Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 9

• Facebook to Test Emoji as Reaction Icons: Despite the billions of “likes” bestowed on Facebook posts every month, something has been missing: an option to express a different emotion. On Thursday, Facebook announced it will begin testing six new emotional reactions that you can convey with a simple emoji, similar to the thumbs-up “like” icon that the social networking service has made so famous. The six new emoji depict various expressions, from an open mouth to express surprise to a scowling red face for anger. The other four emotions are love, laughter, sadness and a supportive cheer. The new reaction icons will be available to most Facebook users in Spain and Ireland by the end of this week. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Facebook’s news feed, said the company would evaluate how people in those two countries use the new buttons and refine them, before expanding the rollout to the company’s 1.5 billion users worldwide later this year.

• Facing China Slowdown, Alibaba and JD Find Solace in Russia: Russia’s plunging currency hasn’t weened consumers off foreign goods. Instead, cash-strapped shoppers are turning to online retailers for imported smartphones, jewelry and clothes, giving an unexpected boost to Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. Alibaba’s AliExpress site posted a 40 percent increase in Russian visitors to 22 million in July compared with a year earlier, according to researcher TNS. JD.com, which gets more than half its sales from electronics and home appliances, started its first international site in June in Russia, exclusively offering devices such as Xiaomi Corp. smartphones for about $214. That’s less than half of what an IPhone or Samsung Electronics Co. model with similar technical specifications costs locally. Millions of Russians are sinking into poverty as the collapse in crude prices drags down the economy of the world’s biggest energy exporter, sends the ruble into a tailspin and cuts government revenue. In August, wages fell 9.8 percent in real terms and Russians now face significantly lower disposable income than a year ago. While the economy may be in recession, Russians are embracing deliveries from China. Some 80 million people go online in Russia, making it Europe’s largest Internet market by users, according to East-West Digital News. However, the number of Web shoppers is still about a third of that, compared with 70 percent to 90 percent in the U.S. and western Europe.

• Netflix is raising its prices again. Netflix announced Thursday that it will raise its prices again, this time by $1 to $9.99 a month, giving the streaming video service more money to develop original content. The price increase will take effect on Nov. 11 for new customers. Existing customers will continue to pay the current rate, $8.99 a month, until October 2016. Longtime customers who still pay $7.99 a month will hold onto that rate until at least May 2016. The change may reflect that it is getting more expensive for Netflix and other video distributors to secure deals for television and movie content. In August, Netflix announced it would not renew a deal with cable network Epix, costing U.S. subscribers access to some high-profile movies including "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," "World War Z" and "Transformers: Age of Extinction." Rival Hulu quickly swooped in to make a deal of its own with Epix. The price hike will allow the company to offer more original content, said company spokeswoman Anne Marie Squeo. This year alone, Netflix introduced more than two dozen new series or films, including “Narcos,” a popular crime drama focusing on the life of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel.

• Microsoft’s Mission to Reignite PC Sector May Be Taking Hold: Shipments of personal computers fell nearly 11 percent last quarter, to the shock of almost no one. Sales have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it is becoming harder to remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Yet despite all that movement — or maybe because of it — something curious has emerged in recent months: optimism. “Initiatives like Surface and Surface Book have helped the industry wake up and say, ‘We’ve got to make the industry cool and sexy again,’ ” said Frank Azor, executive director and general manager of Dell’s XPS line of PCs. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business. The company said the goal was to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative. Analysts and industry executives say the strategy may be starting to work. Dell, which still sells millions of PCs, announced on Thursday several new machines that run Windows 10, a new Microsoft operating system. One of them, the XPS 12, is similar to Microsoft’s Surface Book, a “two-in-one” device that combines the keyboard of a traditional laptop with a touch-sensing screen that can be detached for use as a tablet. The Microsoft event on Tuesday, where the Surface Book was introduced, generated the kind of buzz from the tech press that’s normally reserved for an Apple event. Apple itself generated discussion last month about whether it has begun to imitate Microsoft by announcing a new big-screen tablet with a stylus, the iPad Pro. The Surface has been available with a big screen and a stylus for some time.  It remains to be seen whether these efforts will result in more sales. Microsoft has seen terrific growth in its Surface business, which has jumped to $3.6 billion in annual sales from nothing three years ago. But most other big PC makers have not been able to get customers to spend on PCs as they once did. PC owners are holding on to their machines longer, making do with systems that are good enough for their needs. At the same time, they are relying on mobile devices for more of their computing tasks. On Thursday, IDC, the technology research firm, said that global PC shipments declined 10.8 percent in the third quarter from the same period a year ago, slightly worse than the research firm had expected. (Another research firm, Gartner, had pegged the decline at 7.7 percent.)

• Amazon launches platform to build apps for 'Internet of Things': Amazon.com's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, has launched a service to help customers build applications to connect devices through the cloud, the so-called "Internet of Things". The service, called "AWS IoT", will allow factory floors, vehicles, health care systems, household appliances among other "things" to connect through cloud services, the company said on Thursday. The beta version of the service is available from Thursday, Amazon's Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels said at a company event in Las Vegas. The connection to the cloud will be fast and lightweight, making it a good fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life, Amazon said.

• Twitter Opens Up Its Amplify Video Ad Program: Twitter just announced an expansion of its Amplify ad program that should make it accessible to more publishers and advertisers. Amplify is the company’s two-year-old program for video ads. Initially, it involved a direct and somewhat complicated relationship — the publisher would embed a short video clip in a tweet, then the advertiser would both include a short pre-roll ad in the tweet and pay to promote the tweet in Twitter. In the new, open version of Amplify, an advertiser no longer needs to work with a specific publisher. Instead, they choose a content category, then Twitter will automatically include their pre-roll ads in videos tweeted by relevant publishers. (Advertisers can also use Twitter’s other ad targeting capabilities at the same time.) This isn’t just about making the process easier for advertisers — it also gives publishers a monetary incentive to share their video clips on Twitter. We’ve heard that the revenue split is 70 percent for publishers and 30 percent for Twitter, and that publishers will be able to blacklist certain advertisers or categories if they feel like they’re not a good fit.