Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 1st,

• Souq, Online Retailer in Middle East, Gets a $275 Million Boost:  Souq.com, an online retailer based in the United Arab Emirates, said on Monday that it had raised $275 million from international investors. It was a vote of confidence for digital commerce in the Middle East, which has made little headway compared with elsewhere. Souq, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, was founded in 2005 on an eBay-like online auction model, but it subsequently evolved into more of an Amazon-style set-price retailer. It has been a rare success story in a region where online businesses face logistical problems, political challenges, stifling bureaucracy and regulations that vary greatly from country to country. Souq’s latest round of funding included money from the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management, as well as from Standard Chartered Private Equity and the International Finance Corporation, which is an arm of the World Bank. Souq, which means market in Arabic, did not provide details on what the funding round meant for its overall valuation, and it has not released details on its annual sales or profit. The $275 million funding round was, however, the largest ever disclosed by a technology start-up in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Wamda, a research firm based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. Even after multiple fund-raising rounds, the Jabbar Internet Group — which sold Maktoob, a news site, to Yahoo for more than $150 million in 2009 — still holds a majority stake. Souq, now the largest online retailer in the Arab world, ships hundreds of thousands of products across the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also has operations in Egypt.

• For the first time, Google’s self-driving car takes some blame for a crash: A Google self-driving car sideswiped a bus this month, the first blemish on the otherwise spotless driving record of the company’s vehicles. Google’s 53 vehicles have driven more than 1.4 million miles autonomously and been in 17 crashes, but never been at fault before. The crash took place at 3:20 p.m. Feb. 14, about three miles from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google’s car was attempting to make a right-hand turn on red, and moved to the right side of a wide lane on El Camino Real to pass traffic stopped at the light. But as Google’s car neared the intersection of Castro Street, its path was blocked by sandbags around a storm drain, according to a report Google filed with the California DMV. Google’s car tried to go around the sandbags by cutting into the line of vehicles on the left side of the lane. Instead, it struck a metal piece connecting the two halves of an accordion-style bus, according to a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority spokeswoman. Google said its car was going less than 2 mph and the bus was moving at 15 mph. Both parties said there were no injuries and described the crash as minor. The 15 passengers on the bus were transferred to another bus following the accident. Google characterized the crash as a misunderstanding and a learning experience, saying its cars will learn that large vehicles are less likely to yield than other types of vehicles.

• This Water Pitcher Orders New Filters From Amazon Using Wi-Fi. It Could Be the Future of Shopping. The future often seems silly in the present. Case in point: Brita’s new “smart” water pitcher. The “device” is indeed primarily a water pitcher, designed — you know — to clean and hold water. But the pitcher, which goes on sale today on Amazon, does something else that helps explain why Brita is charging $45 for it, compared to $20 to $32 for other Brita pitchers that hold the same amount of water. It connects to the Internet and senses when a given filter has purified all the water it was meant to, after about 40 gallons. It then pings Amazon.com and automatically orders a new $5.99 filter for delivery. Call it programmatic commerce, and expect it to be around for a long time. The partnership between Brita and Amazon is part of a bigger initiative at Amazon dubbed the Dash Replenishment System. The goal is to allow products like water pitchers, computer printers and pet food dispensers automatically to order related, necessary items from Amazon without a human lifting a finger (after a one-time setup). At a higher level, it fits perfectly into Amazon’s ongoing mission to shrink the time between wanting and buying. What started with one-click purchasing has escalated to Wi-Fi connected physical buttons to order mac and cheese, reordering items by talking to the Amazon Echo speaker and now filter-summoning pitchers.

• Raspberry Pi 3 Launches — 50% Faster, With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth And An Eye On IoT: A major new Raspberry Pi microprocessor has been announced today: the Pi 3 Model B board becomes the new top-of-the-line Pi, with a 64bit 1.2GHz quad-core chipset and 1GB RAM it’s being slated to offer a 50 per cent power bump over the Pi 2. But is still priced at just $35 — the original Model B Pi price-tag, four years on from its debut. Round about this time last year the Pi Foundation launched the 900Mhz quad-core Pi 2 — which was 6x faster than the then top-of-the-Pi-line Model B+ board, and dubbed an affordable “entry-level PC”. Also priced at $35. The Foundation is touting the Pi 3 as opening up “even more possibilities for IoT and embedded projects”. Speaking to the BBC, Pi founder Eben Upton said: “This is the first Pi you can stick behind your TV and completely forget about.” “The two main things that people do with their Pi are use it as a PC replacement or use it as an embedded computer,” he added. “The Pi 3 is doubling down on both those things rather than going looking for new things to do.” The really big deal here is the inclusion of built in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. The Pi 2 had Ethernet but makers wanting the board to support wireless connectivity had to add a wi-fi or Bluetooth dongle. The Pi 3 removes the need to buy wireless add-ons, so it’s being positioned for out-of-the-box IoT development and as a powerful IoT hub that can link together multiple in-home connected devices. Back in November, the Pi Foundation launched another new board: the single core 1GHz Pi Zero delivers a lot less on the processing performance front and lacks on-board connectivity options (a wi-fi dongle can be plugged into its micro-USB port) but it costs just $5 — a price-point that’s clearly targeting makers wanting to build individual IoT/connected devices. The more powerful and well connected Pi 3 doubles down on the growth in IoT devices the Pi Zero was seeking to encourage — following on from the Pi 2, which was capable of running a version of Microsoft Windows that’s designed to support IoT apps (aka Windows 10 IoT; formerly called Windows Embedded). At a launch event today the Foundation said it has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full compatibility between the new Pi 3 board and Windows 10 IoT.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 29th

• Morgan Stanley fund marks down Flipkart stake value by 27%: A mutual fund investor in Flipkart Ltd, India’s largest e-commerce firm, has slashed the value of its holdings by as much as 27%, the latest indication that the investor rush of the past two years into Indian startups has led to unsustainable valuations.Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust valued its stake in Flipkart at $58.9 million as of 31 December, down from $80.6 million in June 2015. The company reported the number late Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US stock markets regulator. Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust also cut the value of its stake in other high flying startups including file storage company Dropbox Inc. and data analytics company Palantir.Flipkart was valued at $15 billion when it received $700 million from Tiger Global Management, Qatar Investment Authority and other investors in June. That was its fourth round of fund raising in a year. Its valuation shot up roughly 5 times from $2.5-3 billion in May 2014. Morgan Stanley’s latest estimate implies that the mutual fund currently values Flipkart at $11 billion. Mint reported on 4 February that China’s Alibaba Group is in early talks to buy a stake in Flipkart and increase its holding in Flipkart rival, Snapdeal. The talks are at a very initial stage and the likelihood of a deal is a function of Flipkart’s willingness to offer a discount on its current valuation of $15 billion, Mint had reported then. There are not too many takers for India’s top e-commerce firms at their current valuations, prompting both Flipkart and Snapdeal  to approach Alibaba Group for cash. Early last year, Flipkart set a target of generating annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) of $8 billion by December. However, the company’s current average monthly annualized GMV is roughly $5 billion, Mint reported on 17 February. This number, which includes sales at Flipkart’s unit Myntra, indicates Flipkart missed its internal sales target.

