Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

• Holiday Shopping Is Chilly for ‘Buy’ Buttons at Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest: More than a year after Twitter and Facebook began placing Buy buttons on their social networks, their e-commerce initiatives still appear to be relegated to experimental side projects. And at Pinterest, the tech platform that many believe is most conducive to e-commerce, one of its mainstream launch partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day via so-called Buyable Pins. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Facebook and Twitter, and tepid early results at Pinterest, highlight the myriad challenges all three platforms face in transforming their immense user bases into shoppers. The sluggishness of the combined efforts also serves as a warning to other industry players betting big on the idea of social commerce that it’s still unclear if consumers will make purchases in big numbers on platforms that aren’t mainly retail destinations. Spokespeople for the three companies declined to disclose sales numbers for these initiatives. While each platform had its own reasons for pursuing e-commerce initiatives, the central idea was that they thought there was an opportunity to make it easier for their users to buy a product when they discover it on the platform. In theory, the usefulnesses of such a feature would be the biggest on mobile phones, where clicking through to make a purchase on another site can make purchases less likely because of uneven mobile webpage experiences. Facebook was the first to take a crack. Sixteen months after Facebook first began testing Buy buttons on ads and regular posts to let people purchase products they discover on Facebook without leaving Facebook, the initiative is still being dubbed a beta test, restricted solely to online merchants who work with e-commerce software provider Shopify. The company has also recently added purchase capabilities to some Facebook business pages and to a dedicated shopping section of Facebook, but these features, too, are being characterized as “tests” that aren’t available to all Facebook users in the U.S. At Twitter, it’s still unclear how big of a priority e-commerce will be going forward under the leadership of new CEO Jack Dorsey. The company began placing Buy buttons in tweets in September of 2014, and struck partnerships in October of this year with software partners such as Bigcommerce and Stripe to get more merchants on board. Best Buy, for example, will soon join the program — just not in time for the just-passed Black Friday weekend. But regular Twitter users can still go weeks without seeing any tweets enabled with e-commerce; most Re/code colleagues I polled, who are absolute Twitter power users, said they never come across them at all. Then there’s Pinterest, the massive tech platform that retailers were most excited about for its e-commerce potential. The company began inserting Buyable Pins into its iPhone app in late June, and just added the feature to its Android app in early November. The company says more than 10,000 merchants have joined the program, including big retailers and brands like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Tory Burch, but at least one of these big partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day on Pinterest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the sales figures. This source and another also said that Pinterest insiders have privately admitted to being disappointed with early sales numbers.

• AppDynamics Raises $158M; Now Valued At $1.9 Billion: Last month, based on an SEC filing, we told you that seven-year-old, San Francisco-based AppDynamics had raised a fresh $83.4 million in funding as part of a round that was targeting up to $150 million. Turns out the company met that target and then some. CEO David Wadhwani — who joined the firm in September after spending more than a decade as an executive at Adobe, including as its digital chief — says the company has just closed on $158 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital. Other participants in the round include Adage Capital, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Cross Creek Advisors, as well as earlier backers Institutional Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. AppDynamics makes software to monitor the performance of business applications, competing with some traditional firms like IBM, as well as younger outfits like New Relic, which went public last December and has seen relatively steady stock performance since. (New Relic, which raised $214 million in venture funding, has a current market cap of $1.8 billion.) AppDynamics had previously raised roughly $206 million in debt and equity, including a $120 million round — $70 million equity and $50 million of debt — that closed in July of last year. At the time of the funding announcement, the company told VentureBeat that the money represented “pre-IPO growth financing.” Asked today what this new round means, Wadhwani said he “won’t speculate on the exact timing” of an IPO but added, “I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do.” The new funding, he said, “represents freedom. We can [execute on our plans for the company] on this money and effectively choose when we want to go public.” Wadhwani declined to discuss the company’s post-money valuation, but a source close to the company pegs it at $1.9 billion.

• In a Global Market for Hacking Talent, Argentines Stand Out: Want to learn how to break into the computerized heart of a medical device or an electronic voting machine? Maybe a smartphone or even a car? Thanks to the legacy of military rule and a culture of breaking rules of all sorts, Argentina has become one of the best places on earth to find people who could show you how. As Silicon Valley’s talent war has gone global, particularly for those skilled at breaking into things, this Latin American nation has become a rich recruiting ground for corporations and foreign governments. Companies need hackers to help defend against online criminals and state-sponsored spies. And as the world’s critical infrastructure moves online and the threat of war moves into cyberspace, governments are desperate to acquire hackers’ tools. Within Latin America, Brazil has become known in recent years as the world leader in Internet banking fraud. But Argentina’s hackers have a reputation for creativity. In particular, they are known for their ability to find so-called zero-day flaws, which are unpatched holes in widely used technology that can be used to spy on or even destroy adversaries’ computer networks. Technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have encrypted their products and services so that in many cases the only way to monitor a target’s communications is to hack directly into its device. As a result, there is a new urgency among governments in acquiring zero-day exploits. A mix of executives from around the world, government officials, contractors and — or so it was rumored — spies gathered here in October in an industrial building converted into a cultural center to watch hacking done the Argentine way at the 11th annual EkoParty, the largest hacking conference in Latin America. Long before foreign companies came calling, hacking things was a life skill in Argentina, a way to get by through decades of repressive military rule and a volatile economy. Argentines have a saying, “atado con alambre,” which translates roughly as “held together with wire,” to describe the inventive nature of so many here who learned to do much with little. The country still has one foot in the tech industry’s past because of stringent import rules. Amazon will not ship to your door here. BlackBerry has more market share here than Apple. A new iPhone costs $2,000 or more on MercadoLibre, an online auction site, but many iPhone owners said they had been able to persuade a friend traveling from abroad to sneak one through customs. To get their hands on the latest, greatest devices, Argentines often have to think like a hacker — or even become one. “You make do without resources, without high-end technology, with poor Wi-Fi connections,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentine political analyst. “We improvise creative solutions, for lack of other options, and many have applied these same procedures to the technical industry.”

• FAA Permit for Drone Flight School May Help Amazon, Google Speed Up Delivery Plans: The Federal Aviation Administration is plotting how to regulate drones. Tech companies with plans for drones — Amazon, Google, DJI, GoPro and a bevy of others looking to tap a potential multi-billion dollar market — are itching for the FAA to get on with it already. Last week, the agency made a small legal maneuver that advocates hope indicates more leniency to come on the commercial applications of drones. The FAA authorized the Kansas State University Polytechnic campus to train students and outside companies on flying unmanned aircraft. This type of authorization, called a Section 333 exemption, is common; construction sites, news outlets and disaster relief groups have received them. Amazon scored one in April. The notable difference here is in how close the FAA lets drones get to people. Even with flight authorization, drones must stay 500 feet from people, unless the craft meet some stringent safety and logistics requirements. The only exception had been on closed film and TV sets, which deploy drones for movie magic. But the FAA lifted the 500-foot restriction for the Kansas school, even though it didn’t ask for the specific closed-set exemption.

