage of the more than 200 million customer accounts it has on file by processing payments on websites outside of its own walls. Earlier this year, Amazon hired PayPal vet Patrick Gauthier to lead a newly created team dedicated solely to building a payments business across the Web and app world. The payments industry is watching closely. For years, it has been waiting for Amazon to become a real player, perhaps challenging PayPal along the way.

• Baidu’s Profit Tops Estimates Even as Spending Rises - Revenue up 36%, Shares pop 7%: Baidu Inc. kept spending under enough control to report a third-quarter profit that topped projections, giving the Chinese Internet search provider more room to boost a share buyback program to $2 billion. Revenue climbed 36 percent to 18.4 billion yuan ($2.89 billion), matching estimates. The board authorized a new block of share repurchases, after completing a $1 billion buyback program in the latest quarter, the Beijing-based company said in statement Friday. Chairman and Founder Robin Li is betting new services including home delivery and online video will drive growth beyond the company’s mainstay search advertising business. Baidu said this week its Qunar travel site will form an alliance and swap shares with rival Ctrip.com, the latest move toward consolidation in China’s Internet industry. Baidu Inc. kept spending under enough control to report a third-quarter profit that topped projections, giving the Chinese Internet search provider more room to boost a share buyback program to $2 billion. Adjusted earnings per ADS was $1.43 a share, exceeding the $1.28 average of analyst projections, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue climbed 36 percent to 18.4 billion yuan ($2.89 billion), matching estimates. The board authorized a new block of share repurchases, after completing a $1 billion buyback program in the latest quarter, the Beijing-based company said in statement Friday. Chairman and Founder Robin Li is betting new services including home delivery and online video will drive growth beyond the company’s mainstay search advertising business. Baidu said this week its Qunar travel site will form an alliance and swap shares with rival Ctrip.com, the latest move toward consolidation in China’s Internet industry. Baidu’s three major new businesses, video service iQiyi, online commerce site Nuomi and travel site Qunar, remain loss-making, dragging on profit generated by its core search advertising business. By taking a 25 percent stake in Ctrip, in return for 45 percent of Qunar, Baidu intends to cut costs and benefit from reduced competition. That may affect Baidu’s revenue.

• Microsoft Sells $13 Billion of Bonds in Month's Busiest Day: Microsoft tapped the bond market for $13 billion Thursday, its biggest sale ever, in the busiest session of the month for high-grade issuers. The seven-part deal eclipsed a mark set just eight months ago by the tech giant as it raises money to repurchase stock and repay existing debt. It sold its longest portion, a 40-year bond, at a yield that was 1.8 percentage points more than comparable government debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company sold $3 billion of 10-year notes at a spread of 0.18 percentage point more than its similar maturity debt in the secondary market on Wednesday. “This is a banner year for tech issuance, so they needed to price wide to get people to take down $13 billion,” CreditSights Inc. analyst Jordan Chalfin said in an interview. “For Microsoft, an extra five-10 basis points doesn’t really matter. Their debt-funded share buybacks are very accretive for equity holders.” Microsoft, one of only three non-financial companies with top AAA credit ratings, said in a filing on Thursday that it will use the proceeds for anything from working capital to stock repurchases and repayment of existing debt.

• LinkedIn Earnings Beat Expectations With $780M In Revenue, Stock Jumps 9%: LinkedIn handily beat analyst expectations today with revenue of $780 million and earnings of 78 cents per share. Analysts were expecting earnings of 45 cents per share on about $756 million in revenue. LinkedIn shares promptly spiked as much as 8 percent in extended trading. In total, the company’s revenue grew 37 percent year-over-year, up from around $568 million in the third quarter last year. The company’s Talent Solutions division was its fastest growing segment, up 46 percent year-over-year to $502 million in revenue. Marketing solutions grew 28 percent to $140 million in revenue, while subscription revenue grew 21 percent year-over-year to $138 million to round out the rest of the company’s revenue report. LinkedIn’s domestic growth continues at a healthy clip, up to $484 million in revenue from $343 million in the third quarter last year, up 41 percent. Its international segment is still not quite as large as its domestic business, but was still up from $225 million to $295 million, a jump of 31 percent. Basically, its domestic business is performing stronger than its international business — which is not all that surprising given the big presence and brand it has in the U.S. So, as expected, the company’s recruiting segment continues to be one of its fastest-growing. LinkedIn has basically become the go-to service for what are effectively a more modern form of resumes, making it a gold mine for recruiters seeking new talent. So it’s not all that surprising that recruiting and the company’s Talent Solutions division is one of its most important — and getting a lot of attention. The company has two new launches coming up — its referrals product in November, and a new revamped Recruiter platform coming early next year. Both those products are geared toward better automating the process, and eliminating redundant tasks, of searching for new recruits.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 29

• Flipboard's Fanfare Fades as Executives Exit, Sale Talks Stall: Flipboard Inc. debuted in 2010 with the kind of fanfare any startup would envy. The news-reading app piggybacked perfectly on the debut of Apple’s iPad tablet and Steve Jobs’s promise of a new era for digital media. Critics loved Flipboard’s magazine-like layout, created by one of the first software designers of the iPhone, and investors poured money into the company. Almost five years later, Flipboard is struggling to live up to the praise. Several senior executives have departed, including co-founder Evan Doll, and talks to sell the company haven’t reached the finish line, according to people familiar with the plans, who asked not be named discussing private matters. Flipboard’s woes are indicative of a larger malaise gripping startups across the technology landscape as questions emerge about the sustainability of the tech-investment boom. Flipboard is performing well enough -- and, after raising more capital earlier this year, is at no risk of going out of business -- but is no longer a breakaway hit. People are finding media through their Facebook or Twitter feeds, limiting the need for a stand-alone application like Flipboard. Meanwhile, advertising rates -- the company’s main revenue stream-- have been in decline. While Flipboard’s reading app was a showpiece for the iPad five years ago, the company is now working to adjust to a changing digital-news market and live up to its $800 million valuation. Other companies facing similar questions about whether they can make good on early investor expectations -- and lofty private-market valuations -- include online storage service Dropbox Inc., note-taking company Evernote Corp., music-streaming service Deezer SA and blood-testing company Theranos Inc., said Anand Sanwal, chief executive officer of CB Insights, a firm that tracks startup investing. The companies face a challenge in that they could be too expensive for another company to buy, yet may not have the business fundamentals to justify their valuations to public investors through an initial public offering, he said.

• Samsung Deploys Cash Pile With $10 Billion Buyback, Capex Boost, As Phones Fail To Revive Growth: Samsung Electronics is tapping its $50 billion cash pile to buy back shares and invest in its components business after struggles in the smartphone division battered investors. Shares surged. The company will buy back and cancel 11.3 trillion won ($10 billion) of shares and boost capital spending by 14 percent this year, Samsung said Thursday. The announcements came after the company posted profit that trailed analyst estimates. Capital expenditure will rise to 27 trillion won this year as the company invests in chips and display plants.  Samsung is struggling for an answer to Apple Inc. in high-end smartphones, trying price cuts, a $120 rebate program and new models to tempt consumers from buying iPhones. That has prompted a renewed focus on making components for earnings growth, with new semiconductor and display plants to get its parts into other vendors devices. Samsung said it will increase capital spending after posting profit that missed analysts’ estimates as price cuts on new Galaxy S6 smartphones failed to sway consumers from buying iPhones. Capital expenditure will rise 14 percent to 27 trillion won ($24 billion) this year, the company said Thursday. Net income, excluding minority interests, was 5.31 trillion won ($4.7 billion) in the third quarter with profit to fall in the current period, Samsung said. Increased marketing spending, including a $120 rebate program, hasn’t sparked sales of the premium devices that generate fatter profit margins. Samsung is investing in computer chip plants as it tries to revive Galaxy smartphone demand through a new mobile payment service and by releasing larger devices at least a month before the new iPhones to recapture market share from Apple Inc. Shares of Samsung rose 4.9 percent in Seoul, the highest since May. The rally erased their decline for the year.