• In ‘Strategic Refocus,’ Troubled Zenefits Lets 250 Employees Go: Zenefits, the troubled benefits software company that three weeks ago fired its founding CEO, said today that it has laid off 250 employees, mostly in its sales recruiting organization. In a memo to employees, CEO David Sacks said the move signals an intention to “rebuild in line with our new company values.” Zenefits, which sells employee health insurance plans alongside free software to administer those plans, was been rocked by disclosures that many of its employees are not properly licensed to sell insurance. The job cuts amount to about 17 percent of the Zenefits workforce. The company has until recently been considered a Silicon Valley high-flyer, having raised $500 million from investors at a valuation of $4.5 billion. From an email from new CEO David Sacks: "We are reducing our headcount by roughly 250 employees, or about 17 percent of total employees. These changes are almost entirely in the Sales organization, with about a dozen employees in Recruiting. Within the Sales organization, we are eliminating the Enterprise team (although some members will be offered other roles). We are also making a large reduction in Sales Development Representatives (SDR), the organization that prospected for the largest accounts.I want to make clear that this is a reduction in force (RIF), meaning that we are not cutting these jobs for performance reasons. We are letting go of many great people today, and it is not their fault. It is no secret that Zenefits grew too fast, stretching both our culture and our controls. This reduction enables us to refocus our strategy, rebuild in line with our new company values, and grow in a controlled way that will be strategic for our business and beneficial for our customers."

• IHOP Is Releasing Special Snapchat Geolocation Filters, but You Have to Visit the Restaurant to Use Them - The Geo-fencing feature is all about engagement: IHOP today announced a Snapchat campaign that targets patrons inside its restaurants. To push its Double-Dipped French Toast, the all-day breakfast brand is essentially using the same custom geo-filters Snapchat introduced to the masses on Monday. But it's working directly with the Los Angeles social app to serve the ad just to IHOP customers. IHOP and Snapchat developed what they are calling "chain geo-filters," location-based dynamic art that can be added to photo and video snaps. When using the app at a restaurant, customers who take a snap will be able to swipe to reveal IHOP-themed creative overlays. Kirk Thompson, IHOP's vp of marketing, told Adweek that his team quietly released its custom Snapchat filter a few days ago, and it's already garnered 3 million views. On why the new promotion is only zeroing in on people already in stores, he explained, "IHOP receives Snapchats from users every day, a lot of them taken while in our restaurant. Introducing customized filters was a great way to further engage with our guests and at the same time extend our brand message when they share that content with their friends."

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 26

• Baidu Shares Rise 14% On Revenue Beat: Baidu Inc. posted revenue that topped analysts’ estimates as the Chinese Internet search provider’s investments in mobile begin to bear fruit and attract advertising. Sales rose 33 percent to 18.7 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) in the December quarter from a year earlier, the Beijing-based company said in a statement. That beat the average analyst estimate of 18.5 billion yuan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Mobile revenue made up 56 percent of total sales in the quarter, up from 42 percent a year earlier, Baidu said. The company’s dominance in search as more users shift to using mobile devices is helping offset the impact of a Chinese economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years. Chairman Robin Li is also investing in services such as home delivery and online video to drive growth beyond advertising and help Baidu compete with Alibaba and Tencent. Baidu’s American depositary receipts rose as much as 14 percent to $179.90 in extended U.S. trading after the results were released. The stock has lost 16 percent this year. Investors are keeping a close eye on Baidu’s margins. Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are now vying for supremacy in an on-demand services industry primed for growth as more people turn to their smartphones or the Web to order food, schedule beauty treatments or hire helpers. Users of such services could rise 29 percent to 400 million by next year, according to Shanghai-based IResearch. The rising cost of competing in online services is spurring consolidation, including the combinations last year of fashion sites Meilishuo and Mogujie, travel-site operators Ctrip and Qunar, and group-buying startups Meituan.com and Dianping.com. Baidu has had to keep spending on its video-streaming service IQiyi and main online commerce site Nuomi to keep pace with Alibaba’s and Tencent’s expanding rival platforms. Chairman Li and another executive this month offered to buy Baidu’s entire 80.5 percent stake in the IQiyi business, a deal that will shore up the search giant’s margins while setting up a potential initial public offering for the unit. “These bold steps help to reveal its core operating margins and the earning power of its monopoly-like search engine business,” HSBC Securities analysts led by Chi Tsang wrote in a report. Selling IQiyi could expand Baidu’s operating margins to 26 percent this year from 20 percent, even while unabated spending on on-demand services erases about 30 percentage points of profitability, they estimated.

• Anonmyous Flyers Posted At Palantir's Campus Warn Employees That Stock Is Worthless - Flyers Are False: Employees of data-analysis company Palantir  may have seen flyers posted on lampposts around their Silicon Valley offices this week featuring a disemboweled unicorn with rainbow blood streaming from its midsection. The posting, dated Feb. 23, warned: "Palantir workers: your common shares are worth $0.00." Palantir staff can relax a bit. The terms of recent fundraising rounds don't contain many of the provisions that can crush the value of common shares held by employees.Fundraising talks last year valued Palantir at $20 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said in June. While Palantir shares are trading lower on secondary markets than they were last year, the same can be said for many stocks, private and public, thanks to a global economic slowdown. Palantir common stock fetches $8.50 to $10 a share on secondary markets before fees, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing private share sales. That's a long way from zero. Palantir declined to comment. Several flyers have already been removed, according to Quartz. Someone posting on an online community forum under the pseudonym Palantir_Watcher claimed responsibility for creating the handouts. The person didn't respond to a request for comment. However, the guerilla campaign tapped into an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear about what private companies in Silicon Valley are worth after a wave ofwritedowns and cost-cutting at startups. Venture capitalists and other institutional investors typically hold preferred shares. They are worth more on secondary markets than common stock, which is what is given to employees, often representing a significant portion of their compensation. However, Palantir hasn't given newer investors the sort of preferential treatment awarded to shareholders of companies such as DocuSign Inc., Honest Co., and Stripe Inc., according to an analysis by the technology website the Information. The proportion of funding rounds that gave senior liquidation preferences to new investors was on the rise last year among companies with valuations of at least $1 billion, according to a study by law firm Fenwick & West. That allows those new investors to cash out before common shareholders, as well as earlier investors with preferred shares. During the fourth quarter of 2015, 42 percent of deals had such provisions, compared with 15 percent in the previous two quarters. Investors were also given the right to block an initial public offering that didn't meet their valuation threshold in 33 percent of deals in the fourth quarter, compared with 20 percent in the second quarter, the study said. Palantir had neither provision.