• Target and PayPal Sites Report Problems on Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, is not immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to gain access to the site of Target, the discount chain,and PayPal, the online payments processing service. Both are now back online after an onslaught that reflects the shifting trends in the way consumers are looking for shopping bargains. Foot Locker, Groupon and Victoria’s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns Monday afternoon, according to Catchpoint Systems, a web monitoring firm. In a statement on Monday, Target said it was experiencing its biggest online volumes ever in response to a 15 percent online discount that it had announced previously. Visitors to the site early Monday got a message saying: “Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic’s causing delays. If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP.” According to a statement from Target, the company said it placed online shoppers in a queue in order to manage the volume of users, but it then allowed them to keep trying to gain access by refreshing their browser. A heat map on downdetector.com showed most of the problems with PayPal were reported in North America and Europe. Problems started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. PayPal said in an emailed statement that the “brief, intermittent interruption” in service was resolved. It did not provide a reason. The holiday buying frenzy has evolved over the years as more stores offer sales before and sometimes on Thanksgiving Day. It has also shifted away from physical stores as Americans have increasingly turned to online shopping. For many people, Monday was their first day back at work after the long Thanksgiving weekend, so some shopping was presumably being done surreptitiously while at work.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 30 2015

• Thanksgiving Final Results – OmniChannel Strikes Back: This morning we are releasing the final results from Thanksgiving 2015. What stands out is the Omnichannel players with stores and online marketplaces (Best Buy, Sears, etc.) did extremely well.  This indicates that these ‘Brick and Clicks’ retailers were really able to tie their store and online promotions together with great success. This data is date-shifted to compare Thanksgiving this year  (Nov 26) vs. last year (Nov 27).  In summary, Thanksgiving 2015 blew the doors off, coming in at 43.4% y/y growth compared to 20.1% last year – more than twice the rate of growth.  The trick is while we know that Thanksgiving 2015 was very strong, we don’t know if this will continue through the entire Cyber Five and through all of Holiday 15, or if consumers are shopping much earlier than last year and will taper off as we get past Thanksgiving.  Omnichannel marketplaces led the pack with Google Shopping and Amazon also outperforming. From a device perspective, Smartphones were 58% of traffic compared to last year’s Thanksgiving 35% and a new high water mark for this device type in our data.  From an order perspective, smartphone came in at 37% which was also more than double last year, although conversion rates continue to lag desktop and tablet considerably. Conclusion: consumers not only increased their Thanksgiving sales, but they utilized their smartphones heavily and favored omnichannel retailers.

• Kobe Bryant Takes NBA Retirement News to Twitter, Not TV. Chris Sacca Is Pumped: On Sunday, outgoing NBA star Kobe Bryant opted not to make his expected retirement announcement on broadcast TV. Instead, he went for social media, posting his retirement poem on Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. It links to Players Tribune, a site for athletes from fellow superstar Derek Jeter, which subsequently crashed after the Kobe post. It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook’s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over “lack of sex.”)It took about an hour for Twitter to add the news to its Moments tab. (Facebook’s trending section, at least for me, does not have the news, but is teasing a split between NFLer Tim Tebow and a former Miss USA over “lack of sex.”)

• Amazon releases video showcasing unmanned delivery drones:  Amazon has unveiled what its unmanned drones for package delivery would look like with a video launched on Sunday on the prototype of technology it announced two years ago. The promotional clip, narrated by television show host Jeremy Clarkson, shows a family receiving in about 30 minutes replacement soccer shoes for the one chewed up by its dog. "In time, there will be a whole family of Amazon drones. Different designs for different environments," Clarkson says. The video shows the box containing the shoes ordered by the family fitting seamlessly into the body of the drone. It then rises vertically, in helicopter style, for nearly 400 feet, according to Clarkson, after which it assumes a horizontal orientation, flying like an airplane. Clarkson said the drone in the clip could fly for 15 miles. It was equipped with what he called "sense-and-avoid technology" to sense, then avoid, obstacles in its path. The video shows the drone approaching its targeted landing spot, dropping the package, then taking off again, presumably to return where it came from. The launch of the video appeared to be timed ahead of "Cyber Monday", one of the biggest shopping events for electronics retailers. Amazon did not say when it hoped to have the drones in service.

• Judge Dismisses Yelp Suit Brought by Shareholders: Yelp won the dismissal of a lawsuit by shareholders who claimed they had been fraudulently misled about the authenticity and quality of its reviews, and who accused Yelp of manipulating those reviews to favor paying advertisers. In a Nov. 24 decision, United States District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar in San Francisco said reasonable investors would understand that not all Yelp reviews are real, particularly given the company’s admission that its technology to screen user-generated content is not foolproof. In April, Judge Tigar dismissed an earlier version of the complaint, which sought class-action status. He said the plaintiffs could not sue again because any amendment would be “futile.” Yelp lets users rate restaurants and other businesses on a five-star scale. Positive reviews can bolster sales and negative reviews can harm sales, especially if viewers perceive the reviews as unbiased. Shareholders led by Joseph Curry accused Yelp of inflating its share price by falsely promoting the reliability of its reviews, as part of a calculated strategy to extort businesses into buying ads or making payments in exchange for removing bad or fake reviews. But the judge said only 11 of the complaints accused Yelp of offering to manipulate reviews in exchange for fees, a small number.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, November 27

• India’s Grofers Grabs $120M To Bring Offline Merchants Into The On-Demand World: The race for on-demand delivery services in India is on, and today one of the bigger startups in the market has picked up a large cash injection as it goes for pole position. Grofers, an Instacart-style app that links up with local, offline merchants to delivery groceries, medicine, flowers, and other daily items to customers, has raised $120 million led by new investor SoftBank. The Series C round also included existing backers DST’s Apoletto Managers, Tiger Global and Instacart investor Sequoia Capital. Grofers CEO and co-founder Albinder Dhindsa and SoftBank have both directly confirmed the round and investors to TechCrunch. Grofers has been on a fundraising tear to aid its expansion. This is the third round raised by the company this year alone, after earlier rounds of $10 million and $35 million. It brings the total to just under $166 million including an earlier seed round. Japan’s Softbank has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into Indian startups like Ola, Snapdeal and more, and as part of this round it will take a seat on Grofers’ board. The Times of India, which first reported the raise, cites sources that say Grofers now has a post-money valuation of over $300 million. Dhindsa, who cofounded the company with Saurabh Kumar, would not comment on the valuation and said he hadn’t even wanted to make this fundraise public. “Very honestly it’s just a distraction for the team,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re in the middle of trying to build a business.” Today, that business is currently live in 26 cities in India, with some 1.6 million downloads of the mobile apps that are used to order its services. While Grofers looks on the surface like another Instacart clone, there is more going on under the hood. The company originally started as a B2B provider of a supply chain platform it built to help larger brands distribute consumables to smaller merchants, and for those smaller merchants who are almost completely offline to better keep track of their stock. “In India, retail is very unorganised, so we see an opportunity in helping small merchants come online,” Dhindsa says. Still, perhaps to tap into a more mass market prospect, it recently pivoted — or expanded may be the more accurate term — to make its business more consumer-facing, by offering those small, offline businesses an additional service: a way of showing their stock to consumers, who can order and have items delivered. Typically, Grofers offers some features to businesses for free, such as its inventory management system. It then takes a cut on other business software and services, as well as on the delivery, which can range at prices to consumers of between $1 for groceries to $0.40 for medicines (not as cheap sounding in India as it may be in the U.S.). Dhindsa says that the funding will be used to continue growing its supply-chain management development, but also to continue building out its last-mile infrastructure. Today, Grofers uses a mix of its own employees and contractors to deliver goods. Perhaps cleverly, it has chosen not to make delivery the cost-and-profit focus of its whole operation. In fact, it’s even considered partnering with others for that aspect of its business.

• Thanksgiving Online Sales Stats: Growth Higher Than Rest of Year As Importance of Holiday Season Sales Rises: Thanksgiving is now in full swing in the U.S., and while many are focused on food and football, some are turning their attention online to kick off their holiday shopping. Adobe, which has tracked 100 million visits to some 4,500 retail sites so far today (including 80% of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers), says that over $1 billion has been spent so far online, and that the final figure is on track to be $1.7 billion — growth of 22% compared to Thanksgiving a year ago, with Star Wars being one of the big brands driving sales. “Thanksgiving Day online sales continue to trend ahead of expectation as we head into the evening hours, when mobile shopping comes back into the mix,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index. “We expect the day to come in up 22% YoY at over $1.7 billion, driven by stronger than expected toy sales due to Star Wars items and much higher shopping via email promotions (+25% YoY).” Meanwhile, IBM — which also tracks sales across thousands of websites in the U.S. — is publishing real-time numbers showing how people are buying online. As of 3 PM Pacific time today, the average value per order has been $142.55. As a point of comparison, a year ago, IBM said the average order value was $125.25; and in 2013, it was $132. IBM says that online sales the day before Thanksgiving were up by 35% compared to the same day a year ago, with average value per order up by $9.10. (As comparison, U.S. e-commerce sales overall are only expected to go up by 14% this year compared to last, so 35% is high). Taken together, yesterday’s and today’s numbers indicate not only that more more of us are shopping online, but we are spending more in the process. We’ll have to see how those numbers bear out over the next days and weeks before saying whether this is a sign of people getting in early and dropping off, or whether this is a bellwether for a strong season overall. Overall, the period is projected to bring in between $70 billion $95 billion in e-commerce sales. Yesterday, comScore published some numbers predicting that mobile would account for less than 17% of all sales in November and December ($11.7 billion out of $70 billion); but that it would represent nearly all the growth. IBM’s numbers today so far are actually improving on those projections. It says that just under 28% of all sales are being made on mobile devices. And mobiles are also account for just under half (48%) of all e-commerce traffic — that is, browsing for goods if not buying outright. Adobe, on the other hand, is reporting slightly lower numbers for mobile. It says that $283 million in sales have come mobile devices so far this Thanksgiving, with smartphones accounting for 15% of that and tablets 11%. Adobe says this is a big leap over last year’s 18% but actually lower than the 29% it had expected “but will pick up again during Thanksgiving dinner time.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, November 25