• Ebay Exceeds Expectations While Paypal Flops: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman defended his strategy of inking deals with big merchants and smartphone applications and offering free peer-to-peer payments as investors sent shares down on concerns the efforts are hurting the company’s quarterly profit. PayPal, in its first quarter as a stand-alone company separate from EBay Inc., said it added 4 million accounts to reach 173 million users. Its total payments volume gained 20 percent to $69.7 billion from a year earlier. But investors reacted to the company’s declining take rate, a measure of how much money PayPal keeps from each payment made on its platform. That metric fell to 3.24 percent in the third quarter from 3.39 percent a year earlier, the company reported Wednesday in a statement, and shares dropped as much as 7.8 percent in extended trading. The goal of the July split with EBay was to make sure that each company could focus on their main businesses. EBay last week reported quarterly profit and sales that topped analysts’ estimates and raised its outlook, sending shares up the most in 10 years. PayPal’s strategy is to attract more customers and merchants and offer them expanded services as competition in the payments industry intensifies with startups Square Inc. and Stripe Inc. as well has Apple Inc. and Google Inc. who are trying to create digital wallets. Even JPMorgan Chase & Co., entered the digital payments race Monday. PayPal is processing more payments in stores like Macy’s and on popular smartphone applications like Uber and Airbnb. But PayPal keeps less money from each transaction because the clients that bring bigger volume to the payments company also have the leverage to negotiate lower rates. The downside of that strategy was on display when Square disclosed its money-losing relationship with Starbucks Corp. The challenge for Schulman is to differentiate PayPal as competition intensifies. Among the additional services the company offers is a merchant cash advance program called PayPal Working Capital, which gives preapproved loans to businesses that process payments through PayPal. PayPal also is getting into the international money-transfer business by purchasing Xoom Corp. for $890 million in a deal announced in July.

• Yelp - struggling so far this year - beats Street expectations on revenue sending shares up 7%: Yelp reported a bigger-than-expected 40 percent jump in quarterly revenue as more local businesses advertised on Yelp.com, its consumer review website. Shares of the company, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, rose about 7 percent after the bell on Wednesday. To Wednesday's close of $22.07, Yelp's stock had fallen nearly 60 percent this year. San Francisco-based Yelp, which gets about four-fifths of its revenue from local advertisers, said the number of local advertising accounts rose about 37 percent to 104,200 in the third quarter. Yelp has been investing to grow its website beyond user reviews by investing in services such as restaurant reservations, food ordering and delivery. The company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $8.1 million, or 11 cents per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared with a profit of $3.6 million, or 5 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $143.6 million from $102.5 million.

• Verizon says Internet of Things revenue at $500 million year-to-date. Aimed at connecting to the Internet everything from household devices to industrial machines, the business is growing at a "double-digit" rate, Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon said at an event in San Francisco. "A large portion of our revenue comes through connectivity but a significant part of it comes from the application layer already," he said in a phone interview after introducing a platform to help customers develop applications in healthcare, agriculture, utilities and connected cars. Last year, Verizon's annual revenue from the business totaled $585 million. The global Internet of Things market is expected to grow to $1.7 trillion in 2020 from $656 billion in 2014, according to market research firm IDC. Examples include Verizon's fleet management tracking application and a partnership with Intel Corp (INTC.O) to provide water management sensors in vineyards, Lanman said. At the event, Verizon also unveiled a chip that Lanman said halves the cost of connecting low data usage devices like dog trackers to high-speed networks. AT&T has also been working on growing its "Internet of Things" business and previously launched initiatives such as a cloud-based data-analytics platform for companies and a global SIM card for connected cars. AT&T said last week it added 1.6 million connected devices including 1 million connected cars in the third quarter of 2015.

• Alphabet, Indonesian companies to expand Web access via balloons: Alphabet, the new holding company for Google, has teamed up with three Indonesian telecommunications companies to expand Internet access in that country using solar-powered balloons. Alphabet officials, including co-founder Sergey Brin, and representatives from Indonesian companies Telkomsel, XL Axiata Tbk PT (EXCL.JK) and Indosat Tbk PT (ISAT.JK) signed an agreement Wednesday to bring so-called Project Loon to the nation of 250 million people. The project sends solar-powered balloons 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) into the air to deliver Internet access through radio frequency signals to antennae connected to buildings on the ground. The balloons use algorithms to find the best winds to carry them along their charted course. Project Loon is part of Alphabet's secretive X division, where the company experiments with far-off technologies dubbed "moonshots" such as its self-driving car technology. Alphabet and its partners will deploy hundreds of balloons in 2016 over the country of more than 17,000 islands in an effort to determine where gaps in service lie as part of the tests before full-scale service is launched. The U.S. tech company has already tested the project in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia but with only a single carrier. Project Loon Vice President Mike Cassidy said the Indonesian partnership marks the first time it will send signals from multiple telecommunications companies through a single balloon, and that it will be the service's largest deployment to date and could eventually reach 100 million users. Cassidy said the effort is also a model for how Alphabet will move the product into the commercial market. He said the telecommunications companies will use the trial period to determine pricing and billing while Google works out technical issues.

• GoPro Plunges 15% After-Hours Following Q3 Earnings Miss: GoPro took a dive Wednesday after releasing Q3 financials that disappointed street expectations. At the market’s close, GoPro reported a miss on its Q3 earnings, posting an adjusted $0.25 per share on $400.3 million non-GAAP revenue during the period. Those figures compared to street expectations of a $0.29 per-share profit, and revenue of $433.6 million. The action camera maker’s $400.3 revenues represented a 43% year-over-year increase from $280.0 in Q3 2015, with EPS also up significantly from $0.12 in the corresponding quarter last year. The company shipped 1.6 million camera devices in Q3, up 46% from Q3 2014, but still less than the street had expected. Interestingly, GoPro emphasized how important foreign markets, specifically China, had been to the company’s growth. Sales outside of the U.S. reportedly made up more than 50% of the company’s revenue. The company said China was “the fastest growing market in GoPro’s history.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, October 28

• Apple Profit Is Up 31%, Revenue Up 22% as iPhones Sell Briskly, but Its Forecast Is Muted: Apple on Tuesday turned in another quarter of enviable revenue and profit growth, fueled by sales of the iPhone. But the results raised a perennial question for the world’s most valuable company: How can it keep its growth streak alive? The issue was stoked by Apple’s muted forecast for its all-important holiday quarter, as well as the unwillingness of Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, to go into detail in an earnings conference call about how Apple plans to rev up sales next year. Over all, Apple posted a profit of $11.1 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, up 31 percent from a year ago. Revenue was $51.5 billion, up 22 percent from last year. The results exceeded Wall Street estimates. Yet while the performance was bolstered by sales of the iPhone — Apple said that it sold 48 million iPhones in the quarter, up from 39 million in the same period last year — the company was more cautious about sales for the key holiday sales period. Apple projected revenue of $75.5 billion to $77.5 billion for the end-of-year quarter. While the sheer numbers are huge, the low end of the forecast fell below Wall Street estimates and would amount to anemic growth of less than 4 percent from a year ago. The last time Apple’s quarterly sales fell below 4 percent was in mid-2013. New Products: Apple is going into 2016 with a full slate of refreshed products. In late September, the company introduced its newest iPhone models, the 6s and 6s Plus. It also announced a larger iPad, the iPad Pro, and will begin shipping a new Apple TV this week. IPad Struggles: While the iPhone continues to grow, the iPad has been facing declines. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Apple said iPad sales dropped 20 percent from a year ago, making it the seventh consecutive quarter that sales of the tablet have slipped. The company is increasingly positioning the iPad as a business device. Apple Watch: The company did not break out sales of the Apple Watch, which debuted in April. But the category called “other products” — which includes the watch — posted $3 billion in revenue in the quarter, up from $2.6 billion in the previous quarter, which was the first quarter that included sales of the device. Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that the numbers for the “other” category were in line with his expectations, and implied somewhere between 3.5 million and four million watches were sold over the quarter. China: One of Apple’s fastest-growing markets — China — continued to grow. Sales in the region that Apple calls Greater China jumped 99 percent in the quarter to $12.5 billion. The region remained the company’s second-largest market after the Americas, accounting for 24 percent of sales in the quarter, compared with 13.7 percent a year ago. Investors have been scrutinizing the China business given that the country has been cutting interest rates to shore up a slowing economy. Apple Pay: Apple said it has partnered with American Express to bring its Apple Pay mobile payments service to global markets. Chief Executive Tim Cook said the credit card company will bring the service to customers in Australia and Canada, then expand to Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2016.