• FoxConn Agrees To Buy Sharp, Then Pulls Back On Discovering New Liabilities: Taiwan's Foxconn has put its takeover of Sharp Corp on hold after discovering previously undisclosed liabilities, sources said, throwing the acquisition in doubt and sending shares of the Japanese electronics maker tumbling. Loss-making Sharp announced on Thursday that it had agreed to be bought by Foxconn, a contract manufacturing firm formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and major Apple Inc supplier. Just hours later, Foxconn said it would not sign the deal until it had clarified some "new material information" from Sharp. It did not elaborate. Shares slid 14 percent on Friday morning, adding to a drop of 14 percent a day earlier as the planned share dilution looked larger than expected. "That puts the entire deal in jeopardy," Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal said in a note to clients. "This is especially so given the dramatic back and forth that happened between Sharp and Foxconn in 2012, when Foxconn agreed to acquire a stake in Sharp but then later walked away." Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said the Japanese group had contingent liabilities that amounted to "hundreds of billions of yen." The sources did not elaborate on the nature of the liabilities or the exact amount. Reuters has not seen any documents regarding the new information. The 11th hour delay jeopardizes a deal that would have marked the conclusion to five years of courting by Foxconn founder and billionaire Terry Gou and the opening up of Japan's insular tech sector to foreign investment. The loss-making display maker said on Thursday that it would issue around $4.4 billion worth of new shares to give Foxconn a two-thirds stake. Foxconn's investment is set to total more than 650 billion yen ($5.8 billion), a separate source familiar with the matter said. If a deal does go through, it would boost Foxconn's position as Apple's main contract manufacturer and enable Sharp to start mass-producing organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens by 2018, around the time Apple is expected to adopt the next-generation displays for its iPhones. But efforts to patch up the deal could be impeded by lingering distrust over the collapse of the 2012 deal to form capital ties. That distrust was one reason Sharp officials, until recently, preferred a lower offer by the state-backed Innovation Network Corp of Japan.

• Microsoft will pay about $400 million for software developer tools startup Xamarin, according to people with knowledge of the agreement.The deal was announced Wednesday by both companies without terms. Xamarin had sales of about $30 million for 2015 and expects to approximately double that in the current year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details of the purchase aren’t public. Microsoft Is Buying a Company That Is Key to Its Cross-Platform Future: Microsoft today says it's acquiring mobile app development startup Xamarin for an undisclosed sum, giving the company a tool for building mobile apps that can work across iOS, Android, and Windows phones. Xamarin, which has 15,000 customers including large brand names like Coca-Cola and JetBlue, allows developers to code in a single programming language while designing an app to look native to each platform. Xamarin also offers a way for developers to test those apps using thousands of cloud-hosted devices. One of the four-year-old startup's main products relies on Microsoft's Visual Studio software, so this acquisition is a natural pairing.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 25

• Airbnb Admits It Removed 1,500 Listings in New York Before Releasing Data to Regulators: Before Airbnb Inc. shared data on its business in New York City, the home-rental website removed about 1,500 listings controlled by full-time landlords. The company disclosed the removals in a letter to New York state legislators on Wednesday as it faces criticism over becoming a platform for unregulated hotels.  Airbnb said it kicked off 622 hosts as part of the effort in November. The cuts helped portray a rosier picture of its New York City operations in the data released in December. The company had not outlined the extent of its removals when it initially presented the data publicly. The deleted listings accounted for about 4 percent of those offered in the city. Josh Meltzer, the company's head of public policy in New York, wrote in the letter to legislators that the listings "did not reflect Airbnb's vision for our community." Airbnb has faced questions from city officials who have said real-estate developers are using Airbnb to rent out homes instead of selling them to permanent residents. The practice risks driving up housing prices. Airbnb defeated a proposal in San Francisco last year that would have restricted the company's business in its hometown. Airbnb spent $8 million to fight the effort. "In New York City, where housing prices and availability are a critical issue, we want to work with our community and policymakers to help prevent short-term rentals from impacting the availability and cost of permanent housing for city residents," Meltzer wrote in the letter. "While home sharing has been around for centuries, our people-to-people home sharing platform is new. And Airbnb is a young company. We have learned that a one-size fits all approach to cities will not work." Along with the letter to New York lawmakers, Airbnb released updated data on its operations in the city. Of hosts renting their entire homes in New York City, 38 percent of revenue came from those listing two or more homes on the website. Hosts with six or more homes on Airbnb generated 6 percent of revenue.

• Salesforce quarterly revenue beats Wall St expectations: Salesforce.com Inc reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and raised its full-year revenue forecast, saying customers were stepping up purchases of its web-based sales and marketing software despite economic uncertainty.Shares of the world's largest maker of online sales software rose 7.2 percent to $67 in after-hours trading.The company raised its full-year revenue forecast to $8.08 billion-$8.12 billion, from $8.0 billon-$8.1 billion, and said forecast adjusted profit of 99 cents to $1.01 per share. Revenue rose 25.3 percent to $1.81 billion, above analysts' estimate of $1.79 billion. In the fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, revenue from sales cloud - a suite of software that allows companies to track leads, forecast and collaborate around sales opportunities - rose 12.3 percent to $708.9 million. The net loss narrowed to $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, from $65.8 million, or 10 cents per share, a year earlier.

• HP Inc says to accelerate job cuts by 2016: HP Inc said it was accelerating its restructuring program and now expects about 3,000 people will exit by the end of fiscal 2016 instead of over three years as it announced in September. Then, Hewlett-Packard Co had said it expected to cut about 33,300 jobs over three years, of which up to 3,300 were to be cut in HP Inc. It said then that 1,200 people would leave the company by the end of 2016. The restructuring will result in charges and associated cash payments of about $300 million in the current year, the company said. "This move is basically HP Inc embracing the tough pricing environment and shifting their focus to building their portfolio," says Shannon Cross, an analyst for Cross Research. HP Inc (HPQ.N), which houses former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a near 12 percent drop in quarterly revenue, as it struggles with weak demand for PCs and printers. Revenue in the company's personal systems business fell 13 percent in the first quarter ended Jan. 31, while it declined 17 percent in its printing division from a year earlier. PC sales have been falling sharply worldwide, and the launch of Windows 10 has so far failed to rekindle demand. Printer demand has been hurt as corporate customers cut printing costs and consumers shift to mobile devices.

• Google Fiber Is Finally Coming to San Francisco: Google Fiber is coming to its own backyard. Well, in moderation. On Wednesday, the high-speed broadband and cable business, announced that it will start servicing “some” apartments, condos and affordable housing units in San Francisco, the urban hub north of its Silicon Valley headquarters. It’s not saying how many connections, when they’ll come or how much they’ll cost.But it is definitely coming, unlike other cities where Fiber has said that it is “exploring” an arrival. That makes San Francisco among the largest metropolitan areas for Fiber, which has, so far, kept to smaller cities clamoring for its service (and where it can more quickly gain broadband market share).It’s a symbolic entry — landing near Silicon Valley — as well as a commercial one: The city is full of tech companies and techies that have also clamored for super fast Internet.Comcast* and AT&T, two of Fiber’s chief competitors, have both announced intentions to bring gigabit Internet to the city. While Fiber has primarily focused on residential lines, it could expand into enterprise services, something Comcast has made a push for.Google is accelerating its enterprise business, which includes a team dedicated to getting startups on Google services. It’s not clear if that includes Fiber, which is housed under the Access subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet. 