• Xiaomi's $45 Billion Valuation Seen `Unfeasible' as Growth Cools: Things were going so well for Xiaomi Corp. Customers were lining up, investors were swooning and the Beijing-based startup closed funding at a $45 billion valuation. That was last year. Now the high-flying smartphone maker is stumbling. Founder Lei Jun’s latest business, one of China’s most exciting startup stories of the past few years, is likely to miss its own goal of selling 80 million smartphones this year, according to two people with knowledge of its production plans. Suppliers also cut their internal targets for Xiaomi in anticipation of the shortfall, they said. Xiaomi’s falter shows the startup’s challenge in trying to maintain momentum after a meteoric ascent past Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. in China. Investors bought into the company’s story of youthful disruption and online sales, yet the subsequent lowering of China’s growth target and the copying of its sales strategy by rivals have neutralized Xiaomi’s first-mover advantage, putting its high price tag in doubt. "All those expectations of growth aren’t being realized, which now makes that $45 billion valuation unfeasible," said Alberto Moel, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein in Hong Kong. "The argument was that their business is kind of like Apple and they’re growing very fast, but they’re no longer growing so fast and they’re not as good as Apple." Domestic shipments of Xiaomi smartphones, including its premium Mi 4 and more economical Redmi series, dropped 8 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, its first-ever decline, according to researcher Canalys. IHS, another research firm, estimates that Xiaomi shipments dropped 3.9 percent, barely maintaining the lead over Huawei Technologies Co. That’s a big change from the bold growth projections used to justify Xiaomi’s tag as one of the world’s most-valuable technology startups. In March of last year, Lei predicted selling 100 million smartphones in 2015. Through the first nine months of this year, Xiaomi shipped about 53 million smartphones. With its optimistic forecast, Xiaomi secured $1.1 billion in December from investors including GIC Pte., All-Stars Investment Ltd. and DST. Xiaomi drew comparisons to Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company that months earlier held the largest initial public offering ever.

• Black Friday Deal or Dud? How to Shop Smart This Holiday Season: Black Friday, which has traditionally been the moment to flock to stores for steep discounts, and which has evolved to also include major online sales events for retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, is not all that it is billed to be. We asked J. D. Levite, the deals editor of the product recommendations website The Wirecutter, for some data on just how beneficial the deals are on Black Friday — and the answer was not encouraging. Year round, Mr. Levite and his team track product prices across the web to unearth discounts on goods of all types, from gadgets to kitchenware. They also look at whether the product is high quality and durable based on their own testing and other reviews, and whether the seller or brand has a reasonable return or warranty policy. By those measures, Mr. Levite said, only about 0.6 percent, or 200 out of the approximately 34,000 deals online, which typically carry the same price tags inside retailers’ physical stores, will be good ones on Black Friday. “There are just more deals on that day than any other day of the year,” he said. “But for the most part, the deals aren’t anything better than what you’d see throughout the rest of the year.” There’s a smarter way to shop than relying on Black Friday. With the plethora of web tools now available, consumers can research online and then use trackers to follow product pricing for drops throughout the year. While it’s a time-consuming effort, the method is more precise for understanding pricing trends, both online and in stores. One useful tracking tool is Camel Camel Camel, which is geared toward users of the online retail behemoth Amazon. Using the Camel Camel Camel website, people can view a product’s price history on Amazon.com and then create alerts to receive an email as soon as the item’s price falls to a certain threshold. Over time, interesting trends emerge. One is that some product prices are raised in October, a few weeks before Black Friday. The prices are reduced again on Black Friday. Camel Camel Camel’s database also shows some items have predictable pricing patterns over the course of a year. A pair of bookshelf speakers made by Pioneer are typically $127, but that tends to drop significantly in August — to $60 in August 2014 and to $88 in August 2015, timed to the back-to-school season. This week, the same pair of speakers was again $127. In other words, there are times of year when different types of products decline in price — and Black Friday isn’t one of them.

• All In: Why Nikesh Arora Bet $483 Million on SoftBank's Future: It began late one night this year when he and Son were talking about people’s tolerance for risk and how it tends to decline over time. Arora took a chance as a kid by leaving India for the U.S. with only $200 in cash, but he had since gone on to a lucrative career. So Son prodded him. “Masa said, ‘How much risk appetite do you have?”’ Arora says. “‘Do you believe you can transform SoftBank into a company two, three, five times its size? Now is the time to take the risk.”’ A week later, Arora came back with a plan to buy 60 billion yen ($483 million at the time) in SoftBank shares, more than any insider purchase by an executive in Japan in at least 12 years, according to Bloomberg data. He would become the company’s second-largest individual shareholder and borrow heavily to do it. Arora says investors don’t yet appreciate what SoftBank is becoming. The company has been battered recently because of struggles at two major holdings, the China e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the U.S. wireless operator Sprint Corp. SoftBank is still valued at less than the public shares it owns, meaning investors deem its operating businesses practically worthless.Arora professes not to be worried. He says investors will come around once the company makes progress in reviving Sprint, lets Alibaba recover and demonstrates that it’s more than a Japanese telecommunications company with a spotty investment record.“I’m very relaxed,” Arora said. “I’m here for at least the next 10 years.”  Arora was hired last year after a decade at Google Inc. and promoted to president in June. Since then, he has been quietly building his own operation within SoftBank, an investment arm that will take stakes in technology companies around the world. Though SoftBank put money into startups for decades, including a tumultuous foray during the dot-com bust, the effort had dwindled in recent years to what Son called a “hobby” next to his wireless and broadband businesses. Arora is reviving the venture push and making it much more ambitious. He is hiring a team of 15 to 20 outsiders and plans to put about $3 billion into startups each year. Arora’s recruits, from companies such as Google and LinkedIn Corp., are hand-picked for the expertise they can offer startups in key areas like personnel, product development and acquisitions. He says SoftBank will hold a competitive advantage by operating at a financial strata few can reach. He plans to make five to 10 investments a year of $100 million to $1 billion. The idea is to back startups that have proven products and need to expand -- the rapid phase of growth Arora helped manage at Google.

• Morgan Stanley Said Struggling to Sell EBay Enterprise Deal Loan: Morgan Stanley is struggling to unload $640 million of loans backing the private-equity buyout of EBay Inc.’s enterprise business after investors shunned the debt, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The bank has been trying to sell the loans since mid-October and continues to hold the debt even after EBay said on Nov. 2 that the sale was completed. Morgan Stanley has discussed a steeper discount to lure buyers and has been probing investors in recent days about the price at which they may be willing to buy the debt, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. One concern investors have raised is that the company’s projected earnings may be too optimistic. Buyout targets often make adjustments to forecast earnings, called add-backs, that can reduce a borrower’s leverage.

