Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, October 12

• Twitter Is Planning Company-Wide Layoffs for Next Week:  Twitter is planning company-wide layoffs next week, according to multiple sources. It’s unclear how much of the staff will be culled, but insiders say it will likely affect most, if not all, departments. The downsizing comes at the same time Twitter is restructuring its engineering organization to make it leaner and more efficient, these sources say. It’s likely that many of those impacted by the layoffs will be engineers, which make up about half the staff. Those close to the company have argued for years that Twitter has become too bloated. It reported roughly 4,100 employees last quarter, more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO. Twitter’s user base has grown less than 50 percent in that time. Of course, some of the growth has come via acquisitions — Twitter has made plenty over the past two years. But still, the feeling from those close to the company is that Twitter’s engineering team is much larger than it needs to be. The reorg also aligns with what Dorsey has been preaching for the last four months: That Twitter needs to be more focused. In June he told Re/code that the company needed to do a better job of “clarifying ownership” around projects, and he restructured Twitter’s product team in August to do just that. Now, it appears, the rest of the staff will be reshuffled, too. Update: Twitter stock is down more than 3 percent in after-hours trading on the news.

• Apple Is Said to Deactivate Its News App in China: Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there. The Apple News app, which the company announced in June, is available only to users in the United States, though it is being tested in Britain and Australia. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas — but they have found that it does not work in China. Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user’s preferred media, instead see an error message: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region.” Greater China is now Apple’s second-largest source of revenue after the United States, with sales of more than $13 billion in the third quarter. That means the company is most likely taking a careful approach to delivering new content, like that on its news app, within China. Beijing generally insists that companies are responsible for censoring content inside China. In Apple’s case, that would mean it would probably have to develop a censorship system — most Chinese companies use a combination of automated software and employees — to eliminate sensitive articles from feeds. For now, Apple seems to be avoiding the problem by completely disabling the service for users in China.

• How Do You Value A Company Like Uber? I became interested in Uber after reading a news story in June 2014, which reported the company was being valued at $17 billion in its latest venture capital round. I posted my first valuation of Uber in June 2014, viewing it as an urban car service, with local (but not global) networking benefits. Assuming that it would increase the size of the urban car service market by about 40%, while preserving its low capital-investment business model, I valued Uber at just under $6 billion. While some in the VC community were quick to dismiss the valuation, I will remain grateful to Bill Gurley for a post where he took me to task for having too narrow a vision of Uber’s business model. In his counter narrative, he argued that Uber was not just urban (it could create inroads in suburbia), not just a car service (it was in logistics & transportation) and that it was working with other businesses to create global networking benefits. Since Bill, as an early investor in Uber with access to its internal workings, clearly knew far more about the company than I did, I revalued Uber using his narrative and arrived at $54 billion as the value that reflected the narrative. I was wrong about Uber’s value in June 2014, when my estimate of $6 billion was below the $17 billion assessment by venture capitalists then. Correcting for both my cramped vision and the changes that have occurred since June 2014, my estimated value today is $23.4 billion. I know my estimated value lags the $51 billion value that VCs are attaching to the company today. This may very well be a reflection that my vision is still too cramped to capture Uber’s possible businesses, but it is what it is.

• SingPost Doubles Down on E-Commerce With U.S., European Services: Singapore Post Ltd., which counts Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. as its second-biggest shareholder, plans to expand freight services and warehouses in the U.S. and Europe as Asia’s emerging middle class drives online purchases from overseas. The move comes as other postal companies in Asia also are looking to reinvent themselves. Japan Post Group, a $2.5 trillion behemoth that also function as a bank and insurer, is preparing an initial public offering and looking to expand internationally after buying Australian logistics company Toll Holdings Ltd. earlier this year. SingPost holds a monopoly on mail delivery in its home base, which accounts for about 80 percent of its operating profit, but is looking for new areas of growth as more people use mobile phones and access the Internet. Worldwide business-to-consumer sales could grow 34 percent to $675 billion in 2016 from last year as the global middle class grows, SingPost said, citing data from researcher eMarketer.

• DocuSign CEO resigns as company heads toward IPO: source. The chief executive officer of DocuSign has resigned, according to an internal memo, signaling a leadership change for a well-funded tech company that is on the brink of an initial public offering. Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign, a San Francisco company that makes software to add legally compliant electronic signatures to documents, told employees in a memo the company would begin a search for his successor. Krach became CEO four years ago and has been chairman for seven. Sources familiar with the company say Krach will continue to have a significant presence there. He will stay on as chairman for at least three more years. He is also one of DocuSign's largest individual shareholders. Krach will remain CEO until a replacement is named. A search has begun, and the board is looking at both internal and external candidates. The next logical step for the company is an IPO, according to the source who asked not to be named because the plans are confidential. DocuSign, valued at $3 billion, aims to replace one of the final paper-and-pen aspects of business transactions: the signature. It is available in more than 40 languages and about 188 countries. DocuSign recently closed a Series F funding round that exceeded $300 million and now has well over $500 million in financing.

• Amazon plays a long game with AWS: Amazon Web Services doesn’t just want to dominate the global business in selling computing online. It also wants to be the rarest thing of all in the technology industry: a long-lived company. Its strategy hinges on an unprecedented level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match. The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional “vendor lock-in” of hooking customers on proprietary technology, but by making itself the center of the styles and habits of cloud computing. At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, the chief information officer of General Electric, said, “A.W.S. will be the trusted partner that will run our company’s information technology for the next 140 years.” That’s how long G.E., founded by Thomas Edison, has been around. Mr. Fowler was talking at the annual A.W.S. conference, during a session in which the company indirectly made the case that it would go after all of the existing customers of some of the biggest technology companies around. Among other offerings, A.W.S. plans to send customers machines that will extract an Oracle database, say, and send it to A.W.S. to be transformed to a cheaper cloud product. G.E. had at one point thought of building its own cloud, but it went with Amazon in part because of this know-how. A.W.S. also introduced a range of new technology products, including automated creation of mobile software applications, automated large- and small-scale data analysis systems in real time, and ways of building software that can be managed easily across the globe from a single location. There were, of course, also ways to make these parts fit together, mostly in automated forms that configured and managed most of the underlying technology. To work with it all, last week A.W.S. published a 56-page manual on how to build and run software in A.W.S. “Cloud is the new normal,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, said to a roomful of several thousand software engineers on Thursday. “This is how you will build your applications.” Certainly, a good part of A.W.S. software is open source, which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud business, created more than 500 new features and services last year, as A.W.S. did. That raises an interesting prospect. A.W.S. does not have a lot of the proprietary technology or onerous contracts that have traditionally held captive the customers of big enterprise software companies. Amazon may be creating a kind of casual lock-in of its own: All this automation, features and standardization of practices could mean that in several years most young engineers will know how to work in the A.W.S. system, but none other. That’s not exactly a hostage situation, but it would hold companies.