• Wow! Facebook’s New Reactions Are Here, but Still No Dislike Button. Facebook has been testing alternatives to the company’s now-famous “Like” button for a few months, and it’s ready to bring those alternatives to the masses. The company is rolling out new reactions like “wow,” “sad” and “haha” to U.S. users beginning Wednesday and the rest of the world shortly after, according to Tom Alison, engineering director for News Feed. It started testing these responses in countries like Spain and Ireland last fall, and while the company said at the time that it was open to adding more emotions it looks like it stuck with the same six it started with. Getting to those six was actually a lengthy process, said Alison. The company has been working on reactions for a year, and crafted the new options based on data about which stickers and user comments were most popular on Facebook. You’ll quickly notice what’s not included in the new list of reactions: A dislike button. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially said Facebook was building one, but it turns out that wasn’t actually the case. (Angry!) “I think … ‘anger’ and ‘sad’ actually covered a lot of what we saw people trying to convey,” Alison explained. Why change the “Like” feature at all? Engagement. You may not feel comfortable “Liking” a sad update in your feed, so Facebook wants to give you other options. Alison said it’s “a little early” to tell if engagement increased in countries where Facebook has been testing the new reactions, which probably means it hasn’t. (Facebook would likely broadcast it if engagement were up.) The new feature will be available on iOS and Android phones beginning Wednesday as part of a free app update.

• Uber China Rival Didi Kuaidi Raising $1 Billion at Valuation of More Than $20 Billion: Didi Kuaidi, the biggest ride-hailing company in China, has received at least $1 billion in commitments for a new fundraising round, according to a person familiar with the matter. Once the financing closes, it would value the Uber rival at more than $20 billion, said the person, who asked not to be named because the terms aren't final. The round is oversubscribed, and the company is still negotiating terms with investors, the person said. Didi Kuaidi declined to comment. Didi Kuaidi is spending heavily on adding new drivers and offering competitive fare prices as it aims to stay ahead of Uber Technologies Inc. in China. Uber spent more than $1 billion in the country last year and plans to spend a comparable amount in 2016. In the first three quarters of 2015, Uber lost $1.7 billion, much of that going toward expansion in Asia, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in January. Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick said last week that the company is profitable in the U.S., according to Canadian technology blog BetaKit. It's unclear how the metric was calculated. Didi Kuaidi raised $3 billion last year at a $16.5 billion valuation. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the Chinese company's latest fundraising round. To take on Uber, Didi Kuaidi has formed an international coalition with the likes of Lyft Inc. in the U.S. and Ola in India. Uber was last valued by investors at $62.5 billion, and the company has raised more than $10 billion in the five years since it started picking up passengers.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 24

• European Tech Scene Begins to Feel Silicon Valley’s Woes: At the offices of Deliveroo, a food delivery start-up with headquarters in an upmarket neighborhood here, signs of activity are everywhere. The communal kitchen hums with 20-something developers. A gold-painted scooter, which the co-founder William Shu once used to make deliveries, stands in the center of the office as people bustle about. The frenetic pace belies a more cautious approach that Mr. Shu, 36, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, has recently started taking at the start-up.Over the last year, Mr. Shu has urged colleagues to be more circumspect with growth plans, forgoing rapid expansion in competitive markets like the United States to focus on places where Deliveroo already has a loyal following. And while the start-up has raised almost $200 million, employs roughly 400 people worldwide and operates in 12 countries, Mr. Shu says profitability — and not just aggressive growth to beat rivals to new markets — is increasingly important as the company moves beyond its British roots. The focus at Deliveroo is symptomatic of a change across many European start-ups. Just as in Silicon Valley, where a number of privately held tech companies have been stung by lower valuations and investor questions about their sustainability, that same unease has now reached Europe’s tech community, in a sign that a move away from soaring boom times in start-ups is going global. Driving the pullback are some of the same forces that have caused a change in Silicon Valley’s start-up scene. Tech stocks are gyrating because of fears of a global economic slowdown — exacerbated in Europe by the region’s migrant crisis and persistent financial problems. Valuations of some start-ups worldwide got ahead of themselves. As a result, venture capitalists in Europe and farther afield are becoming more cautious about funding local start-ups that do not have proven business ideas. “When Silicon Valley sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold,” said Fred Destin, a partner at the London office of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. “It’s only a matter of time before Europe faces the same issues that we’re seeing on the West Coast.” In Europe, that is leading to situations like that of Powa Technologies. Last week , Powa, an e-commerce company based in London, entered into administration, a form of bankruptcy. The start-up had raised $175 million since 2013 but had failed to win enough customers for its mobile shopping technology. Deloitte, which is overseeing the sale of the company’s assets, says it is now working to find buyers for the business. Truecaller, a Swedish start-up that had raised around $80 million for its caller ID smartphone application, recently laid off about 20 percent of its staff. A company spokesman declined to comment on the layoffs and said Truecaller remained committed to its business. And SwiftKey, a popular predictive typing smartphone application used by more than 300 million people worldwide, was bought by Microsoft this month for a reported $250 million, which was significantly less than what many of SwiftKey’s investors had expected. “You can already see more hesitance and lower valuations,” Christian Reber, founder of 6Wunderkinder, a German start-up bought by Microsoft last year, said in an email. “The market correction will continue, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

• MasterCard will let you to take a selfie to complete purchases: MasterCard wants to use your face to help fend off fraudsters. Using a new system called MasterCard Identity Check -- or, colloquially, "selfie pay" -- the credit card company will use biometric methods like face recognition and fingerprint scans to better secure online shopping. Right now, Mastercard offers a feature that financial institutions can enable that lets customers set up a password for online payments to help prevent fraud. The new system will use the same principle, but instead of relying on a password that could be forgotten or stolen, it uses your face or fingerprint. Consumers will go through all the normal steps of filling out credit card information when making an online purchase, but this feature adds another step: The website will send a notification through an app on customers' smartphones that asks them to verify their identity. This can be done either through a fingerprint scan or by using the phone's camera to take a brief, selfie-like, video. When taking the "selfie," the user will have to blink to prove that it's a live person and not just an old photo being used to spoof the system.

• Lenovo aims at mature markets with new 'augmented reality' phone: China's Lenovo Group is ready to break into mature markets this summer with the launch of its new smartphone which sports 'augmented reality' features developed under Google's Tango project, its chief executive said on Tuesday. The device, which was announced at the 2016 CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in January, will launch in July, Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing said in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Declining to give additional information he said that the phone will include Google's Project Tango technology and more. Project Tango combines 3D motion tracking with depth sensors to give a mobile device the ability to know where it is and how it moves through an area, creating the potential to use augmented reality features on the phone. Augmented reality software then overlays text or graphics on the real-life image. It differs from virtual reality, which seeks to simulate real-world views.