• HP Inc plunges after printer business underwhelms: Shares of HP Inc, which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, plunged 16.3 percent on Wednesday after the company's lackluster results fueled concerns about its ability to weather a slowdown in the printer and PC markets. HP Inc's revenue from both its printer and PC businesses fell 14 percent each in the fourth quarter, their worst performance in the year ended Oct. 31, and forecast current-quarter profit below market expectations."Things got worse. Not only did they not get better - they got worse," said Shebly Seyrafi, an analyst at FBN Securities.HP Inc Chief Executive Dion Weisler called the printing business a "much greater challenge" than the PC business.The company has been cutting printer prices to tackle stiff competition, particularly from Japanese printer makers Canon and Epson.However, the price cuts, coupled with the effect of a stronger dollar, have reduced the value of income from overseas markets.Revenue from HP Inc's printer supplies such as ink cartridges and laser toner fell 10 percent this quarter. Supplies account for most of the profits for HP Inc.HP Inc's PC unit has been suffering as sales have been falling worldwide for several quarters and the launch of Windows 10 has so far failed to rekindle the industry."Ultimately I think (HP Inc), the way it's structured, it's going to be more of a sort of dividend yield play," said Jeffrey Fidacaro, an analyst.HP Inc's sibling, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, saw its shares rise as much as 8.5 percent on Wednesday, after it maintained its profit forecast for fiscal 2016.

• Zenefits Under Investigation For Allegedly Allowing Unlicensed Brokers To Sell Health Insurance: Cloud HR platform Zenefits may have allowed salespeople to illegally act as insurance agents in at least seven states. According to a BuzzFeed investigative report, the startup let unlicensed brokers sell health insurance, leading to at least one commissioner to investigate in Washington State. Those unlicensed solicitations go back to at least the summer of 2014, and the Washington State office of the insurance commissioner started looking at the potential violations earlier this year, according to the report. This is not the first time Zenefits has faced legal scrutiny for possible insurance violations. The Utah Insurance Department took the startup to task over claims it was illegally giving insurance software away for free. Regulators at the time said that the company violated local laws and that it was unfair to traditional insurance brokers. Utah legislators threw out the complaint and let Zenefits get back to business after both the Utah House and Senate overwhelmingly voted to let the startup continue operations. The broker license violation looks a bit more serious and could be considered a Class B felony, under Washington State law. Violators may be subject to a prison sentence of up to 10 years as well as face a $20,000 fine. According to the report, Zenefits execs may have known about the violations and were aware of the consequences, but were prompted to get sales agents licensed in the state only after learning of the insurance commission’s investigation. State records show 22 agents became licensed brokers just days after the report said Zenefits realized there was a state inquiry. The startup has since launched a “license management system” to help track which sales agents are properly licensed.

• Facebook’s Internet.org Now Available Throughout India: Internet.org, Facebook’s initiative to provide free Internet services in developing countries, is now available to all Indians through the Free Basics app on Reliance Communication’s network. The project is meant to give people in emerging economies easy access to the Internet, but has been hit by a slew of criticism. Reliance Communications is India’s fourth-largest telecom operator, with about 110 million subscribers as of June. According to its site, Free Basics will enable users to use Facebook and Facebook Messenger and access sites like Wikipedia, BBC News, Bing Search, Dictionary.com, and local news services. Detractors say that by making a handful of services available on its platform, Internet.org gives preferential treatment to its partners, therefore violating the tenets of net neutrality. In response, Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said Internet.org will focus on offering basic services for free (hence the branding of its app) and is not meant to limit access to other providers. The company has also taken steps to make joining Free Basics easier to join for developers and other potential partners. This has done little to ameliorate critics who are concerned about the potential drawbacks of having a company as large and powerful as Facebook control what millions of new Internet users see. In addition to India, Free Basics is available in 30 countries throughout Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, November 25

• Apple plans to launch Apple Pay in China by February: WSJ Apple Inc (AAPL.O) plans to launch its mobile payment system Apple Pay in China by early February, the Wall Street Journal reported. The iPhone maker has struck deals recently with China's big four state-run banks, the newspaper reported late Monday, citing people familiar with the discussions. When launched, Apple Pay will mainly compete with Alipay, the online payment platform run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, and UnionPay, a state-controlled consortium that has a monopoly on all yuan payment cards issued and used in the country. Apple's plans could still face regulatory hurdles in China, where banking and e-commerce are overseen by a number of government agencies, WSJ said. Launched in the United States in October last year, Apple is bringing its payment service to China, the most important market for smartphones. The company's sales nearly doubled in Greater China in its fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier. The amount Apple would make off such transactions has been a sticking point in negotiations to bring Apple Pay to China, the Journal quoted the people as saying.

• Google’s Answer to Facebook Instant Articles Gets (Tentative) Launch Date, Ad Partners: Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s initiative for mobile news publishing and its open source riposte to similar efforts from Facebook and Apple, is arriving “early next year,” the company said in a post on Tuesday. Last month, Google rolled out a preview version of the product, which Re/code readers learned of first. Google has already roped in marquee publishers, including* the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC. Some 1,600-plus newspapers and television stations have “voiced their support,” according to Google. On Tuesday, the company also announced it had signed up a slew of analytics and advertising providers for the back end.

• Hewlett-Packard ended its life as one public company with a whimper. For the quarter that ended Oct. 30, Hewlett-Packard had net earnings of $1.32 billion, or 73 cents a share. Revenue was $25.7 billion, down 9 percent from a year earlier. The earnings were below Wall Street’s expectations, which used nonstandard accounting popular in analyzing tech companies. By the nonstandard formula, HP earned 93 cents a share. Analysts had expected HP to make 96 cents a share, on revenue of $26.4 billion, according to a survey by FactSet. Shares of HP Inc. were down more than 7 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday, while HPE shares were up more than 2 percent. Of the two firms, Ms. Whitman’s HPE drew more attention, as she is trying to remake a business that sold things like computer servers and data networking into something with more software and high-value services, which can compete in the era of cloud computing. HP, considered the grandfather of Silicon Valley, began November as two separate entities. One, called HP Inc., sells primarily personal computers and printers. The other, HPE, sells computer hardware, software and services that are used by large companies. Meg Whitman, who was chief executive of the old HP and now runs HPE, split the entity in the hope of increasing efficiency and growth. After months of planning, the two companies began operating separate financial reporting systems in August, although they were legally one company until Oct. 30. Ms. Whitman’s strategy now is led by high-value consulting, in particular helping customers in planning, managing, protecting and using hybrid cloud and on-site systems to get and analyze more data, faster. Next week HPE and Microsoft are expected to make a joint announcement that Microsoft is a “preferred partner,” meaning they will make sales calls together and recommend each other to customers. It is a plausible plan, Mr. Bittman said, that only needs revenue and profits. “It’s a good series of slides, but we need to see it in action,” he said.

• Amazon Challenger Jet.com Announces $350 Million Investment, Eyes $150 Million More: E-commerce startup Jet.com announced a $350 million cash infusion Tuesday led by Fidelity Investments, providing money to help the company attract customers during its first holiday shopping season. An additional $150 million investment is “expected shortly,” the Hoboken, New Jersey-based company said Tuesday in a statement. The investment values Jet at $1 billion before the new funding round, the company said. Jet, which began operations in July, offers free shipping on orders exceeding $35 without a membership. Web giant Amazon.com Inc. charges customers $99 annually for delivery discounts. Founded by former Amazon executive Marc Lore, Jet is trying to undercut its chief rival’s prices to attract customers. Last month, it abandoned a $50 subscription membership fee. The total value of merchandise sold on Jet was $33.2 million in October, an increase of 65 percent from September, the company said in the statement. Jet expects to end the year with gross merchandise value of $500 million on an annualized basis. Jet offers customers unique ways to save on orders, including discounts for paying with a debit card or waiving their right to return products they buy. Consumers can also amass savings by loading up their carts with more items, which minimizes the number of shipments. Jet is attracting new customers by subsidizing their purchases with big discounts, which is a lower-cost way of gaining business than advertising, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is considering offering an option to buy online and pick up in a store with its retail partners, which would help Jet compete with Amazon’s larger inventory and faster shipping, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the strategy is private.