• Dismal Twitter Forecast and Flat User Growth Send Its Stock Lower: On Tuesday, Twitter gave a dismal forecast for its fourth-quarter revenue and profits. Shares in Twitter, a social media company, plunged as much as 13 percent in after-hours trading as Mr. Dorsey and his lieutenants offered little explanation for the gloom in a conference call with investors. In a similar call three months ago, Mr. Dorsey’s pointed critique of Twitter’s product failings sent the stock down 11 percent. Twitter also reported revenue of $569 million for the quarter, up 58 percent from $361 million a year ago. Its net loss was $132 million, or 20 cents a share, compared to a loss of $175 million, or 29 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. For the fourth quarter, usually the strongest thanks to holiday advertising, Twitter warned that revenue would be $695 million to $710 million, well below the $740 million that Wall Street had been expecting. The new projections, delivered as the company exceeded analysts’ expectations for its third-quarter results, provided fresh evidence that Twitter is failing to win over advertisers, the source of most of its revenue, as it confronts stiffening competition from Facebook, Instagram and Google. “The company is finding real challenges gaining traction with advertisers,” said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, citing the new forecasts and an advertiser survey his firm conducts twice a year. Mr. Mahaney, who has a neutral rating on Twitter’s stock, said he was struck by the contrast between the upbeat tone of Twitter’s executives on the call and the company’s deteriorating outlook. “Everything sounds so good, yet you reduced your forecast pretty materially. Why?” Mr. Dorsey didn’t answer that question, although Adam Bain, the company’s former ad chief and new chief operating officer, offered a clue: Ad prices plunged 39 percent in the third quarter, which he said was partly because of improved efficiency of video ads.

• Alibaba Revenue Up 32%, Sends Shares up 4%; Cloud Computing Revenue Doubles Y/Y; Overseas Sales at 8%; GMV growth sinks to lowest in 3 years: China's Alibaba is squeezing more money from online shopping than expected, beating analyst forecasts for revenue growth, as mobile shopping grows. The company wrung out higher-than-expected revenue growth of 32 percent year-on-year, even as gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of goods transacted across its platforms, sank to its slowest annual growth rate in more than three years. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares closed about 4 percent higher on Tuesday, after rising as much as 8.4 percent during market hours. Alibaba is trying to replace decelerating volume growth in online shopping with new kinds of online buying, mirrored in its latest investments. For instance, Alibaba invested $4.6 billion in Suning during the quarter. It also offered $3.5 billion to become sole owner of Youku Tudou, known as China's YouTube. Online video users in the country are beginning to cough up money for high-quality online streaming services. But the majority of Alibaba's revenue still comes from China's online shoppers buying from domestic businesses, a business driven by growth in GMV. For the latest quarter, growth came mostly from Tmall, an Amazon-like website allowing businesses to sell to customers, where GMV rose 56 percent. Gains at Taobao, more akin to eBay and by far the company's biggest contributor to GMV, showed signs of slowing at just 15 percent. Alibaba's revenue rose to $3.49 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30. Net income attributable to shareholders reached $3.58 billion, or $1.40 per share. International Expansion: The proportion of revenue Alibaba gets from abroad reached 8 percent, compared with 9 percent in the previous quarter. Co-founder Jack Ma has said he wants half of the company’s sales to originate outside China. The company named Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs  partner, as president in August to spearhead a global expansion into regions such as Russia and Brazil. The company is also looking to make forays into Italy, France, Australia and New Zealand, Evans said in October. Cloud Business: Revenue from cloud computing more than doubled from a year earlier. The e-commerce giant is betting on Internet-based computing and big data to boost growth for the next decade thanks to demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. AliCloud could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018

• IBM says SEC investigating company's books, shares fall: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) recognized revenue for certain deals in the United States, Britain and Ireland, IBM said on Tuesday, news that sent its shares down 4 percent. Shares of IBM fell as much as 4.4 percent to a five-year low of $137.33 and closed down 4 percent. News of the SEC probe came a week after the company posted lackluster quarterly results and cut its 2015 profit forecast. "It couldn't come at a worse possible time because now the stock is at another 52-week low as a result of this," said Belpointe analyst David Nelson. He said, however, that the probe "doesn't look like a massive smoking gun." "The investigation could be into warranty reserves, they could have recognized an item at the wrong time," Nelson said.

• PayPal says makes $1 billion in small-business loans in first two years: PayPal Holdings, the online payment processor, said on Tuesday its small-business lending program has processed $1 billion in loans in the first two years of its launch and more than doubled loan growth in that span. PayPal Working Capital is extending short-term loans totaling more than $100 million per month, or $3 million per day, to a mix of sellers on eBay and standalone small- to medium-sized merchants, the company said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. PayPal separated from eBay earlier this year, and Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman has stated he is looking to use PayPal's size to offer affordable financial services widely.

• Even As Oracle and AWS Circle Each Other, Oracle Will Not Build a Giant Cloud System Like AWS: Counter to the expectations of many industry watchers, Oracle, the world’s largest maker of software for businesses, is not planning a global computing system to rival Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the other big global cloud companies. While it has built out a network of 20 data centers, largely filled with Oracle equipment, it now plans to go after customers by offering faster updates of its core products, new ways of customizing applications and a much younger, retooled sales force. “We’ve made our investments,” Mark Hurd, co-chief executive of Oracle, said in an interview. Compared with A.W.S., he said, “the place we like is one of higher profit margins.” Besides applications, Amazon sells raw computing and data storage, which are generally lower-margin businesses. Oracle is expected Tuesday to announce better security inside its cloud because of changes from its proprietary hardware, but won’t sell access to the machines on their own. Oracle’s better margins, Mr. Hurd said, will come from selling large-scale software that can be customized by its buyers to suit local markets and products. He hopes to lower his sales costs and bring in younger companies with salespeople recruited straight from college and given crash courses in selling Oracle cloud products. In the last four years, he said, the company has hired 1,000 graduates a year. “We train them in products, sales skills and processes,” said Mr. Hurd. “They’re selling within a year, with a much lower cost of sales.” Oracle’s sales force, some 30,000 people globally, is considered among the most aggressive and highly compensated in the tech business. Now, Mr. Hurd said, “we have to do some branding” to entice the kind of smaller companies and start-ups the new sales team is chasing. The ease of modification and the faster sales force illustrate how, while still far apart, Oracle and A.W.S. are becoming more like each other as cloud computing goes mainstream. For its part, a few weeks ago A.W.S. dropped all pretense and made a direct bid for Oracle’s customers. A.W.S. even put up a thinly disguised picture of Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison.

• Japan's Carmakers Proceed With Caution on Self-Driving Cars: At this week’s Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan Motor Co. will display a concept car with retractable steering wheel and message-flashing windshield, joining Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. in exhibiting vehicles with autonomous modes for changing lanes and avoiding collisions on highways. But while Tesla deployed its Autopilot system this month and Google aims to have fully self-driving cars on the road by 2020, Japan’s automakers see a wait for such vehicles, with introductions coming only after 2025. The unwillingness to take a software-testing approach -- with beta versions used for trial periods and ongoing updates -- and apply this to car-making divides traditional auto companies and tech-industry challengers, said Tatsuo Yoshida, an auto industry analyst with Barclays Plc. Whereas Tesla beamed Autopilot into Model S sedans with the promise the system would continually learn and improve itself, Japan’s automakers view such an approach as putting features on the road before they’re ready. They’re also wary of exposure to liability if they introduce safety features that fail. Each of Japan’s three biggest automakers have set targets to start deploying the technology around 2020. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told reporters this month the company can probably develop a completely self-driving car in about three years, while Google has forecast about a five-year time frame.

• Rackspace Launches Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers: Rackspace is getting deeper into the container game. The company today announced the beta launch of its Carina container service. Carina gives developers access to a fully managed container environment that offers bare-metal performance and still allows them to use the same native Docker tools they are used to from their local development environments. Right now, the service — which will remain available for free during what the team expects to be a long beta period — focuses on Docker’s tooling, but over time, the idea here is to use the flexibility of Magnum and OpenStack to give developers the ability to use other container orchestration engines like Kubernetes and Mesos, as well. The team believes that the combination of a multi-tenant environment and (near) bare-metal access will allow it to deliver the right mix of a high-performance system and low cost. Otto acknowledged a multi-tenant system may not be the right choice for workloads that are highly security sensitive, but the service also gives users the choice to also run containers on Rackspace’s private cloud service. The service provides users with a set of defaults based on the company’s experience, but users can then tweak these as necessary. Otto believes most users will opt to stay with Docker Swarm as the container orchestration engine, simply because it gives users more control (and in an imperative way) than Kubernetes, which is far more opinionated. Because of the way the company architected the service without using a traditional hypervisor (using libvirt/LXC instead), containers will start significantly faster than on a similar service that uses more traditional virtual machines. Because there are still some advantages to running containers on virtual machines — especially when it comes to security — Rackspace also plans to support virtual machines. It’s no secret that large public cloud vendors like Google, AWS and Microsoft now all offer their own container services. The Rackspace team believes that it has an advantage over them in terms of speed, but also because they don’t abstract away the containers from developers. In addition — and this is no surprise coming from Rackspace — the company believes it can offer a level of service that is significantly higher than its competitors. Rackspace already worked with a number of partners to test the service in a private beta. These include O’Reilly Media, which is using containers to power parts of its online learning tools, as well as the Drupal and WordPress hosting service Pantheon, which has long used containers at the core of its platform.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 27

• Reuters Exclusive: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery, pickup: Wal-Mart applied Monday to U.S. regulators for permission to test drones for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories, a sign it plans to go head-to-head with Amazon in using drones to fill and deliver online orders. The world's largest retailer by revenue has for several months been conducting indoor tests of small unmanned aircraft systems – the term regulators use for drones - and is now seeking for the first time to test the machines outdoors. It plans to use drones manufactured by China's SZ DJI. In addition to having drones take inventory of trailers outside its warehouses and perform other tasks aimed at making its distribution system more efficient, Wal-Mart is asking the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to research drone use in "deliveries to customers at Walmart facilities, as well as to consumer homes," according to a copy of the application reviewed by Reuters. The move comes as Amazon.com, Google and other companies test drones in the expectation that the FAA will soon establish rules for their widespread commercial use. FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said in June that the agency expected to finalize regulations within the next 12 months, faster than previously planned. Commercial drone use is currently illegal, though companies can apply for exemptions.