• Tech IPO Freeze Is Sign of Investor Reality Check: The tech IPO market is frozen. Storage vendor Nutanix is further proof. It's been over three months since Square and Match Group debuted, and not a single software or Internet company has followed. Seven of the past 10 technology companies to go public are trading below their offer price, and four are down by at least 20 percent, according to FactSet. Nutanix, which filed its IPO prospectus in December, is holding off on selling shares until the stock market volatility wanes, said sources familiar with the matter. The developer of data center technology that wraps together storage, servers and virtualization was set to go public in late January, but has been advised by its bankers to wait for the market to calm, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. No other high-profile tech companies are publicly on file. Last month, online lender Elevate Credit delayed its IPO due to market conditions, as January marked the worst month for the Nasdaq since 2010. The index is still down 8.5 percent to start the year even after rallying over the past week. For Silicon Valley's financiers, this is all troubling. Big IPOs are their lifeblood. That's how venture investors make outsized profits and justify the billions of dollars they pour annually into start-ups that ultimately go bust or fail to generate returns. Last year should have been a banner year for IPOs. The Nasdaq topped 5,000 for the first time since 2000, and rose for the fourth consecutive year. Investors expressed appetite for risk, bidding up Amazon.comand Netflix, the year's two best large-cap performers. Yet, tech companies went public at the slowest pace since 2009. Instead of IPOs, the highest growth companies were raising mega-rounds of cash in the private market at valuations and revenue multiples that exceeded what public investors were paying. Hedge funds and private equity firms distorted the IPO cycle, putting piles of cash into companies but without rewarding early investors and employees the way public offerings do. Late-stage private financing almost doubled from $8.9 billion in 2013 to $16 billion last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association, with companies including Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX and SoFi each reeling in at least $1 billion. That could mean a painfully dilutive private investment round, selling the business at a loss to some investors or going public at a price below what earlier investors paid. "People just have to get real," said Golden, a managing partner at Revolution Ventures in San Francisco and former director of JPMorgan's technology investment banking practice. "When markets are speaking, we may not like what they're saying but we have to listen."

• Etsy Shares Spike 13% As It Reports Strong Revenue In Fourth Quarter: Etsy didn’t have a good 2015, but it was still able to finish on the stronger side. Today the company reported its fourth-quarter results, coming in at $87.9 million in revenue and a loss of 4 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 1 cent per share on revenue of $86.5 million. Another important number to track here was the company’s gross merchandise sales (GMS), which rose 21.3% to $741.5 million from $611.5 million in the fourth quarter last year. Shares of Etsy were up as much as 13% in extended trading following the report. Still, it’s partially a recovery from the day where shares ended down around 7% before the company reported earnings. t’s also a strong finish amid the fresh 2015 IPOs, which was one of the weakest years for the IPO market since 2009. Even with the strong showing, Etsy is still trading well below its IPO price — but it is certainly not alone. The fourth quarter was an important one for Etsy — it had to show investors that it could post a strong holiday quarter and bring in new people who would buy gifts and other products on Etsy. It looks like investors were pleased by its ability to beat on revenue and bring in some new buyers and sellers. It also had to show that it could continue to bring those buyers and sellers in through despite its brand as an artisanal marketplace that is quite different from others like eBay. Etsy is also continuing to navigate a shift to more mobile sales, with mobile visits accounting for 61% of the company’s overall visits, and 44% of gross merchandise sales coming from mobile devices. This is all pretty good news for the company. In general, Etsy has not had a good year. Shortly after its IPO the stock hit around $30, but has since cratered to under $8. Today, obviously, didn’t help. To be sure, a lot of companies haven’t been having a good year due to a few things outside their control — like global economic issues and foreign exchange problems — but Etsy in particular is getting hit hard by investors.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 23

A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D.: While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls. “It’s remarkable what they can do,” said Blair Hull, a founder of an electronic trading firm who relies on Jane Street to make a market for his recently started E.T.F. “If you look at who provides this kind of liquidity these days, it’s fewer and fewer firms.” It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion. And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital. In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop. Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon). Jane Street was founded at the beginning of the previous decade, when a couple of option traders and a computer expert left Susquehanna to start their own business. Harnessing Ph.D.-toting mathematicians to the most powerful computers money can buy has become the accepted way for hedge funds and banks to get a trading edge these days, but Jane Street takes this marriage of high tech and high intellect to a new level. Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm’s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders. Indeed, new traders must complete a monthlong OCaml boot camp before they start trading. And to the degree that the super-shy Jane Street does has have a public face, it belongs to its chief technology officer, Yaron Minsky, who givesfrequent lectures at Harvard, M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, promoting the firm’s ability to manage risk by developing the best software around.

• A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care: John Costik got the call at the office in 2012. It was his wife, Laura, with terrible news: Their 4-year-old son, Evan, was headed into the emergency room. His blood sugar reading was sky high, about 535 mg/dl, and doctors had discovered he had Type 1 diabetes. The first three days in the hospital were a blur during which the Costiks, engineers in Rochester, received a crash course in managing the basics of diabetes care.For starters, they were told to log their son’s numbers on paper forms. It was their first hint that diabetes management did not occupy a place on technology’s bleeding edge. The methods for guesstimating carbohydrate intake also seemed imprecise, Mr. Costik found, and the process generated a lot of wasted data.“The last thing you want to do is find some form and fill it out,” he said. “You’re really just emotionally trying to cope with it, and that data in that book isn’t necessarily useful to the people with diabetes.” Several months later, Mr. Costik fitted his son with a Dexcom G4 continuous glucose monitor. A hair-thin sensor under Evan’s skin recorded an exact blood sugar reading at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day.But all that data left with Evan every morning when he headed off to day care. Mr. Costik wanted something better: continuous access to his son’s glucose readings.So he examined the device’s software code and wrote a simple program that transmitted the monitoring data to an online spreadsheet he could view on a Web browser, Android mobile phone or, eventually, his Pebble smartwatch. Now, as consumer gadgets weave themselves ever more tightly into everyday life, patients and their families are finding homespun solutions to problems medical-device manufacturers originally did not address. Industry executives say the pace of user-driven innovation was one reason the Food and Drug Administration recently reclassified remote glucose-monitoring devices, hastening approval for new models by big companies like Dexcom and Medtronics. James Wedding, a civil engineer who lives outside Dallas, saw Mr. Costik’s Twitter post and used his code to set up a remote monitor system for his daughter, Carson, who is now 12. Lane Desborough, an engineer in California, got in touch with Mr. Costik after seeing his tweet, ultimately creating an open-source system based in part on Mr. Costik’s code. It allows anyone to hack existing glucose monitors so they transmit readings to the cloud, where they can be read by patients and caregivers.Mr. Desborough called the project Nightscout. The Nightscout group onFacebook, known as CGM in the Cloud, provides free tech support for users trying to improve on monitoring devices.About two dozen users have even started a project called Open APS, in which they are pairing insulin pumps with glucose monitors in an effort to create an open-source artificial pancreas system. These wearable devices, which automate insulin delivery, are being tested in academic settings, but these early adopters are not waiting for the results of those continuing clinical trials.Mr. Costik now works at the Center for Clinical Innovation at the University of Rochester, where he works to improve management options for all patients; Mr. Desborough is now the chief engineer at Bigfoot Biomedical, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that plans to create an artificial pancreas.