• Tango, Chat App Unicorn, Lays Off 9% Of Staff Following Failed Move Into E-Commerce: Tango, the mobile messaging unicorn that reached a billion-dollar valuation when Alibaba invested $280 million in it early last year, has laid off around 9 percent of its workforce after it shuttered a brief effort at e-commerce. The Mountain View-based company launched an in-app commerce feature powered by Alibaba and Walmart back in May of this year, initially in the U.S. market, but it has confirmed to TechCrunch that ‘Tango Shop’ was closed down last month, leading to the lay-off off around 30 employees working on it. “The initiative didn’t really pan out,” Tango CTO Eric Setton told TechCrunch. “We didn’t see the conversations we wanted. [There was a] good amount of traffic but the volume didn’t materialize. [We recently] updated the app to take the e-commerce flow out, but unfortunately couldn’t keep the team working on that initiative.” Following the reorganization, Tango now has 270 staff across its U.S. office and a smaller presence in Beijing, China. Interestingly, one high-profile exit from that reshuffle was Chi-Chao Chang — formerly VP of Tango Labs and the lead on Tango’s commerce initiative — who is now working at Facebook, although he is involved with the social network’s search business not Messenger. Despite the retrenchment, Setton claimed Tango is on track to have its highest quarter of revenue to date. “This year, [revenue] is an order of magnitude above what we’ve ever seen before,” he said, although he declined to provide a specific revenue figure. Setton also declined to give an update on Tango’s current user base. The last figure given by the company came in May, at the launch of Tango Shop, when it claimed 300 million registered users. That wasn’t a big jump on the 200 million registered users that it announced in March 2014, when Alibaba invested and Tango announced its first (and only) monthly active user count: 70 million. The lack of fresh user metrics suggests that Tango’s user growth is stalling, particularly as the mobile messaging scene matures and network effects come into play to drive users to the most established, more popular apps. Because, after all, chat apps are about chatting, which is hard to do if your friends all moved to Snapchat (estimated at 100 million monthly users), Kik (240 million registered users), Facebook Messenger (700 million monthly users) or WhatsApp (900 million monthly users).

• Alphabet Trying to Mix Heft With Start-Up Agility: Alphabet was created to separate Google, the search giant, from the constellation of appendages — the self-driving cars, the pharmaceutical company, the two venture capital funds — that many current and former employees say had made the company too sprawling to manage. The last three months of 2015 were the first quarter of the new holding company’s life, and the contours of the organization are starting to fall into place. It has hired new leaders, such as an auto industry veteran who was recently tapped to run the self-driving-car project. It is developing new processes, like an internal system that would have Alphabet companies pay Google for dull but important services like human resources, accounting or access to Google’s technological infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, something first reported by The Wall Street Journal. These are normal processes in large companies, used to make sure business units have a handle on expenses. But the company is also asking questions about how it might achieve the dream that has eluded so many other big companies: find a way to take advantage of its heft while being nimble like a start-up. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive of Alphabet, has said that he wants his company to be a home for entrepreneurs. If the Alphabet concept plays out as advertised, company chiefs would have more autonomy to make strategic decisions on such matters as whom they hire and how they spend money, or even to raise their public profiles. But the pitch — in particular to acquisition targets — is also about what they would not have to do. They would not have to worry about building a large server infrastructure for their technology to run on. They would not have to worry about whether to use their money to hire another accountant or another engineer. In the case of more mature companies, they could skip the mounds of paperwork and reporting requirements that come with going public. That broad idea — that entrepreneurs do best when they are focused squarely on new technology rather than distracted by corporate building blocks that every company needs but also take lots of time to build — has taken root across Silicon Valley. It is why, in addition to money, venture capital firms now give their companies access to all kinds of marketing, sales and other services in hopes that their start-ups can more quickly become grown-ups. The first good glimpse of all this will come early next year, when Alphabet, for the first time, will separate Google’s search and advertising businesses from Alphabet’s more speculative divisions. But it will take months or years for Alphabet to figure out how to create the best of all possible worlds. If such a thing exists.

• When and Where Do Black Friday's Biggest Crowds Actually Hit? Google's look at foot traffic finds a few surprises:  Google wants to help shoppers navigate the wretched non-holiday known as Black Friday. Today, the online Santa of search is showing when and where people head for doorbusters. Pulling aggregated, anonymized data from Google Maps users, the company is revealing for the first time traffic insights for various retailers in the month leading up to Christmas Eve. The data isn't just relevant to shoppers. Understanding peak traffic for shopping malls, department stores, electronic stores, cellphone stores, discount stores and dollar stores could help marketers better reach consumers when they're keenest to buy. Google also announced today it would provide a more detailed view of offline measurement by giving advertisers the ability to break out store visits at a keyword or ad-group level. "By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits," according to a Google blog post. "For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store." Here are a few key insights from Google's foot-traffic analysis: Store traffic peaks between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Black Friday, with Thanksgiving Day department store visitors peaking between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Shopping malls, superstores and discount stores experience the highest traffic on the Saturday before Christmas. Dollar stores are busiest on Christmas Eve.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 24

• The U.S releases draft regulations for drones: Proposed Regulations for Drones Are Released in the US: On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements. The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets. The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas. The government already has rules that limit the use of drones for commercial purposes, like delivering packages. But attention has turned to recreational use more recently, as drones, many of them the size of a laptop computer, have emerged as a must-have item for thousands of people. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, has estimated that 400,000 drones will be sold this holiday season in the United States.

• Deliveroo, an On-Demand Food Delivery Service, Raises $100 Million: On Monday, Deliveroo, an on-demand food delivery service based in London, announced that it had raised $100 million from investors, including DST Global, an early backer of Facebook, to help push the service into new markets, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. In total, the start-up has now raised roughly $200 million since its creation in 2012. Just about four months ago, Deliveroo raised $70 million to expand beyond its British roots. The company provides a one-size-fits-all offering for nontech savvy restaurants that includes food packaging, delivery drivers and other support so individuals can order the restaurants’ food through smartphones. As part of the new fund raising, Deliveroo expects to branch out into highly populated cities across Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore. Mr. Shu said there were no plans in the short term to offer the service in the United States, though the start-up now operates in 50 cities in 12 countries, primarily in Europe. While online food delivery companies like GrubHub and Just Eat, its European counterpart, have allowed people to order food through smartphones for years, a new generation of start-ups like Deliveroo are trying to extend that offering to restaurants that do not have their own delivery logistics. That group includes Delivery Hero, based in Berlin, which also offers a fleet of drivers and other logistical support to restaurants looking to expand into online orders. Delivery Hero is valued at $3.1 billion and operates across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Other tech companies, including Uber, the ride-booking service, now offer similar products. Yet for Mr. Shu of Deliveroo, these rivals are only a small fraction of his overall competition, which also includes people cooking for themselves at home and traditional restaurants.

• Amazon Makes Holiday Shopping Season Tough for Target and Walmart: Neither Target nor Walmart needed a reminder about the distance between their online businesses and Amazon’s. Their third-quarter sales numbers provided it anyway. Walmart’s online sales grew just 10 percent in the third quarter, slower than the 15 percent industry average, while Target’s grew 20 percent, well below the company’s stated goal of 30 percent, the companies announced last week. These numbers might not spell all-out trouble if it weren’t for Amazon’s performance during the same period: The company’s electronics and general merchandise business — basically the core of its retail operation — grew 35 percent in North America in the quarter, marking the segment’s highest growth rate in several years. The third-quarter headwinds of the traditional retailers coupled with Amazon’s momentum makes this e-commerce holiday season an even more critical one for Walmart and Target. It doesn’t help that Amazon’s huge logistics investments over the last few years mean it can flex its muscles the most during the holiday with its arsenal of express shipping capabilities when customers are often looking for last-minute gifts. If Walmart and Target going to close the gap, now has to be the time. But history isn’t on their side.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 23, 2015

• Once Valued At $4.5B,  LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today’s Unicorns: The first thing you see when walking into the headquarters of LivingSocial is row upon row of mostly empty desks, broken up by small street signs that employees once needed to find one another when the office teemed with people. One row, “BYFAD Lane,” was named after a start-up, BuyYourFriendADrink, which LivingSocial acquired to get into the daily deals business. Other signs, such as “Sky Diving Street,” were named for some of the hottest discount coupons that the company once provided. On a recent visit, some desks were piled high with boxes of employee belongings, the detritus left behind after a round of layoffs that eliminated one-fifth of the work force. In one refrigerator, the milk was six months old. The technology industry’s boom over the last few years has been defined by the rise of “unicorns,” the private companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest unicorns of its day. It now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like several years down the road if things go awry. Just four years ago, LivingSocial and its larger rival Groupon grew rapidly on a simple pitch: The companies would match customers to local businesses with a daily deal in users’ inboxes, like half off at a local deli or a two-for-one massage promotion. LivingSocial and Groupon would take a cut of each transaction. Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way that the Internet would invade local business, and by late 2011 LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, according to data from the research firm VC Experts. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price among its investors. LivingSocial spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of momentum, the company explored going public. Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled. T. Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s work force has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 percent below its I.P.O. price.