• 'Bottomed Out' Alibaba Set for Best Month After Post-IPO Crash: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. looks like it may be bottoming out after suffering the worst post-IPO crash ever. Shares are heading for their best month ever, and analysts have raised their sales projections in the past four weeks. Results due Tuesday are expected to show revenue growth of 27 percent in the September quarter, while in the background China’s leaders draft plans for stimulating the economy during the next five years. Chairman Jack Ma pulled off a record initial public offering as investors backed his bet on e-commerce and Alibaba catapulted to the top of the market in China. Then the domestic economy slowed to its weakest growth in 25 years, prompting the billionaire to calm investor fears that at one point erased $150 billion from its market value -- the equivalent of an International Business Machines Corp. The stock fell to a record low of $57.20 on Sept. 29, or 16 percent below its IPO price. Since then it has surged 33 percent, closing Monday at $76.35, up 1 percent for the day. That has come as at least four analysts covering Alibaba raised estimates. Sales in the September quarter are expected to be 21.4 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), with adjusted earnings-per-share of 3.44 yuan, according to estimates. New cloud-based services for merchants to reach consumers and an expansion of entertainment and local-services businesses are central tenets of Ma’s growth strategy. Increased promotions on Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace are driving e-commerce ahead of next month’s Singles’ Day, the country’s biggest shopping event. The company also offered $4.6 billion for the rest of Youku Tudou Inc., a YouTube-like website, to add content it can stream to Internet users and to bolster revenue beyond e-commerce. Alibaba is expanding its London office to serve as its European hub and opening up in France and Germany.

• JPMorgan Chase says it is building a rival to Apple Pay: JPMorgan Chase said on Monday it will soon launch its own competitor to Apple Pay that will allow consumers to pay retailers using their smartphones in stores, and it has already won the endorsement of a major group of merchants. The largest U.S. bank is the latest company to try to profit from the prevalence of smartphones, which many financial executives believe will one day be consumers' preferred way to pay for everything from milk and eggs at the supermarket to a rental car at an airport. The companies that figure out how to convince consumers to stop pulling credit cards out of their wallets and start paying with their phones stand to earn vast sums by taking a percentage of the trillions of dollars that consumers spend annually. No clear front-runner has emerged in the business yet. Chase believes its smart phone application, known as Chase Pay, has one key advantage: the caliber of retailers it has brought on board, Gordon Smith, chief executive of the bank's consumer business, told Reuters. Chase has signed a deal with the Merchant Customer Exchange, a group of major retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc, (WMT.N) the largest U.S. retailer, and Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) to accept payments through the bank's technology. Retailers included in the Merchant Customer Exchange ring up more than $1 trillion of sales per year and have over 100,000 outlets. Rivals like Apply Pay have struggled to sign up retailers to accept their payments. In June, Reuters interviewed the top 100 U.S. retailers and found that two-thirds said they did not plan to accept Apple Pay this year. Apple Pay's website lists Best Buy in its "Coming Soon" section but has no mention of Wal-Mart. Chase signed up the Merchant Customer Exchange mainly by promising to cut retailers' costs, Smith said. Whenever a consumer pays for something with plastic, the retailer pays fees to banks and credit card networks to process the transaction. Chase is willing to accept a lower fee for Chase Pay transactions than for other transactions, and hopes to make up the difference by getting more volume over its network, Smith said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday October 26

• Big headlines from last week: Smashing earnings from  Alphabet (the new Google), Amazon and Microsoft. Markets loved Google for lower spending and a share buyback; and Microsoft and Amazon for gushers of cash from their cloud businesses. Amazon Posts an Unexpected Profit, and Its Shares Soar; Microsoft Earnings Climb, Lifted by Strong Growth in Cloud Computing; Google Announces Stock Buyback as Earnings Rise. 

• Twitter's Jack Dorsey gave back a third of his stock to Twitter employees to lift morale. 

• Google's first earnings amid a change of guard led to this headline: The New Google: ‘All the Assholes Have Left’

• Zuckerberg Flies to India, Where Facebook’s Web Access for All Has Been a Tough Sell: The Internet.org suite, rebranded last month as Free Basics, is now in 25 countries, from Indonesia to Panama. Facebook is investing heavily in other parts of the project, including experiments to deliver cheap Wi-Fi to remote villages and to beam Internet service from high-flying drones. Mr. Zuckerberg is also determined to win over the Indian public. Last month, he hosted a live-streamed chat with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And this week, Mr. Zuckerberg will be in New Delhi, where he will take questions from some of Facebook’s 130 million Indian users. Internet.org’s free services — which include news articles, health and job information and a text-only version of Facebook — are deliberately stripped down to minimize data use and the cost to the phone company. Facebook says the primary goal is to show people what the Internet is all about. But many Indians want more and complain that, contrary to its altruistic claims, the project is simply a way to get them onto Facebook and to sign up for paid plans from Reliance. Internet activists have also attacked Facebook, accusing it of cherry-picking partners to include in its walled garden rather than simply offering a small amount of free access to the whole Internet. Their concerns have struck a chord with the Indian government, which is considering new rules that would govern such free services. The magnitude of the task ahead was apparent during a reporter’s visit in August to Dharavi, home to as many as a million of Mumbai’s poor. Several billboards advertised Freenet, Reliance’s version of Internet.org. But in the neighborhood’s narrow alleys, where rivulets of raw sewage competed with sandaled feet, there was little evidence that anyone had taken notice. At Yahoo Mobilewala, a nearby phone shop named in honor of the American Internet company, the owner, Rizwan Khan, offered service from every major carrier. But his stack of Reliance chips — each in a blue Freenet envelope that said “Go free Facebook” — was gathering dust in its display case.

• Rumor: Uber Refueling Its Warchest Yet Again, At A Valuation Of Up To $70B: Another month, another billion for Uber… The ride-hailing business is reportedly raising yet again — planning to raise close to $1 billion in new investment according to the NYT citing “people close to the matter”, with investors looking at a valuation of between $60 billion and $70 billion for the six-year-old startup. If the NYT’s report is on the money, it comes mere months after the WSJ reported Uber had raised almost $1 billion in new financing, with a valuation then, in July, of more than $50 billion.

• Facebook updates its search feature to drive more conversation: On Thursday, Facebook announced that it's making a few updates to the way search works on the site to make it easier than ever to find conversations running through your social circle. In a company blog post, Facebook said that it wants to make search a better tool for sparking conversation on the social network. For example, public posts or posts made by your friends will begin showing up in search results, as will what Facebook calls "public conversations." Basically, that enables Facebook to become a place where people can more easily dip into discussions about the topic of the day. "When a link gets shared widely on Facebook, it often anchors an interesting public conversation," the company said in a post. "With one tap, you can find public posts about a link, see popular quotes and phrases mentioned in these posts, and check out an aggregate overview of sentiment." So if you found yourself completely perplexed by "pizza rat" or "pirate cat" or, you know, "Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearing," you should be able to hop into Facebook and look up what your friends and others are saying about it. The updates to search will start rolling out for its U.S. English users Thursday, Facebook said, with more plans for search  in the pipeline.