• Fitbit Forecasts Miss Estimates on Global Rollout of New Devices: Fitbit's current-quarter profit forecast missed Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, as the wearable fitness device maker aggressively invests in new products, sending its shares down more than 16 percent in after-hours trading. The lackluster guidance overshadowed the company's comfortable quarterly revenue and profit beat in the holiday shopping season. Fitbit has been diversifying its portfolio of colorful wristbands and clippable devices that track calories, sleeping patterns and heart rate, to better compete with rivals as well as to tap new markets and demographies.The company last month unveiled its $200 smartwatch, Blaze, to mixed reviews. Earlier this month, Fitbit announced a new wristband, Alta, to appeal to the more fashion-conscious customer.  Fitbit's net income attributable to common stockholders rose to $64.2 million, or 26 cents per share, in the quarter, from $11.9 million, or 19 cents per share, a year earlier.On an adjusted basis, the company earned 35 cents per share. Revenue nearly doubled to $711.6 million from $370.2 million.Analysts on average had expected a profit of 25 cents and revenue of $647.8 million. Fitbit's revenue forecast of $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion and adjusted profit of $1.08-$1.20 per share for 2016 was largely in line with expectations.Shares of the San Francisco-based company were down 15 percent at $14.04 in after-hours trading on Monday after closing up 5.9 percent.The stock, which has lost nearly 70 percent of its value since hitting a high in August, has been trading below the June IPO price of $20 all this month.

• Amazon Raises Minimum Order Size as It Seeks More Prime Buyers: Amazon.com Inc. is increasing the minimum order size for free shipping to $49 from $35, a step that could encourage more consumers to sign up for Prime, the online retailer’s annual service that includes two-day deliveries. The benefit of getting more people to sign up for Prime services -- for $99 a year -- is that they tend to shop more frequently and spend more money, while access to other perks such as online movies, music and other content helps to keep customers within Amazon’s shopping ecosystem. By encouraging non-Prime customers to spend more on a single order, Seattle-based Amazon is also aiming to reduce costs while boosting profits on each sale. The new threshold follows a 33 percent jump in fulfillment costs -- warehousing, packaging and shipping -- in the fourth quarter, which outpaced a 15 percent increase in product sales. Monday’s price increase is the first since 2013, when Amazon raised the threshold to $35 from $25. Amazon’s new minimum order size for free shipping brings it in line with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s online store, which has a threshold of $50, or free pickup in stores. Target Corp. has a $25 minimum, while it’s $35 at startup Jet.com Inc.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 22

• New Chinese Rules on Foreign Firms’ Online Content: China is taking another step to restrict what can be posted on the Internet in its country by issuing new rules barring foreign companies or their affiliates from engaging in publishing online content there without government approval. The rules, which were jointly released this week by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that beginning March 10, foreign companies or foreign joint ventures will be restricted from disseminating a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, animation, audio and video. The rules also apply to digitized books, art, literature and science. The new regulations would allow foreign-owned companies to cooperate with a Chinese partner to publish content on the Web in China, but they must get government approval. China already has some of the world’s most restrictive policies on the dissemination of information. Chinese TV and the news media are censored; the government has censors monitoring popular social media platforms, like WeChat; and American Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been blocked in China for years. One key question is the impact such regulations would have on companies like Apple and Microsoft, which run online platforms in China that provide services and sometimes content. For example, Apple’s Chinese App Store offers games and other apps in the country while Microsoft has a joint venture through which it provides a cloud version of Windows and Office software. Internet companies, like Akamai and Cloud Flare, have operations that work to speed traffic to foreign websites or host them through servers in China.

• Apple Still Holds the Keys to Its Cloud Service, but Reluctantly: In Silicon Valley — if not Washington — Apple is being hailed for digging in its heels on a court order requiring it to aid the Federal Bureau of Investigation in gaining access to an an iPhone used by one of the attackers in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, emphasized on Tuesday in a letter to customers that helping the F.B.I. essentially hack into one of the company’s own phones would be a dangerous precedent. What’s more, Apple said it would have to create new software to do this. But while company executives have embraced the notion that Apple is no longer able to intervene for law enforcement when investigators want access to an iPhone, it has repeatedly cooperated with court orders for access to online services like its iCloud. That may sound like hypocrisy, but to people familiar with how Apple’s products and services work, it is simply a matter of technology. ICloud is an Internet service Apple customers can use to back up information that is stored on their devices. It is helpful if your phone, tablet or computer is lost or badly damaged. And it, like other online services, is a gold mine for law enforcement — as the government spying revelations by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden showed. Every few months for the last few years, tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have published transparency reports, which are lists of instances in which a company turned over data on users at the behest of a court order in the United States or other countries.In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2015, Apple received nearly 11,000 requests from government agencies around the world regarding information on roughly 60,000 devices. Apple provided some data in roughly 7,100 of those requests, the report said.Apple has stated repeatedly that it would hand over data to comply with a court order when it is technically able to do so. And as that report indicates, it has. Often.But the operative phrase to understand the difference between Apple’s cooperation and its resistance is “technically able.”In the fall of 2014, with an update to its iOS software, Apple switched off its ability to retrieve data from its phones and tablets. By doing this, Apple tried to take itself out of the equation when law enforcement is looking for access to a phone. In essence, the company could no longer fulfill a request if it was technically unable to do so.ICloud is a different story. Apple encrypts that data on its servers and holds on to the key, which it uses to gain access to the data when it is required to do so by a court order.There are practical reasons for managing security in the cloud differently from on an iPhone. ICloud exists, in part, to save backups in the event that, say, you drop your phone in a swimming pool. Apple needs to have that key to get your data back for you.It is not so easy for a company to take away its ability to gain access to your information when that company’s ability to retrieve your information is the reason you are using its service.

• Facebook Brings 360 Dynamic Streaming To Samsung Gear VR, Forms Social VR Team: Zuck shocked everyone by appearing on stage for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event for MWC 2016. He wasn’t there to push Samsung’s new phones or talk about Messenger, his time onstage was all about virtual reality. Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is the parent company of Oculus) will be bringing its dynamic streaming technology for 360 video to Gear VR (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is powered by Oculus). This technology allows significant performance upgrades to streaming content by only playing back what’s in view of the headset at any given time rather than processing the entire 360 sphere of video at once. All of this is done by seamlessly switching between dozens of variants of each 360 video taken from multiple angles. Facebook revealed more about the technology at its Video @Scale event last month. The results speak for themselves, Facebook says their efforts have “quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x.” Another interesting tidbit comes from a Facebook blog post today—they’re building a social VR team to focus “entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR.”

• Uber Driver Held in Killing Spree as Police Probe Tie to Routes: A driver for Uber may have picked up passengers in between incidents as he drove around and shot at least six people dead over the span of several hours, according to police in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While there have been other incidents of misconduct by Uber drivers, the Michigan shooting would be the first to involve a mass shooting. In order to become an Uber driver, Dalton would have undergone, and passed, a background check. Uber said it’s referring inquiries regarding the routes to police given that there is an active investigation. “We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence,” Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can.” 

• Yahoo launches auction process as Starboard gears up for fight: Yahoo Inc officially launched the sale of its core business on Friday, a move seen as a positive step for frustrated investors but not enough to keep an activist hedge fund from pursuing a proxy fight against the struggling Internet company.Yahoo shares jumped after the company announced its board has formed a committee of independent directors to explore strategic alternatives, and that it has hired investment banks and a law firm to run the process. The launch of the auction process, a move activist hedge fund Starboard Value and other shareholders have pushed since late last year, showed the company was moving another step closer to selling its core business, which includes search, mail and news sites, rather than spin it off as previously planned. The move follows more than three years of effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to turn around Yahoo by focusing on mobile apps and trying to boost advertising revenue.  Yahoo had acknowledged during its earnings last month that it was open to exploring options for its core business. Despite the launch, Starboard's founder Jeffrey Smith is not backing down, and will continue his pursuit of nominating a group of directors for the Yahoo board, people familiar with the matter said.

