Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 2

• Meg Whitman Seeks Reinvention for HP as It Prepares for Split: When HP splits in two on Sunday after a year of planning, what is left will bear little resemblance to the engineering-driven company founded more than 75 years ago in a garage not far from Stanford University. On one side will be HP Inc., which will largely consist of personal computers and printers. On the other, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell the computer servers, data storage, networking, software and consulting services that run a modern company. Each company is expected to have annual revenue of about $50 billion and will be among America’s 500 largest public companies. Neither will have the standing as one of the most innovative operations in the world that the old HP enjoyed for decades.

• With Instagram’s Boomerang, making gifs is easier than ever: It’s a gif world, and we’re just living in it. Those short, looping (often loopy) animated files pop up just about everywhere on the Web and in social media. Now, it’s easier than ever to make them yourself. Instagram’s new app, Boomerang, makes it very easy to make your own 1-second gifs for sharing on Instagram, Facebook and your phone’s camera roll. The process couldn’t be simpler. Just find something moving that you want to shoot, hit the capture button and keep as still as you can for a second or so. You can shoot from either rear-facing or front-facing camera. To work, the app will need permission to access those cameras, as well as your phone’s storage. Free, for iOS and Android.

• Uber Germany retreats to Berlin, Munich: Taxi-hailing service Uber Technologies is making a retreat in Germany to the cities of Berlin and Munich as it grapples with a ban from using unlicensed cab drivers. Uber will for now suspend services in Hamburg, Frankfurt and Duesseldorf, it said in a statement on Friday, citing a difficult regulatory environment. A German court in March banned Uber from running services using unlicensed cab drivers and set stiff fines for any violations of local transport laws by the pioneering online taxi firm. The company in Germany has since limited itself to drivers that hold a passenger transport license, among other legal requirements, through its UberX and UberBlack smartphone apps, but it has run into a shortage of suppliers of ride services.

• Zomato CEO warns may not meet revenue goal, pulls up sales team: Zomato, the restaurant listing and services company which is valued around $1 billion, might fail to meet its sales target for the current financial year, according to an email co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal sent to the staff on Friday. In a long mail that Goyal first sent to the company’s sales team and later forwarded to all employees, he talked about the underperformance of the sales team and how it might result in the company missing its revenue targets. “We are far behind the numbers that we promised our investors for this financial year (year ending March 2016) – our investors have said that so far, we have always delivered what we have promised. We are close to not living up to that for the first time in the last 5 years,” Goyal said in the email. The email came a fortnight after the company sacked about 300 employees globally, or 10 per cent of its total workforce. Zomato has also been facing difficulties in retaining top-level staff as a number of senior executives have left the company after short stints.