• YouTube has a new music service... What is YouTube Music? YouTube Music is a new app from Google that lets you specifically search for music on the site. That means you get more focused results — a search for "Prince," for example, won't bring up videos about royalty. Well, not of the non-musical variety, anyway. The app will also suggest other songs that you may like, based on your preferences. Doesn't YouTube already have a music service? You may remember that YouTube previously launched a service called YouTube Music Key, which was in an open beta, and seems to have been discontinued in light of the new service. how does this work with YouTube's new subscription service, YouTube Red? Subscribing to YouTube Red, Google's new ad-free subscription service, will get you access to ad-free versions of YouTube, YouTube Gaming and YouTube Music, plus Google Play Music. That will cost you $10 per month if you're an Android user and $13 per month if you're on iOS. You will be able to use the YouTube Music app for free, but those who don't pay will still see ads and not have access to some of the more advanced features. How does this stack up against other services? You could always listen to YouTube, with ads, for free, so why would you pay for that? There are a few perks that may convince you. For one, you no longer have to leave the soundtrack of your day up to the whim of the auto-play algorithm or take the time to actually make your own playlists. Plus, on mobile, you couldn't just keep it running in the background — if you wanted to listen to YouTube, that was all you were going to do. YouTube Music fixes all of these problems. Can I download it now? Not yet. You will have to wait a little while. Although YouTube Red will launch next Thursday, the Music portion of it is scheduled to be out only by the end of the year.

• ..and that caused Disney's ESPN to withdraw content from YouTube: Walt Disney Co's sports network ESPN said it will not make its content available on YouTube, due to the recently announced ad-free subscription-based offering coined YouTube Red. ESPN would not be part of the subscription service at launch due to "rights and legal" issues, a YouTube spokeswoman told Reuters.

• Microsoft Goes Upscale With Fifth Avenue Flagship Store: Most of the luxury brands on the storefronts of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, one of the world’s most famous shopping thoroughfares, seem to belong together, like the notes of a song. There are Tiffany & Company, Gucci, Armani, Valentino, Rolex and — cue the sound of a record needle sliding off vinyl — Microsoft? Yes, the company that brought us Windows and Office is opening a store on the street that brought us $5,000 handbags and $20,000 watches. The doors of the striking new flagship Microsoft Store will open to the public on Monday. It’s an expensive gamble on a retail strategy that is still a long way from paying off. It does not take a detective to see that the foot traffic is often light at the Microsoft stores the company has opened — the Fifth Avenue store will be its 113th — over the last six years. That’s a contrast with the jamborees usually found over at Apple’s stores, inevitably a few blocks away or across the mall from Microsoft’s electronics boutiques. I got a preview tour of the store last week. It’s clear the building renovation cost a fortune, though Microsoft executives wouldn’t say how much. The company gutted a building from the 1930s that was previously a Fendi store, replacing all but the top of its facade with huge sheets of glass. Walking into the store, what hits you first are the Microsoft devices arrayed on large open tables in the middle of the room. There is a collection of Surface Books, the company’s first laptop, which has received positive reviews and goes on sale Monday. Nearby is the Surface Pro 4, the latest version of the company’s popular tablet computer. An Xbox set up in the front corner of the store — an area Microsoft calls the living room — lets people play Halo 5: Guardians, the science-fiction shooter game that goes on sale Tuesday. Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, is showing more patience with the company’s stores than he has with other unfulfilled initiatives begun under his predecessor, Steven A. Ballmer. Mr. Nadella shut down a Microsoft group that made television shows for people with Xboxes, and he cut the staff working on Microsoft’s phone hardware to a fraction of its former size. Why do Microsoft Stores survive? The bricks-and-mortar alternatives for showing new Microsoft products in their best light are not great. The number of electronics stores has dwindled, leaving just one giant in the United States, Best Buy. And while the stores of wireless carriers are good for putting smartphones in front of the public, category-bending tablets and laptops often require explanations from more-trained specialists.

• Hackers Demand Ransom From TalkTalk, British Telecom Firm ...BAE Hired to Investigate: The chief executive of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications provider, said on Friday that she had received a ransom demand from hackers who had claimed responsibility for stealing data on some of the company’s four million customers. TalkTalk, which offers cable and fixed-line services in Britain, said local authorities had opened a criminal investigation into the widespread data breach. The hackers may have gained access to personal data on the company’s customers, including sensitive information like credit card details, dates of birth and addresses. TalkTalk’s shares fell as much as 11 percent in morning trading in London, but recovered by the afternoon and were down 2.3 percent in midafternoon trading. Despite the claims of responsibility, it remained unclear whether the group that had contacted TalkTalk was behind the breach or whether the ransom demands were credible. Yet TalkTalk’s data breach — the third successful attack on the company in the past 12 months — is the latest in a number of online hackings that have affected a wide range of companies, including Target, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase. It also potentially represents a high-profile example of hackers’ efforts to ransom stolen online data to companies or individuals. Such tactics, commonly known as ransomware, have often involved hackers encrypting people’s computer data and holding it hostage until a fee is paid. In certain instances, hackers have also stolen data directly from companies and demanded payment for not publishing the material online.

Onager is OOO for a week

I'll be out for about a week, snippets will resume once I'm back :)

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 16

• Netflix falls 9% as weak subscriber additions at odds with lofty valuation: Investors questioned Netflix Inc's premium valuation after the video-streaming service reported U.S. subscriber additions below its own expectations, a sign that competition from the likes of Hulu is intensifying. Netflix shares fell more than 9 percent to $100.11 in early trading on Thursday. While Netflix blamed the disappointing numbers on the mandated transition to chip-based debit and credit cards, some analysts said the reason seemed unconvincing since these cards have been around for a while. "The Netflix excuse is laughable," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who is rated four stars on a scale of five on StarMine for the accuracy of earnings estimates of Netflix. "Credit cards expire all the time, and people know how to deal with it. Netflix is seeing declining demand, and churn is a part of that," he said. Netflix doesn't disclose churn or subscriber attrition numbers. The video-streaming service provider had forecast a net addition of 1.15 million subscribers in its home market in the quarter, but ended up with just 880,000. Netflix's stock has more than doubled this year. It trades at 356.6 times forward 12 month earnings, versus a peer median of 12.9.

• Tesla Adds High-Speed Autonomous Driving to Its Bag of Tricks: It is not every day you get to open a door and step into the future. But to pull the handle on a newly updated Tesla Model S this week and slide into the driver’s seat was to catch a glimpse of the auto industry’s plans to soon let cars drive us, rather than the other way around. The updated Tesla, an already high-tech electric car that starts at about $75,000, was equipped with what the company calls Autopilot — a semi-autonomous feature that allows hands-free, pedal-free driving on the highway under certain conditions. The car will even change lanes autonomously at the driver’s request (by hitting the turn signal) and uses sensors to scan the road in all directions and adjust the throttle, steering and brakes. It is the first time that a production vehicle available to consumers will have such advanced self-driving capabilities. Or more to the point, the first time they will be unleashed for driving 70 miles per hour along twisty, though clearly marked, highways for long stretches. (Other manufacturers like Volvo and Mercedes-Benz recently introduced their own semiautonomous features, but limit the functions to lower speeds or require the driver to constantly touch the wheel.) And it’s perfectly legal. Among the states, only New York has any law prohibiting hands-free driving.

• Yahoo Mail Eliminates Passwords as Part of a Major Redesign: Seven months after replacing traditional passwords with single-use SMS codes, Yahoo is taking the next step toward blowing up the password altogether. The company today announced Yahoo Account Key, which links your account to a mobile device and then asks you to approve new logins through push notifications. It’s part of a broad redesign of Yahoo Mail designed to make the service faster and easier to search, and also lets you use the app with accounts from Outlook, Hotmail and AOL for the first time. (No Gmail, though, at least not yet)

• Twitter Courts Direct-Response Advertisers With New Reporting Tools (Claims early tests show Promoted Tweets lift conversions) Twitter today unveiled an analytics feature called Conversion Lift that lets marketers regularly measure how Promoted Tweets perform in terms of conversions, which entail clicks, app installs or sign-ups for services. Interestingly, the feature also susses out if the ads persuaded someone to switch phone carriers, something T-Mobile's social team is likely particularly interested in. To determine how effective an ad is, Conversion Lift splits a marketer's target audience into two groups: people who saw a news feed-style ad and those who didn't. The reporting then compares the conversion rates of both groups, including whether the action took place on desktop or mobile. Twitter said the tests, utilizing Conversion Lift, revealed that people who see Promoted Tweets are 1.4 times more likely to interact with a brand than those who don't see an ad. What's more, it said people who visit a brand's website after seeing a Promoted Tweet are 3.2 times more likely to convert than those who visit the website without seeing one. Based on the data, Twitter then recommends ways for advertisers to more effectively target. For example, Twitter may advise an athletic brand that initially only zeroed in on sports enthusiasts to also target casual sports fans.  The Conversion Lift represents Twitter's latest step toward convincing direct-response advertisers that it's a good place to spend money. Late last month, Twitter rolled out its 'Buy' button to all retailers and added video to its conversion-driving app installs in July.

