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.