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.