• Google Express Loses Another Exec as Wildfire Co-Founders Exit: Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, the couple behind social ad startup Wildfire, are leaving Google three years and three months after the search engine scooped up their company. Talented people leave, join and stay at Google all the time. But Ransom’s departure is noteworthy because hers marks the third major exec exit from Google’s commerce arm in the past year. Ransom took over product duties at Google Shopping Express, its delivery service, after its director, Tom Fallows, decamped for Uber last November. Their boss, Sameer Samat, left for Jawbone in May. Then, in August, Google reshuffled the deck again, appointing its business development lead, Brian Elliott, as general manager for the entire Express operation, which has since expanded service across the Midwest as it aims to compete with Amazon and other delivery companies. The married couple arrived at Google in 2012 to some fanfare with the purchase of Wildfire, a startup that helped marketers manage spending on social platforms. It came amid Google’s feverish push to compete with Facebook on social. (The price tag was between $250 million and $350 million, depending on whom you asked.)

• Dropbox Announces Paper, A Google Docs Competitor: Dropbox is going head-to-head against a very popular web app, Google Docs. Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document editing platform in your browser. It lets you edit a document in real time with your Dropbox contacts. Here’s how it works. Paper users can create a document and type text right away. Compared to Google Docs or Quip, it has very few rich-text editing features. If you want to format your document, you’ll have to use another word-processing app. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Etherpad. What if you want to add images and videos? You can browse your Dropbox and add a Dropbox link directly in the document. Paper will automatically change these links into images and videos. It also does the same with other web content, such as YouTube videos, SoundCloud songs and more. You can write todo lists, @mention people in the document to notify them when you need someone else’s feedback and also leave comments next to a specific paragraph. I called Paper a Google Docs competitor, even though it seems quite different with the smart embeds and mostly plain text approach. It looks like a white board more than a document creation platform. But then again, many Google Docs users already use the service to quickly draft something. So it’s unclear whether Google Docs users will switch to Paper to do something they can already do with Google Docs without the nice embeds. Paper isn’t available just yet. You have to sign up to a waiting list first.

• Music-streaming site Deezer files for $345M Paris IPO: Deezer SA is seeking at least 300 million euros ($343 million) in a Paris share sale, valuing the music-streaming site at as much as 1.1 billion euros as it tackles Spotify Ltd.’s bigger and better-known service and Apple Inc.’s more recent products. The initial public offering would value the French company at 900 million euros to 1.1 billion euros. Started in 2007 by Marhely, who quit school at 16 to work as a developer for Internet startups, Deezer had 6.3 million subscribers at the end of June, according to the IPO filing. The company, whose largest shareholders also include Leonard Blavatnik’s Access Industries, is smaller than Swedish rival Spotify, which has more than 20 million paying subscribers and was said to be valued at $8.5 billion in its most recent financing round.  As the competition in music streaming intensifies, companies are branching out into events and merchandising to make their services more appealing to consumers and artists. Last week, Pandora Media Inc., the world’s leading online radio service, paid $450 million for Ticketfly, a ticketing service. Deezer said Thursday it will partner with BandPage Inc. to include concert listings in artist profiles and alert fans to upcoming offers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 12

• Square, the Mobile Payments Company, Discloses I.P.O. Plans - Lost $77M on revenues of $561M in H1 2015: Jack Dorsey is about to get even busier. On Wednesday, one of the companies Mr. Dorsey runs, Square, the mobile payments start-up, made its initial public offering prospectus public, indicating it is close to a road show to sell stock to investors. The move follows an action-packed 10 days for the technology executive, who was named permanent chief of Twitter last week and who on Tuesday announced that he was laying off 8 percent of the staff at the social networking company as he tries to attract more users to the service. The disclosure of Square’s I.P.O. prospectus is set to quicken the pace for Mr. Dorsey. While the filing revealed that Square’s revenue jumped to $850 million last year, up 54 percent from a year earlier, losses increased to $154 million in 2014, more than in 2013. For the first six months of this year, Square lost $77 million on revenue of $561 million. That means Mr. Dorsey, 38, will need to sell a money-losing Square to investors when I.P.O.s — including recent technology offerings like Pure Storage — have been met with a lackluster reception. In addition, Mr. Dorsey faces questions about whether he can juggle his chief executive roles at Twitter and Square. Taking a company public and navigating the turnaround of another are each tall tasks on their own. Some critics have said Square’s core business does not make enough money to justify the lofty $6 billion valuation that it received from private investors. While Square said that more than two million merchants accepted five or more Square transactions last year, the company’s revenue is not as large as some other technology giants that it is often mentioned alongside. The filing also presented a rocky picture of a key partnership with Starbucks, the global coffee giant, which the two companies entered into in 2012. Square ended up losing tens of millions of dollars on the countless credit card transactions it processed for Starbucks customers, the filing showed. The deal, which is expected to wind down in 2016, will winnow away a significant portion of Square’s transaction volume.

• Square’s IPO Filing: It’s Complicated: Square recorded revenue of about $560 million in the first half of the year, a 51 percent increase over the first half of 2014. For the same period, losses were about flat year-over-year at about $78 million. That doesn’t look great. But a more nuanced look at the numbers, stripping out the Starbucks deal, tells a story of a healthier core business with even a path toward, yes, profitability. As a result, Square is making the case that that deal doesn’t reflect its core business, and it is right: Square loses money on Starbucks transactions, while Square makes money on the transactions it processes for all the other brick-and-mortar businesses it works with. Additionally, the metric subtracts other costs associated with things like stock-based compensation that fast-growing tech companies often argue don’t reflect the health of their main business. In the first half of the year, Square narrowed its Ebitda losses to $19 million from $44 million in the same period last year. And in the second quarter of this year, Square actually recorded an adjusted Ebtida profit, even if just barely. That’s a good sign.

• Jack Dorsey owns 24.4% - i.e. a lot -  of Square: No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company's chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square's registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14. Dorsey's sizable stake indicates that he was savvy enough to keep control of the company he co-founded. Dorsey's high-flying reputation as a Twitter co-founder helped him negotiate more favorable terms for Square than an untested entrepreneur trying to raise money could. Contrast Dorsey's position with that of, say, Box CEO Aaron Levie. When the file-storage company filed for an IPO in January, the 30-year-old Box co-founder owned 4 percent. While that still makes for a nice payout, six venture-capital firms owned more shares than Levie when the company went public. Or look at Dorsey's first venture, Twitter. Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder along with Dorsey, provided the company with early financing, which helped him maintain a 12 percent stake by the time it went public. Meanwhile, Dorsey had 4.9 percent. This month, Dorsey was named "permanent CEO" of an ailing Twitter at the same time Square was prepping for an IPO. He's said he can handle both jobs, but investors are wondering how that will play out. In terms of ownership, he's got a lot more eggs in Square's basket. "There are so many incentives for him to just spend all his time on Square," Lemkin said.

• Amazon Shutters Hotel-Booking Site After Six Months: Amazon.com Inc. has shuttered its hotel booking site "Amazon Destinations" six months after its start, signaling the world’s largest e-commerce company couldn’t persuade many of its customers to book weekend getaways. The Seattle company introduced the site in April hoping to expand on its Amazon Local initiative connecting shoppers with deals close to home. The destinations site featured maps, lodging offers and information about restaurants at popular weekend getaways near Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. Amazon Destinations stopped selling reservations on Tuesday, according to an announcement on the website. "If you have a reservation, your reservation is valid and will be honored by the hotel," the site states. “We have learned a lot and have decided to discontinue Amazon Destinations,” the company said Wednesday in a statement. The business pitted Amazon against Web travel businesses Priceline Group Inc., Expedia Inc., startup Airbnb Inc. and others for a piece of the online hotel booking market. 

• Shopify partners with Uber to ensure same-day delivery: Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify said on Wednesday it was partnering with taxi-hailing service Uber to help merchants deliver goods to customers on the same day in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Shopify said the UberRUSH delivery service will be available to its merchants in the three cities immediately. U.S. department stores such as Kohl's and Macy's Inc offer same-day delivery services via a tie-up with Deliv, an Uber-like startup that contracts drivers to pick up ordered items from stores and deliver them to customers. The agreement with Uber is the latest in a series of major tie-ups announced by Ottawa-based Shopify. Last month, it inked a tie-up with the U.S. Postal Service, making it more attractive for smaller U.S. retailers to use its software to power their e-commerce sites. Just prior to that, Amazon.com also made Shopify its preferred partner for smaller vendors that are seeking to sell their goods via the online retailing giant. Although the rapid delivery services appear to compete with Amazon's own speedy shipping options, the tie-ups with Uber and USPS will not put Shopify on a collision path with Amazon said Brennan Loh, Shopify's head of product partnerships, who added that smaller vendors would still look to sell their products via Amazon due to its much broader reach, in comparison to their own portals.