• Airbnb raises $100 million in funding, Valuation stays flat at $25.5B: source: Apartment-sharing startup Airbnb Inc has raised over $100 million in a new round of funding, a source close to the company said. Airbnb, once a startup selling cereal, expects to achieve profitability in 2016, the source said. Airbnb revenue doubled to $340 million in the third quarter on bookings of $2.2 billion, the source said. The company expects revenue of $900 million this year. The round was done at the same $25.5 billion valuation as the previous funding round over the summer, indicating that unicorns, or private tech companies worth $1 billion or more, are finding it tougher to convince investors to buy shares at continuously escalating valuations.

• Snapchat's lackluster ad business threatens $16 billion valuation: Snapchat, maker of a free mobile app that lets users send videos and messages that disappear in seconds, is struggling to gain traction with advertisers, fuelling investor concern that its $16 billion valuation isn't justified by a business that hasn't yet shown it has a steady source of income. Even in a world where upwards of 140 private companies are reckoned to be worth $1 billion or more, Snapchat's outsized value stands out. Fidelity Investments' decision to slash the estimated value of its Snapchat stake by 25 percent in the third quarter exacerbated concern about the company's ability to meet advertisers' expectations. For Snapchat advertisers, the question is whether prices that can reach more than $500,000 for some ads is worth it when the company lags competitors in targeting specific consumers and measuring how ads perform. "If Snapchat doesn't get that figured out, they're in trouble," said Nick Godfrey, chief operating officer at RAIN, a digital strategy agency. Snapchat lost more than $128 million in the first 11 months of 2014, according to a financial statement leaked earlier this year, which also showed Snapchat had revenue of $3.1 million. Its advertising business began in mid-October. Tech media outlet Re/code estimated that Snapchat's revenue could reach $50 million in 2015, citing sources familiar with the company. Snapchat doesn't comment on its revenue or its losses. The company has raised $1.2 billion from investors, ample resources to develop its advertising techniques. But time may be limited as the company is in early discussions for an IPO, according to sources. Snapchat's $16 billion valuation was calculated at its most recent funding round in May based on how much investors were willing to pay for shares.

• Yelp Surges as Investors See Bargain Buying Opportunity: Yelp Inc. shares surged the most in six months Friday as investors see the customer-review website at bargain prices after it lost almost half of its value this year. Shares jumped 11 percent to close at $31.21 in New York, the biggest increase since May 7 and the highest price since July 28. Yelp shares plummeted July 29 after the company cut its revenue forecast and said it would stop selling national brand advertising. The stock is down 43 percent this year. Yelp Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Stoppelman is trying to convince investors the company is on the right track by boosting its local advertising sales force and pulling back from banner ads from national brands that aren’t getting responses from Yelp users. The move is part of Yelp’s shift to mobile users, who make up a larger portion of its audience than desktop users.

• Google aims for China launch of Google Play app store next year: Google, part of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), aims to launch the China version of its Google Play smartphone app store next year, according to people familiar with the matter, its first major foray in the market since ending localized product support in 2010. The Google Play app store would be set up specifically for China, and not connected to overseas versions of Google Play, two of the people said. They said Google intends to comply with Chinese laws on filtering content that might be viewed as sensitive by the ruling Communist Party, and laws requiring the company to store the app store's data within China.

• Jawbone Lays Off 60, 15% Of Staff Globally, Closes NY Office. Some difficult news this week for Jawbone, maker of fitness trackers, speakers and Bluetooth headsets. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the company yesterday laid off around 60 employees, or 15% of staff. It’s a global round of layoffs affecting all areas of the business; and as part of it Jawbone is also closing down its New York office (which was concentrated on marketing) and downsizing satellite operations in Sunnyvale and Pittsburgh. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said the layoffs are part of a wider “streamlining.” From what we understand, there are no specific product areas being cut as part of this restructuring. The company, in other words, will continue to sell its Jambox speakers and the Era headset, along with related accessories. More generally, however, Jawbone has been increasingly focusing is R&D, product and marketing attention on its range of UP fitness trackers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, November 20

• Successful Tech IPO#1: Shares of Square Soar by 45% After Public Offering: Square began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, at one point surging more than 64 percent above its initial public offering price of $9. It ended the day up 45 percent, closing at $13.07. The first-day pop followed a turbulent I.P.O. process for the six-year-old company, one that was marred by questions over pricing and valuation and that arrived in the face of a precarious public market for technology offerings. On Wednesday, when Square had priced its shares at $9, that was lower than the $11 to $13 range it had set, putting its valuation at $2.9 billion, well below the $6 billion price tag that private investors had valued the company at last year. As recently as Wednesday, advisers laid out options for Square including pulling the deal, three people briefed on the discussions said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but for Square, that was not a consideration.  “We have a great beginning,” said Jack Dorsey, Square’s chief, striking an upbeat note in an interview on Thursday, which was his 39th birthday. “I don’t see negativity as necessarily something that detracts from our work.” The I.P.O. ordeal illustrates the difficulties — some might say guesswork — of accurately valuing companies, both when they are private and when they go public. And Square, which closed its first day trading with a market capitalization of $4.4 billion, now faces the challenge of moving on from the fund-raising event, solidifying its business and building itself up. “I want to get back to a steady state and back to business,” Mr. Dorsey said. He added that Square’s strategy now was “to continue to save people trips to the bank. We’re not going out there to say we’re getting rid of the banks or card networks. We’ve just put a much cleaner face on that infrastructure.”

• Sucessful Tech IPO#2: Investors 'swipe right' in Tinder-owner Match's debut: Shares of media mogul Barry Diller's Match Group, the owner of popular dating site Match.com and mobile app Tinder, jumped as much as 24 percent in their market debut on Thursday, valuing the company at $3.57 billion. Match Group, which touts itself as the world's No. 1 dating company, is seen as the crown jewel of Diller's media properties and has driven parent IAC/InterActiveCorp's (IACI.O) profit and revenue in recent quarters. The U.S. online romance market, worth more than $2 billion a year, has thrived as instant messaging, photo-sharing and geolocation services grow in popularity. One of Match Group's most popular offerings is Tinder, a mobile app on which people "swipe right" or "swipe left" to signal their willingness – or not – to meet prospective partners.

• Facebook Makes It Easier to Move On After a Breakup: Breaking up is now a little easier to do, at least on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that lets people untangle themselves from a relationship without cutting ties altogether. The operator of the world's biggest social network introduced a tool on Thursday for users to "take a break" after changing the status of a relationship with another person, letting them see less of an ex's posts without blocking or unfriending them. People can also tell Facebook to show an ex less information. While the feature might seem intrusive, it's become more necessary as Facebook has worked to highlight a user's most important relationships. The company is using its data to make better suggestions, such as who should be invited to events or whose birthdays are more important to celebrate. For example, Facebook has been serving up flashback memories of older posts, which, after a breakup, could bring back bad memories. And Facebook doesn't want to drive away any of its 1.55 billion users. The tools are more subtle than unfriending or unfollowing someone—the ex won't see any changes. Twitter, which lets users know if they were blocked, came up with a similar option last year, adding a "mute" button that would keep users from seeing someone's posts without letting them know. Facebook's new breakup feature is also reversible—just in case.

• Patron of Indian start-ups Tiger Global to tone down current aggressive style; to come up with two-track approach in giving money to companies: Tiger Global Management, the most prolific backer of startups in India, has decided to tone down its current aggressive style here, several people aware of the thinking at the US firm said, in a reflection of the limits of its strategy so far as well as the changing investor mood. Tiger, which is based in New York with private investments led by Lee Fixel, is coming up with a twotrack approach when it comes to giving money to companies in its portfolio, conversations with founders and investors reveal. The ones that are in leadership positions in the market can expect Fixel to keep his purse strings open, but not the laggards which have been told to fend for themselves. They must obtain validation from investors other than Tiger to lead new rounds and get unit economics right with positive operating margins. One of the founders who met Fixel recounted the conversation thus: "I will be leading very few investments in the next six to eight months, but if you use your cash and survive this cycle, then the pressure will ease out." Tiger, which is the main backer of India's most valuable startup Flipkart and owns significant stakes in the country's largest cab aggregator Ola, has invested around $2 billion (Rs 13,000 crore) in over 35 Indian companies. This year it has been even more active than in the past, but that has changed along with the onset of a more cautious mood about throwing large sums of money at consumer internet ventures. 

