Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 17

• Fed Raises Key Interest Rate for First Time in Almost a Decade: The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, a vote of confidence in the American economy. Policy makers have waited a long time for this moment: Since December 2008 the Fed has held the benchmark rate near zero, the centerpiece of its campaign to revive economic growth and reduce unemployment from the recession. Fed officials predicted that they would raise interest rates by about one percentage point a year over the next three years — an indication that they would be taking a slow-and-steady approach to economic expansion. The cost of borrowing is expected to rise, but only slightly, with variable effects on what banks charge for credit cards, home equity lines of credit, adjustable-rate mortgages, auto loans and some student loans. Remember, Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, has said the Fed will move cautiously in raising its benchmark rate. Financial markets were encouraged by the Fed’s announcement. Stocks rose, the dollar gained modestly and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose slightly. The Fed’s announcement came exactly seven years to the day after the central bank cut its benchmark rate nearly to zero.

• Facebook Messenger Lets You Book an Uber:  The feature will be made available in the U.S. to start. Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday. The new feature for Messenger, which has more than 700 million users globally, will allow users to tap on a street address in a message and summon a ride. After booking, the app will let Uber customers easily share their estimated arrival times or coordinate splitting the fare with friends through Messenger. The feature is expected to be made available in other countries outside the U.S. later. One place Facebook probably won't introduce the Uber button any time soon is in China, where the social network is blocked. The Chinese have had a similar feature in Tencent's WeChat, the dominant messaging platform in the country. That version works with Didi Kuaidi, however, a Tencent-backed ride-hailing service that is Uber's chief competitor there. Tencent has blocked Uber from using WeChat to recruit drivers or promote the company in China, says Uber. 

• Amazon Leads $23M Investment In India-Based Home Services Startup Housejoy: Amazon has led a $23 million investment in India-based Housejoy, a startup that — as the name not-so-subtly suggests — is much like Homejoy, the home services on-demand company that closed its doors this summer. The U.S. e-commerce giant was joined in the Series A round by existing investor Matrix Partners, and new backers Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. Unlike U.S.-based Homejoy — which had raised nearly $40 million and was the most visible player in an emerging category — Housejoy offers more than just home cleaning services. It caters to plumbing, electrical/appliance repairs, beauty, fitness, laundry and pest control and more. The startup is less than a year old, it previously raised $4 million, and is currently available in 11 cities across India. With this new funding, CEO Saran Chatterjee told TechCrunch that it plans to expand to cover 25 cities by the end of next year. The involvement of Amazon, which previously invested in India-based deals with financial comparison service BankBazaar and gift card startup QwikCilver, is interesting. Its founder Jeff Bezos hasn’t been shy in admitting that the company is very much focused on growing in India, where it launched two years ago and is rivaled by two home-grown unicorns: SoftBank-backed Flipkart and Alibaba-backed Snapdeal. Last year, Amazon invested $2 billion in its India business and results seem to be going its way after it recently claimed to have beaten its well-backed rivals on monthly traffic for the first time. Chatterjee stressed in an interview that Amazon hasn’t discussed acquiring Housejoy, and that its involvement in the round could unlock a lucrative partnership for the startup. Beyond its expansion, Housejoy plans to use the money to ramp its quality assurance protocols which evaluate and assess the ‘service providers’ who work for the company. In that way, it’s very much like Uber — a marketplace through which independent workers can find jobs. With some customers experiencing issues with the service — including one India-based writer at Tech In Asia — Chatterjee admits that it needs to raise its reliability from (probably) a seven out of ten score, to nine or ten. The company is also planning to spend a portion of its funding on strategic acquisitions. Chatterjee said that around 10 percent of the round — so roughly $2 million — could go towards buying up companies or acquihiring teams that “give us a position of strength in a city or category, or [add to the] team and talent.”

• Oracle profit forecast fails to impress; shares fall. Oracle Corp on Wednesday delivered a third-quarter profit forecast that did not quite meet analysts' expectations, and the company's shares fell about 1 percent in extended trading. Oracle forecast third-quarter profit of about 63-66 cents per share, with revenue flat or up 3 percent which translates to $9.33 billion-$9.61 billion. The company's shift from licensing software to cloud-based subscriptions has squeezed its margins. Oracle, like other established technology companies, has been moving its business to the cloud-based model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Up to Wednesday's close, Oracle's stock had fallen 13.5 percent this year.

• In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers: The Internet took off as a way to book travel because the human intermediaries were always a bit suspect — their expertise questionable, their methods opaque and their allegiances unclear. And at first, the machines seemed to improve everything. For uncomplicated trips, booking online is now much easier than in the past. Because we’ve replaced agents with computers whose sole purpose is to ferret out the best deal, and for lots of other reasons, airfares have plummeted over the last three decades. Yet as you suffer through another holiday travel season, you might pause to consider how much we’ve really gained — and lost — in ditching human agents for machines. And you might welcome an emerging trend on the Internet: start-ups that are trying to put human agents, whether in travel, home services or shopping, back at the center of how we make decisions. “A lot of companies pushed hard on the idea that technology will solve every problem, and that we shouldn’t use humans,” said Paul English, the co-founder of a new online company called Lola Travel. “We think humans add value, so we’re trying to design technology to facilitate the human-to-human connection.” Lola, which is currently open only in a limited prerelease version, has an unusual interface: When you’re looking to book a trip, you just send a text. Your request can be vague — “Hey, my family is thinking about going to Europe next summer” — because on the other end sits a human. The agent knows your general travel preferences and has access to many of the same tools you’d use to book a trip. But the agent also has something extra — experience and data to help make decisions about the kind of trip you should take.