• Behind the Failure of Leap Transit’s Gentrified Buses in San Francisco: Leap, which raised $2.5 million from some of the industry’s best-known investors, charged riders $6 to get across San Francisco, nearly three times the cost of riding a city bus. Its primary draw was luxury. Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app. The luxury vehicles were up for auction; Leap filed for bankruptcy in July. The end for Leap apparently came so suddenly that its founders didn’t have time to remove much from the vehicles. Inside each bus, sitting in an out-of-the-way parking lot near Oakland, Calif., was a state registration form pinned to the wall, a bundle of iPhone and HDMI cables, and a display case full of snacks. Among the choices were packages of That’s It — vegan, gluten-free, non-G.M.O. fruit bars — and organic, paleo Simple Squares. Leap is one of at least several dozen tech companies that have failed this year. Their deaths are illuminating; dead start-ups show us which investors’ theories are bogus, which technologies aren’t ready for prime time and which common ways founders overextend themselves. In particular, Leap’s death suggests one emerging cause of start-up doom, a problem that also did in the anonymous social network Secret: too close an association with Silicon Valley’s tech-bro sensibilities. Start-up deaths often go unstudied. Silicon Valley stands out for the way it embraces failure, and it’s true that the “We Failed!” start-up post-mortem note has become a staple on publishing sites like Medium. By the time of its bankruptcy auction earlier this month, which attracted only a handful of bidders, Leap was all but forgotten. In its bankruptcy filing, Leap reported that it made nearly $21,000 in the two months during which it offered service. That turned out to be less than two of its buses — which officials told me could no longer start — fetched at auction: One sold for $11,100, and another for $12,100.

• Twitter has appointed Omid Kordestani, who until recently was Google’s chief business officer, as its executive chairman. Mr. Kordestani, who has a reputation for affability and business acumen, could bring a level of calm and stability to Twitter, which has been plagued by management chaos it its nine-year history. A company spokesman said Mr. Kordestani was unavailable for an interview but said he would play an active role in operations, supporting the leadership team and helping with recruiting. His appointment is the latest in a series of quick decisions by Mr. Dorsey, who announced on Tuesday that Twitter would cut up to 8 percent of its staff. Mr. Kordestani was the 11th employee hired at Google. He joined in 1999, when it was a year old, and helped create its primary business of selling the ads that appear in Google searches. His original title was “business founder” and he oversaw Google’s first dollar of profit and built its first sales team. That model has since generated hundreds of billions of dollars and still accounts for more than half of Google’s annual revenue. Mr. Kordestani left the company in 2009 but came back last year after his successor, Nikesh Arora, quit to join SoftBank. As chief business officer, he was Google’s highest-paid executive in 2014, with a $130 million pay package that consisted mostly of stock vesting over four years. Mr. Kordestani does not appear to be a regular user of Twitter. Before his appointment, he had sent just eight tweets on his personal account. Some Twitter investors, most notably Chris Sacca, have complained that Twitter has too many board members who “don’t use the product.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, October 14

• Twitter to Cut More Than 300 Jobs: Twitter announced on Tuesday that it was laying off as many as 336 employees, or 8 percent of its work force, to streamline and refocus as it tries to find ways to attract new users to its social network. “We are moving forward with a restructuring of our work force so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow,” Mr. Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, wrote in an email to employees. “We feel strongly that engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our work force. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.” The cuts, one of the first major moves by Mr. Dorsey since he was named chief executive, received a mixed reaction from Wall Street. News of the impending layoffs leaked out Friday, after the market closed, and Twitter’s shares fell nearly 7 percent on Monday. After the staff cuts were announced Tuesday morning, the stock rebounded briefly and ended the day at $29.06, up 1 percent. “Cutting 8 percent of your work force is a little jarring,” said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “You don’t normally see job cuts at this early stage for growth companies unless there is something materially going wrong with the operations or the strategy.” Twitter’s work force has grown quickly in recent years, through acquisitions and hiring. As of June 30, the company, which is based in San Francisco, had about 4,100 employees, an increase of more than 800 people, or 24 percent, from the previous June. Twitter said Tuesday that revenue and adjusted profit for the third quarter would meet or exceed previous forecasts. The high end of the company’s previous forecast predicted revenue of $560 million and adjusted earnings of $115 million. The company said it would provide “generous” exit packages to those who are losing their jobs, including 60 days of pay for San Francisco employees, which is required under a provision of state law governing large layoffs. Twitter intends to take a pretax charge of $5 million to $15 million in the fourth quarter in connection with the layoffs. Demand for software engineers is intense in Silicon Valley, and former Twitter employees were quick to reach out to those laid off and urge them to join them at other companies.

• It’s not just Twitter: Snapchat is laying off workers, too: Snapchat, the app that's best known for its disappearing messages, is stepping back from creating Netflix-style original content. You might not have realized Snapchat was even in the business of creating scripted shows. But in a move that likely reflects its poor performance, the effort has been shut down — and now the 15-member team responsible for it is being disbanded. Among those leaving? Marcus Wiley, a former Fox comedy executive whom Snapchat hired to run its program planning and development. Snapchat's "Snap Channel" was one of a number of content streams available on the company's app. It appeared on the Discover tab, running alongside partner channels from CNN, BuzzFeed and ESPN, among others. As those companies ran their content on their Snapchat feeds, Snapchat itself produced shows such as "Literally Can't Even" and "Pillow Talk," a casual talk show set in a bedroom where the host and guests appeared on camera in their pajamas. Unfortunately for Snapchat, these shows weren't enough to keep the channel going. After less than a year, the company made the decision to shut down the Snap Channel, a move that convinced Wiley it was time to go.

• Starbucks Is Testing Coffee Delivery to Office Workers in the Empire State Building; Opens a 'secret' kitchen on the ground floor: ree weeks after rolling out mobile ordering in its U.S. stores—a service that lets people pay for drinks in a branded app and pick them up in stores—Starbucks is bringing coffee delivery to the office door. Today, the coffee chain launched its first foray into food delivery with a store on the bottom floor of New York's Empire State Building, which houses 12,000 workers. The program—dubbed "Green Apron Delivery"—lets staffers in 150 offices order food and drinks through a website that only tenants in the iconic building can utilize, meaning that tourists will not be able to participate in the program.  The new store isn't your typical Starbucks, though, mainly because you can't walk inside. Instead, it's more of a kitchen where baristas whip up a small menu of drinks and food. Once someone places an order, a barista makes the drink and delivers it to an office within 30 minutes. Through October, the delivery option is free, and it will cost $2 per coffee run starting next month. Starbucks was quick to emphasize its project in the skyscraper is only a test, but it's the latest example of how the company wants to make digital ordering mainstream. Last month, the coffee chain launched mobile payment at 7,400 stores, and later this year, it will launch another pilot program in its Seattle hometown as part of a partnership with on-demand app Postmates. 

• In Boost to Uber, Ola, India Said to Issue Guidelines for Ride-Hailing Apps: The rules, which aren’t binding, if implemented by the states will be a boost for Uber Technologies Inc. and its bigger competitor Ola that have faced bans in some cities such as capital New Delhi. This month China also proposed rules for ride-booking services that also ask operators to obtain licenses from local authorities and offer cars that are registered for commercial use. The guidelines, prepared by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, mandate ride-hailing companies obtain permits from respective state transport departments to operate in a region, the people said asking not to be identified before a public announcement. The states may set the maximum fares to be charged to provide a level playing field with taxis, according to the advisory. The vehicles to be offered must be equipped with a location tracking device as well as an emergency safety button. Drivers, who offer their services on multiple platforms, will need to have a commercial license and the company will have to obtain a police verification certificate.