• This glove could make eating easier for those with Parkinson’s disease: Eating can be difficult and embarrassing for those with tremors, but GyroGear thinks it has a solution for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease or essential tremor. The start-up has created a glove that steadies a person’s hand, making it easier to complete everyday tasks such as eating. The glove’s power lies in a bronze disc on the back of the hand, which weighs about as much as a roll of nickels. It spins at up to 20,000 rotations per minute, providing a steadying force. The force of the battery-powered disc is akin to putting one’s hand in molasses. While moving is not as easy, the benefit is that much of the shaking is naturally filtered out. GyroGear is aiming to reduce tremors by 70 percent. In one lab test, the London-based researchers say, it reduced a tremor by 90 percent. GyroGear founder Faii Ong was inspired by a 103-year-old hospital patient who couldn’t eat without spilling food. While cleaning her up, the medical student at Imperial College started to brainstorm solutions.  Ong cautions that there’s still work to be done. The glove hasn’t been tested by outside parties, but they plan to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the year. They also hope to begin selling the product by year’s end and are raising funds from investors. “The idea of simple, wearable devices to treat tremor and to avoid the side effects from medications or alternatively the dangers of surgery is very appealing to patients and health care providers,” said Michael S. Okun, medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation. “The GyroGlove is an interesting idea, however many of these types of devices fall short of the expectations — especially when faced with very severe and disabling tremor.” There are other efforts to use mechanical solutions to aid those with Parkinson’s disease. Lift Labs, a start-up that Google acquired in 2014, has devised a vibrating spoon and fork to counteract tremors and make eating easier. While having shown promise for mild tremors, Okun said it hasn’t proven the most effective solution for more severe cases. In the long term GyroGear is interested in adapting its glove to other uses, such as for surgeons, physical therapists, photographers or anyone seeking to keep a steady hand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 19

• Uber is profitable in the US, but is losing $1 billion a year to compete in China: Uber is burning through more than a billion dollars a year in China as it wages a fierce price war against local rival Didi Kuaidi, its chief executive said. The company's Chinese business boosted its valuation last month to more than $8 billion after raising more than $1 billion in its latest funding round, but the U.S. ride-hailing app is not yet profitable in mainland China because of the intense competition. "We're profitable in the USA, but we're losing over $1 billion a year in China," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Canadian technology platform Betakit.  "We have a fierce competitor that's unprofitable in every city they exist in, but they're buying up market share. I wish the world wasn't that way."  The $1 billion figure was confirmed by Uber officials in China in an email to Reuters on Thursday. Uber and China's Didi Kuaidi, backed by Chinese technology giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, have both spent heavily to subsidise fares to gain market share, betting on China's Internet-linked transport market becoming the world's biggest.

• Facebook Plans To Put Ads In Messenger: A leaked document Facebook sent to some of its biggest advertisers reveals that Facebook will launch ads within Messenger in Q2 2016. The document, obtained by TechCrunch but kept private to protect its verified source, says businesses will be able to send ads as messages to people who previously initiated a chat thread with that company. To prepare, the document recommends that businesses get consumers to start message threads with them now so they’ll be able to send them ads when the feature launches. The document also notes that Facebook has quietly launched a URL short link fb.com/msg/ that instantly opens a chat thread with a business. Facebook confirmed the existence of the URL short link. That seems to back up the validity of the leaked document. Messenger is one of Facebook’s most popular and fastest-growing products, with 800 million monthly active users. Yet the social network has never monetized it directly before. Thankfully for users, Facebook isn’t going to let brands send ad messages to just anyone or even people who’ve liked their Pages. Only those who have voluntarily chatted with a business can be sent ads. This should somewhat limit the spam potential and annoyance. Right now, almost all messages come from one’s friends, so Facebook will likely try to preserve this high signal-to-noise ratio with limits on advertising.

• Secondary Shops Flooded With Unicorn Sellers: Until recently, shares of some of the highest-flying unicorn companies have been so hard to come by that secondary buyers have battled each other, not to mention other investors, to acquire some of the startups’ common shares. As the fortunes of billion-dollar companies like Evernote have fizzled, however, so has their shareholders’ enthusiasm. Says the cofounder of one secondary shop who asked not to be named, “We aren’t seeing huge discounts yet in the top 10 names, but people are trying to dump them. It’s not just one person calling you about a particular company. It’s four.” Says another secondary investor, who also asked not to be identified for this story, “We’re seeing an enormous uptick in inbound selling interest.” The situation is changing so quickly that several people with whom we spoke say a number of new characters are now peddling shares of so-called “A List” companies whose shares would have been beyond nearly anyone’s reach six months ago. “We’re seeing a lot of sketchy people advertising these deals,” says one insider. It didn’t used to be like this. Just a year ago, demand for unicorn stock was at an unprecedented level, as were the number of companies establishing billion-dollar valuations for themselves. Unicorn coverage became a cottage industry unto itself, with tech outlets and even data analysis firms poring over which unicorns were the best employers, which companies were positioned to become unicorns, and which venture firms were the best at spotting unicorns early on, among other angles. Alas, by late August, China’s market was in a nose-drive, and both late-and early-stage investors began applying the brakes. It wasn’t long before non-traditional venture investors like Fidelity and Blackrock were slashing the valuations of some of the startups in the portfolio. A parade of well-reported WSJ pieces about what isn’t quite right at high-flying Theranos seemed to cement what many had started to think: That many unicorns really weren’t worth what their ambitious investors had settled on. (It didn’t help when, last week, the human resources startup Zenefits asked its CEO to resign over sloppy and possibly damning business practices. Ten months ago, the company was valued at $4.5 billion by investors.) Partly, such nervousness owes to employees, some of whom are getting laid off as companies cut back on costs in order to lengthen their runway. These former staffers have to exercise their options within 90 days or else lose them, and they’re calling secondary firms for help in figuring out what to do. Some sellers are venture capital firms that thought they could exit some of their investments in 2016 and are now concluding that they can’t. (As some readers will know, the clock is always ticking on a venture fund. Most have 10 or 11 years, tops, to invest in startups and get some cash back to investors before losing the confidence of those backers.)