• Trailing in the Cloud, Google Taps VMware Founder to Chase Amazon: With its cloud business, Google finds itself in a rare position: Behind. The search giant has toyed with different enterprise products for years, with limited success, and now faces fierce competition from Microsoft and Amazon. But Google is signaling that it is serious about building an enterprise business. And here is its biggest sign: Alphabet has tapped Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of the software company VMware, to run it. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, announced the move in a blog post. Therein he said Greene, who has been a Google board member since 2012, will take over “all our cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Cloud Platform and Google Apps.” The move includes an acquisition of Greene’s new company, Bebop. Pichai describes it as a “new development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications.” Google isn’t sharing a price on the deal. Greene is joining at a moment when Google’s cloud efforts, both on the application and the infrastructure side, seem to be spinning. Three years ago, the narrative about Google Apps was how it was so often displacing Microsoft Office with its word processing and spreadsheet apps that run in a browser. Now that Microsoft Office has gotten the cloud religion with Office 365, which runs both as an on-premise version and in the cloud, the narrative around Google Apps has shifted in the last year or so: It’s now described generally as “doing well with small businesses,” even though Google itself still touts the fact that 60 percent of the Fortune 500 use it. Still, the cloud world has just gotten a lot more competitive. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Office Graph, a set of unified APIs that will let third-party developers build add-ons and apps that enhance how Microsoft Office works. This hiring seems a partial response to that.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, November 19

• Square prices shares at 52% discount to last valuation in disappointing turn to long-awaited IPO: sources: Mobile payments company Square Inc priced shares at $9 late on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter, further discounting the company's valuation before it begins trading Thursday morning. Square has raised $243.5 million in its Wall Street debut, about $80 million less than expected. The price set on Wednesday puts Square's market capitalization at $2.9 billion, a 52 percent drop from the $6 billion valuation it had earned at its last private funding round. San Francisco-based Square, led by CEO Jack Dorsey, earlier this month set a price range of $11 to $13, well below the $15.46 per-share price of its most recent private financing. The steeper discount to $9 - a 42 percent drop from what investors were willing to pay a year ago - suggests widespread uncertainty about the profitability of the payments industry and the future of Square itself, which has seen slowing revenue growth. "The way that Square was valued as a private company is they were just going to disrupt everything and change payments," said Andrew Chanin, CEO of PureFunds, an exchange-traded fund for mobile payments companies. "And the reality is not that." Compounding concerns is Dorsey's dual role running Twitter Inc., a social media company struggling for a turnaround. Founded in 2009, the company started as a way for small businesses to accept credit card payments through mobile devices. It has evolved to a suite of small business services, relying on partnerships with companies such as Apple and Visa. The valuation cut triggered a ratchet, or protection investors wrote into previous funding rounds, that requires Square to sell several million additional shares. Square will begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SQ". Square is one of the most prominent "unicorns," or private companies valued at $1 billion or more, to plan a public debut this year. Many have held up Square as an example of how fleeting - and at times nonsensical - private market valuations can be. There are more than 140 "unicorns" globally.

• Match Prices Its IPO at Bottom of Proposed Range as Tinder CEO Breaks Quiet Period Rule with a Bizarre Interview ("Models Beg Me For Sex") Match has priced its IPO at $12 per share, raising $400 million . The company will begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow, under the ticker symbol ‘MTCH.’ The $12 per share is at the bottom of the anticipated $12 to $14 proposed price range and gives the company a market cap of roughly $2.9 billion. Square, which is also going public tomorrow, just priced its IPO at $9, below the $11 to $13 price range. Match owns a group of dating companies, including OkCupid and the infamous Tinder. That particular subsidiary came under fire today after its leader gave a bizarre interview that may have broken SEC-mandated “quiet period” rules. Tinder CEO Sean Rad: Models Beg Me for Sex:, Dick Pics Aren’t Cool: Tinder’s parent company, the IAC-owned Match Group, is going public tomorrow. As the most attractive and valuable part of the company, it makes sense that Tinder’s CEO, Sean Rad, is talking to media outlets to drum up excitement for the IPO. This morning, a fresh Tinder PR disaster dropped in the form of an interview with journalist Charlotte Edwardes in the London Evening Standard. In it, Rad talks about the number of women he’s slept with (“Is 20 low?”), confuses the word sapiosexual for sodomy and condemns fame-hungry journalists. It makes sense that Rad would say some really, really stupid things in an interview. Rad was the dude who mishandled a sexual misconduct scandal (and the resulting lawsuit) that led to the exit of co-founder and CMO Justin Mateen last year. Rad stepped down as CEO last November, but got a second chance at the top job after his successor, former Microsoft exec Chris Payne, was canned in the wake of a memorable Twitter meltdown. The interview is very long and there are many different great parts. Below is perhaps the best selection from it (here’s another one: “I do not condone penis pictures — that is just not who I am”). I’m sure it will inspire a lot of confidence in investors looking to buy Match Group stock tomorrow: He’s desperate to impress on me how gallant he is, citing the fact that a “supermodel, someone really, really famous” has been “begging” him for sex “and I’ve been like, no.” She’s “taunted” him, he says, and “called me a prude.” “She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen but it doesn’t mean that I want to rip her clothes off and have sex with her. Attraction is nuanced. I’ve been attracted to women who are …” he pauses “… well, who my friends might think are ugly. I don’t care if someone is a model. Really. It sounds clichéd and almost totally unbelievable for a guy to say this, but it’s true. I need an intellectual challenge.” He continues: “Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff. You know, just talking. What’s the word?” His face creases with the effort of trying to remember. “I want to say ‘sodomy’?”

• How Amazon’s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut: Shares of Jeff Bezos’s company have doubled in value so far in 2015, pushing Amazon into the world’s 10 largest companies by stock market value, where it jockeys for position with General Electric and is far ahead of Walmart. There is a simple explanation for Amazon’s rise, and also a second, more complicated one. The simple story involves Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing business, which rents out vast amounts of server space to other companies. Amazon began disclosing A.W.S.’s financial performance in April, and the numbers showed that selling server space was a much bigger business than anyone had realized. Deutsche Bank estimates that A.W.S., which is less than a decade old, could soon be worth $160 billion as a stand-alone company. That’s more valuable than Intel. Yet the disclosure of A.W.S.’s size has obscured a deeper change at Amazon. For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little? As we embark upon another holiday shopping season, the answer is becoming clear: Yes, Amazon can make money selling stuff. In the flood of rapturous reviews from stock analysts over the company’s earnings report last month, several noted that Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.

• Goldman Says to Buy Apple Because It's Becoming a Services Company: It's time to stop thinking of Apple as a hardware company and start thinking of it as a service company. At least, that's what Goldman Analyst Simona Jankowski and her team are telling clients as they add the stock to their "conviction buy" list and call for a price of $163 in the next 12 months.  "We expect that over the next year, the focus will shift from unit growth (which is slowing given a maturing smartphone market) to installed base monetization and recurring revenues (“Apple-as-a-Service”). Apple’s model has already tilted that way with its new iPhone 6s installment plans, and we see the upcoming TV service as a powerful next step." Due to Apple's large and loyal customer base, the team argues that there is a "significant multi-year opportunity" for the tech giant to boost monetization. Jankowski's team estimates that over 90 percent of those purchasing iPhones are repeat customers, which will make it much easier for Apple to become a service-like company, especially as it launches a TV service. The timing might prove perfect for a foray into the TV space as well, with Goldman pointing towards acceleration in cord cutting as millennials are more apt to use what it refers to as "over-the-top media consumption," and the skinny bundles such as Sling TV and Vue become more common. "Theoretically, Apple could transition other products to installment plans as well, and charge customers a monthly bill that also includes its other services such as Apple TV and Music. We think a potential live TV service from Apple would be a key enabler of this transition to an “Apple-as-a-Service” business model." The shift to a service model could prove to dramatically increase Apple's average revenue per user (ARPU). Jankowski estimates that Apple's current ARPU would be $42 operating with a service business model.