• Intel’s Earnings Beat: $14.5B Revenue Despite Shrinking PC Market Reflect Move to Cloud Computing; Shares Flat: Intel’s net income for the third quarter was 64 cents a share, above the projections of Wall Street analysts. According to a survey by Thomson Reuters, analysts thought Intel would make 59 cents a share, down from 66 cents a year ago. Revenue was $14.5 billion, down slightly from $14.6 billion a year ago, and above projections of $14.2 billion. Intel shares were down about 3.5 percent in after-hours trading, in part because of a projected fourth-quarter dip in demand from cloud companies. Intel became the world’s biggest producer of semiconductors thanks mostly to personal computers, which eventually led to chips for server computers. Now, the new hot trend of cloud computing — data centers filled with tightly connected servers — is remaking Intel. On Tuesday, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., said that in the three months that ended Sept. 26, PC chips brought in $8.5 billion and chips for servers in cloud computing data centers brought in $4.1 billion. A year ago, PC chips brought in $9.2 billion and data center chips brought in $3.7 billion. Making PC chips is still a big business, but not the way it once was. The data center group also has much higher profit margins: Operating profit from PC chips was $2.1 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago, while data center chips had an operating profit of $2.1 billion, up 9 percent. Intel’s mix of cloud-computing customers shows how much influence is wielded by just a handful of big operations. Of 200 cloud company customers that Intel tracks, just seven take one-third of those chips: Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent of China. While the rest are now growing at twice the rate of the top seven, Ms. Bryant said, the big companies are unusually demanding customers, even designing their own chip modifications to make their global clouds work better.

• Facebook Is Building Its Own YouTube Inside Facebook: Facebook has started serving up billions and billions of videos to its users by placing the clips in their feeds, between pictures of your friends’ kids and stories about people who don’t have kids. But what if you wanted to watch a video on Facebook, without looking at kids or reading about them? Like you can on YouTube? Now Facebook is going to let you do that, too: The social network says it is testing a “dedicated place on Facebook for people to go when they exclusively want to watch video,” which will help “people discover, watch and share videos on Facebook that are relevant to them.” Just like you can do on YouTube, the world’s biggest video site. The parallels between the two platforms aren’t a coincidence, and Facebook’s announcement is one that video industry insiders have expected for at least a year, starting when Facebook began its video push in earnest: If Facebook was going to really take on YouTube for video viewers’ time — and, eventually, advertisers’ dollars — then it would have to offer an experience like YouTube, where you could go look for things you want, instead of waiting for Facebook to show you something you didn’t know you wanted.

• Apple loses patent lawsuit to University of Wisconsin, faces up to $862M in damages: Apple Inc could be facing up to $862 million in damages after a U.S. jury on Tuesday found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices. The jury in Madison, Wisconsin also said the patent, which improves processor efficiency, was valid. The trial will now move on to determine how much Apple owes in damages. Representatives for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Apple could not immediately be reached for comment. WARF sued Apple in January 2014 alleging infringement of its 1998 patent for improving chip efficiency. The jury was considering whether Apple's A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, as well as several versions of the iPad, violate the patent. Cupertino, California-based Apple denied any infringement and argued the patent is invalid, according to court papers. Apple previously tried to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to review the patent's validity, but in April the agency rejected the bid. According to a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge William Conley, who is presiding over the case, Apple could be liable for up to $862.4 million in damages. He scheduled the trial to proceed in three phases: liability, damages, and finally, whether Apple infringed the patent willfully, which could lead to enhanced penalties.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 13

• Facebook adds dedicated shopping section in continued move into e-commerce: Facebook Inc (FB.O) wants its users to shop for clothes and other products from their mobile phones without ever leaving its app. In an effort to move further into e-commerce and compete with Amazon Inc’s (AMZN.O) retail offerings, Facebook announced Monday it is testing several ad features that allow users to shop directly through its app. Few users make purchases on mobile phones because it is slow and cumbersome, but Facebook hopes to win over more ad dollars by smoothing the process. Mobile purchases make up less than 2 percent of all retail sales, according to research firm eMarketer. Among the new features are ads that take a user through a specific brand's products without redirecting them to another site. For example, a user who clicks on an ad from a boutique could see an expanded page that displays numerous clothing items. Businesses on Facebook will also be able to display products for purchase directly on their own pages. And users will be able to purchase products directly on Facebook through a “buy now” button that will be more widely available. The 1.5-billion-member social network has also added a new section on its app that takes users directly to a shopping page where they can browse among numerous brands from a select group of small businesses that will gradually expand. “From Facebook’s perspective, they’re addressing a pain point for retailers,” said Catherine Boyle, an analyst at eMarketer. “They will attract serious ad dollars with this offering.”

• Dell buys EMC for $67 billion in largest deal in tech history: Dell announced Monday it had reached a deal to acquire cloud computing giant EMC for $67 billion -- the largest acquisition in the history of the technology industry. The deal signals that Dell believes it is best to go big at a time when many older technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard are paring down and becoming smaller, nimbler companies. Traditionally known as a personal PC-maker, Dell has more recently set its ambitions on the high-tech business world and portrayed itself as an all-in-one provider of equipment and services. Dell and equity firm Silver Lake Partners said in a press release Monday that buying EMC, a major data storage company, broadens its appeal to those lucrative corporate customers. In 2007, Dell returned to run the company he founded and took the company private again in 2013 with backing from Silver Lake Partners. The EMC transaction is expected to close in the “middle of next year,” executives said on a call with analysts Monday morning. It will take time for Dell and EMC to integrate their businesses if the deal closes, Hewitt said. For one, he noted that EMC has carved its niche by offering comprehensive — and not inexpensive — software solutions to businesses, which is where Dell wants to go. But, he noted, Dell's philosophy is deeply rooted in providing cost-efficiency. As Dell has struggled to adapt its PC business for the modern age, EMC has also been under pressure from activist investors to spin off its cloud and virtualization business called VMWare for more than year as its faced heavy competition from flash storage and cloud storage firms. It has also faced pointed questions about its "federated" business structure, which strung together three firms -- its traditional business, VMWare and its software development firm Pivotal. Analysts had formerly counted Dell, as well as HP, Cisco and Oracle, as potential buyers for the firm. 

• SAP third-quarter operating profit beats estimates on mature markets: SAP said third-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose to 1.62 billion euros ($1.84 billion), beating the most optimistic estimate among 14 analysts, with individual estimates ranging from 1.45 billion to 1.59 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters data. Third-quarter total revenue of 4.98 billion euros was slightly ahead of the average expectation of 4.93 billion. Europe's largest software maker said it was sticking to its outlook for the full year for non-IFRS operating profit of 5.6 billion euros to 5.9 billion euros at constant currencies, which represents flat growth to a rise of as much as 5 percent from 5.6 billion euros last year.

• Financing in the Dell-EMC Deal: Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, EMC has negotiated a "go-shop" provision in the preliminary deal that gives it the opportunity to seek out other buyers. Yet analysts say that while the Dell deal may slightly undervalue EMC shares, it's still a good deal. Shares of EMC rose about 1.5 percent during regular trading Monday. While the company will be a private concern after the deal is closed, a portion of its shares will continue to trade publicly. EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC’s prize holding, software maker VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share. EMC’s stock climbed 1.8 percent Monday to $28.35. Dell will add almost $50 billion to its debt load to complete the purchase, people familiar with the matter said, on top of the $11 billion it already is carrying. The combined company will be run by Michael Dell, the chief executive officer of the company he founded and took private for about $25 billion two years ago. He is financing the takeover with his MSD Partners investment vehicle, Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings. He also is using debt, the VMware tracking stock and cash on hand. The deal will combine EMC’s dominance in devices that store data with closely held Dell’s No. 2 position in servers, the powerful machines that help companies handle big computing challenges.

• Implications for the Data Center Business: The deal will help Dell raise its profile in data centers, the modern factories of the digital age that house servers, networking gear and storage systems. EMC had 21 percent of the storage market last year, about twice what Dell had, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While Dell has been outperforming some of its rivals, the company is grappling with sagging demand for personal computers. During the third quarter, overall shipments declined 7.7 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Still, Dell was able to post a small gain of 0.5 percent while larger rivals declined.

• Implications for VMWare: EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. VMware declined 8 percent to $72.27 on Monday amid concern that the creation of a tracking stock will weigh on the company’s valuation. Analysts at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. lowered their target price for VMware to $75 from $95. EMC rival Pure Storage Inc. rose 8.8 percent to $18.06, exceeding its public offering price of $17 for the first time since shares began trading Wednesday.

• Silver Lake Had Explored Sale of Dell’s PC Business Ahead of EMC Deal: Private equity firm Silver Lake, co-owners of Dell, last week approached Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Huawei to explore the possibility of selling off Dell’s personal computing business, sources familiar with the matter told Re/code. But by Monday, Dell proposed to pay a combined $67 billion to acquire the data storage company EMC and its subsidiary VMware in what is the largest proposed technology M&A deal in history. It was not immediately clear if Silver Lake acted alone or if Dell was consulted. It is also unclear if Silver Lake or Dell would continue to explore a sale at this point. The approach comes as the once thriving PC industry grapples with declining sales. That’s partially why none of the parties that were approached engaged further. Nearly half of Dell’s annual revenue come from the PC business, or about $27 billion, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.