• As Lyft Seeks $500M in New Funding, Leaked Lyft Financials Show the Struggles of Being No. 2 Behind Uber: In the first half of the year, the ride-sharing company generated less revenue, lost more money, and added fewer customers than projected in February. Ride-sharing pioneer Lyft is heading back to the fundraising till, but its numbers may not look that rosy to investors. The company lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to private fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg. Lyft, the second-biggest U.S. ride-hailing service, is raising roughly $500 million as the company burns through tens of millions of dollars a month, according to a fundraising presentation compiled by Credit Suisse. It highlights tepid financial performance at Lyft and reveals that the company has repeatedly underperformed its own expectations. In the first half of the year, Lyft generated less revenue, lost more money, and added fewer customers than projected in February. The numbers suggest Lyft has had to burn through cash as it chases growth in a competitive industry. The willingness to spend big on growth is a costly strategy that’s becoming increasingly common in Silicon Valley. Public market investors have expressed concern about the high valuations of private technology companies recently. Fidelity Investments, BlackRock, and others wrote down their stakes in some startups this year.In the first half of 2015, Lyft spent $96.1 million on marketing. That’s more than twice Lyft’s net revenue during the same period. In one document, Lyft promotes its ability to attract new drivers and riders, even as it does so at a sizable loss. Customer discounts represent a big portion of Lyft’s marketing costs. This year, Lyft has also purchased billboards in New York’s Times Square and on Market Street in San Francisco, in addition to paying drivers big bonuses.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, November 18

• Earnest, Fueled by Growth in Student Loans, Raises $275 Million: At the start of this year, Earnest was an intriguing but small entrant in an emerging field of start-ups using new tools of data and software to analyze credit risk and make consumer loans. Its loans were typically a few thousand dollars for things like relocation expenses and professional training. But today, the lender, based in San Francisco, is growing at a torrid pace, and on Tuesday it announced a $275 million round of debt and equity to fund further expansion. Already this year, Earnest has made 50 times as many loans as last year, and it is lending from $2 million to $5 million every day, said Louis Beryl, a co-founder and chief executive. In this round, $75 million is equity investment, and $200 million is debt funding. The debt portion is led by New York Life. The new financing brings the total raised by Earnest, founded in 2013, to $325 million. Earnest now employees 165 people, up from 30 at the start of this year. Mr. Beryl says he plans to hire about 200 more employees over the next year, especially technical people like software engineers, data scientists and user-experience designers. The long-term goal, he said, is to “build a platform for the next generation of consumer financial services.” The financial service that has carried Earnest so far is refinancing student loans, which it began at the end of January. It is by far the largest part of the company’s business, and Earnest’s success points to the opportunity in services to ease the burden on the nation’s debt-laden students and recent graduates. Student loan debt is more than $1.2 trillion, growing by about 10 percent a year. Student loans are held by 40 million Americans. Earnest is focusing on the more indebted recent graduates. The size of its average refinancing loan is $70,000. The start-up says the average saving, on its refinanced loans, is $18,000, typically over 10 years. Other online lenders, like SoFi and CommonBond, have also done well in the market for refinancing student loans. But Earnest says its approach is particularly data-intensive, which it says allows it to tailor rates to individual circumstances. It asks its customers for digital links to their bank, credit card and retirement and investment accounts, and information on all their loans. “They are willing to share their data for a better consumer finance experience,” Mr. Beryl said. Earnest says it has read-only access to the information. It pledges not to store personal data or sell it. Earnest has made individual loans of more than $250,000. Traditional credit scoring, Mr. Beryl said, tends to punish high student debt loads. But such Earnest borrowers, he said, are in fields like brain surgery and dental surgery, where education is lengthy and costly. “These are people with great jobs, great educations and great earning potential,” he added. Earnest borrowers average a bit over 30-years-old — young people with slender credit histories and thus charged higher rates by traditional banks. Mr. Beryl said Earnest has had no delinquency problems on its student refinancing loans. And Mr. Beryl, 34, is one of those prompt-paying customers. Having attended Princeton, Harvard Business School and Harvard‘s Kennedy School of Government, he had $100,000 in student loans at the start of the year. He has paid down some, but still holds student loan debt, he said.

• Latest Craze for Chinese Parents: Preschool Coding Classes: Wu Pei began teaching her 6-year-old son to code this year, thinking he’d enjoy learning a skill that might boost his future job prospects in an increasingly digitized world. Now, she runs classes in Nanjing, China, and is helping more than 100 parents introduce their children to coding. The 35-year-old former computer programmer with Foxconn Technology Group is tapping growing demand from parents intent on preparing their preschoolers for a world in which Oxford University researchers predict half the jobs in some countries may be eliminated by robots and computers. Similar classes are taking off across China. Reynold Ren has taught about 150 primary school-age children in Beijing to use Scratch, a project developed by the MIT Media Lab and Arduino, which enables users to create interactive objects such as robots. In Hong Kong, about 2,500 students have taken courses that Michelle Sun runs at her First Code Academy. “Teaching the next generation coding is something that should be elevated to a strategical national importance,” said Wang Jiulin, the Xi’an-based creator of Kidscode.cn, a website that shares free information and courses. “Even today, the majority of programmers in China can only perform very basic-level tasks and there’s huge demand for top notch coders.”  

• Lyft executive says on track to hit $1 billion in gross revenue: Ride-hailing app Lyft, Uber's biggest competition in the United States, expects to reach $1 billion in gross annual revenue, the company's co-founder told Reuters. Hitting a $1 billion run rate suggests privately owned Lyft has increased market share in some U.S. cities, despite competition from Uber, a larger and better-financed ride-hailing app. Lyft's net revenue was estimated at $130 million in 2014, according to company financial documents cited by Bloomberg. By comparison, Uber's gross bookings are projected to rise to $10.84 billion this year and $26.12 billion the next, according to a presentation for potential investors seen by Reuters earlier this year. Based on those figures, Uber's 2015 net revenue would be $2 billion. Lyft, founded in 2012, calculated its $1 billion run rate from its gross bookings in October, when the company made about $83 million off of 7 million rides. That did not include Halloween, Zimmer said, which will be counted in November's figures and is one of the ride-hailing industry's busiest nights of the year. Lyft has more than a 40 percent market share in San Francisco, its hometown, and in Austin, Texas, Zimmer said. The majority of rides in San Francisco and New York City are through the Lyft Line service, a carpool feature that brings several passengers together to share a car, Lyft co-counder and Chief Executive Logan Green said last week. However, Lyft's continued growth also hinges on its ability to tap investors for money. A recent pullback in late- and mid-stage investing and the cooling IPO market are expected to make capital tougher to raise for high-priced companies.

• Microsoft sheds reputation as easy mark for hackers:  Microsoft was once the epitome of everything wrong with security in technology. Its products were so infested with vulnerabilities that the company’s co-founder, Bill Gates, once ordered all of Microsoft engineers to stop writing new code for a month and focus on fixing the bugs in software they had already built. But in recent years, Microsoft has cleaned up its act, even impressing security specialists like Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer for F-Secure, a Finnish security company, who used to cringe at Microsoft’s practices. “They’ve changed themselves from worst in class to the best in class,” Mr. Hypponen said. “The change is complete. They started taking security very seriously.” Microsoft estimates that it now spends more than $1 billion a year on security-related initiatives, including acquisitions. It acquired three security start-ups in the last year alone, and the number of security employees at the company increased 20 percent during that time. Soon after he became Microsoft’s chief executive in February 2014, Mr. Nadella instituted a monthly meeting with security leaders from across the company. They meet to discuss industry trends and analyze threats. He also altered how Microsoft watched the Internet for hacker attacks, an effort that had been splintered among different product groups and other divisions within the company. Microsoft now pays hackers more when they find and turn over a security hole.