• Why Carriers Want to Delete WhatsApp: Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the Mobile World Congress, an annual industry gathering held in Barcelona, to reassure phone companies that Facebook is their natural ally. He’d just announced the $22 billion purchase of the WhatsApp messaging service and was touting an initiative called Internet.org, a low-bandwidth suite of basic services carriers would offer in conjunction with Facebook to get hundreds of millions of people online for the first time. He pledged to “build what is going to be a more profitable model with more subscribers for carriers.” By sticking together, the Facebook founder said, both sides could benefit handsomely.As Zuckerberg prepares to return to Barcelona for this year’s MWC on Feb. 22, phone executives say his company looks more like a competitor than a partner. Last year, WhatsApp introduced free voice calls—something Facebook already offered—and both brands have messaging apps. These so-called over-the-top services cut into mobile carriers’ voice and texting revenue because they’re offered over the Internet. Some phone companies say Facebook and its ilk are freeloaders that rely on carriers’ network infrastructure without spending any money to support it. “WhatsApp is competing with us, not only with messaging but with voice, too,” Telefónica Chief Operating Officer José María Álvarez-Pallete said in August at a telecommunications industry event in the Spanish coastal city of Santander. “The premise should be, same services, same rules.” Not all carriers are lining up against Facebook. The company has more than a dozen partnerships with phone companies from Paraguay to the Philippines. Many of them say teaming up with Facebook is beneficial, because it boosts data usage and has the potential to increase revenue. Millicom International Cellular, a carrier with more than 63 million subscribers in Africa and Latin America, has run promotions in certain markets where it offers free access to Facebook and Internet.org for a couple of months. The company reported last year that 33 percent of subscribers who take part end up upgrading to fee-paying data plans. Similarly, South Africa’s No. 3 mobile company, Cell C, offers Facebook and WhatsApp for free in certain subscription packages, because they draw new users. “If we don’t innovate around these services and drive value to our customers, we run a higher risk of being left out of the future entirely,” said Cell C Chief Executive Officer José Dos Santos in an e-mail. In the long run, say some industry analysts, WhatsApp and other alternatives shouldn’t be seen as a threat to the voice service of phone companies. The typically superior sound quality of the voice calls in the apps uses lots of data. “If carriers price their data offerings correctly, it could drive up revenues,” says John Delaney, an analyst at researcher IDC. And when people graduate to video apps like Skype, data consumption grows exponentially. Says Delaney, “What carriers resent is investing heavily and having others piggyback on their investments.”

• Scientists created a three-armed cyborg to play the drums like no human can: Georgia Tech researchers have built a robotic arm that attaches to a drummer’s shoulder and plays along. This allows drummers — now equipped with three arms — to play sequences that two-armed humans can’t even attempt. “It’s a richer and more sophisticated rhythm because you can hit one more thing,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech. The robotic arm is capable of hitting a drum up to 20 times per second, a rate that’s impossible for humans. And it never needs a break. The computerized arm listens to the sound of the human playing and improvises to accompany the beat. Currently it can’t be programmed to play specific songs. The robotic arm will generally mirror the volume and speed that the human is playing. Weinberg stopped short of saying the three-armed solution is presently better than what a drummer can do with two hands. The arm, finalized last week, hasn’t been tested yet to see how it complements professional drummers. Weinberg’s next step is having drummers wear a brain-scanning headband, and see whether the robotic arm can interpret their intentions and play exactly what they desire. Since 2006, he has worked to create memorable music through artificial intelligence. In one project, Weinberg built a robotic prosthesis for a drummer who lost an arm in an accident.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 18

• Zenefits Scandal Highlights Perils of Hypergrowth at Start-Ups: Zenefits may be among the first of several cautionary tales to highlight a sobering lesson: For a start-up, growing too quickly can produce just as spectacular a failure as growing too slowly. Zenefits is a three-year-old company that makes software for small businesses. In its short life span, it has been called both the most unsexy company in tech, and one of the most promising.Its investors have argued that Zenefits, which makes money by acting as a health-insurance brokerage firm for its customers, has the potential to cut the red tape that small businesses have to battle to provide benefits for their employees.These grand promises were bolstered by Zenefits’ early growth. Its annual recurring revenue — an accounting measure preferred by subscription-based software companies — reached $1 million by the end of 2013, the year Zenefits was founded. Recurring revenue hit $20 million by late 2014, and was projected to reach $100 million by late 2015. The exponential growth was catnip to investors. The start-up raised $500 million last year at a $4 billion valuation, one of the largest financing rounds in a year of mega-fundings. At one point, Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent venture firm, had invested more in Zenefits than in any other company. In total, Zenefits has raised about $581 million. Then, last week, poof. Zenefits announced that Parker Conrad, its co-founder and chief executive, had resigned. In emails to employees, David O. Sacks, the former chief operating officer and new chief executive, explained that Mr. Conrad had overseen a company that had become derelict in its culture and ethics. Zenefits has sought to paint the executive changes as a new beginning. One person close to the company said when Mr. Sacks briefed employees on Mr. Conrad’s exit last week, there were celebrations and tears of relief at the San Francisco headquarters of Zenefits.  Yet the story is more complicated than the single instance of a founder’s misdeeds. Zenefits’ recklessness seems to have been merely the worst symptom of a larger sickness that infected the company, according to investors, former employees and others who worked with the management team (and who all requested anonymity because no one in Silicon Valley wants to be seen as kicking a start-up when it’s down).  That sickness: Zenefits was a company consumed by impossible expectations. In return for fund-raising at a stratospheric value, Mr. Conrad promised the moon to investors. Then, to reach the moon, he began to transform a tiny start-up into a mighty rocket ship — only to watch it careen out of control as it stretched to accomplish the impossible. Though many noticed trouble, neither Mr. Conrad, nor the board of directors, nor anyone else in management could afford to stop, take a breath and fix the problems. Growth was the only imperative.

• Cybersecurity concerns - Why US Naval Academy students are learning to sail by the stars for the first time in a decade: batteries run out, systems get hacked, and even advanced technology can be balky. In a pinch — or in a war — sailors need something to fall back on. And stars and sextants have been working pretty well for hundreds of years. So the Naval Academy started teaching its sailors how to navigate ships by looking to the heavens again this academic year. The training was dropped altogether in 2006. “I thought that we had computers and all that for navigation,” Hogan, 20, a Charleston, S.C., native said this week during a class on the subject. But amid concerns about cyberattacks and new weapons that can shut off the electricity of a ship or a plane, the Naval Academy made celestial navigation a requirement for third-year students. “Redundancy is the best policy,” said Lt. Alex Reardon, who taught three sections of the class. Especially because, when it comes to a Navy ship on the open seas, “we’re typically alone in what we do.” That could be a major problem in the event of a cyberattack, said Salvatore Mercogliano, an assistant professor focused on naval history at Campbell University and a former merchant mariner. During World War II, the U.S. began using land-based radio beacons known as the LORAN system to help guide ships. And the space race helped further celestial navigation’s decline: The Navy sponsored the development of the first operational satellite navigation system, dubbed TRANSIT, which went into active service in 1964 — providing navigation assistance for naval submarines and surface vessels. But TRANSIT was retired in the mid-’90s after the Air Force completed the modern GPS system, which uses dozens of satellites circling the globe.

• Amazon expanding deliveries by its 'on-demand' drivers: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is quietly inviting drivers for its new "on-demand" delivery service to handle its standard packages, as the online retailer known for low prices and razor-thin profit margins looks to speed up delivery times and tamp down its growing multi-billion dollar logistics bill.The move, which has not been announced publicly, is the latest sign that the world's biggest e-commerce company wants to control more of its own deliveries. Media reports have said the company plans to lease its own fleet of jets, and CEO Jeff Bezos eventually wants to use drones to get packages to customers. Amazon outlined details of its latest plan over the last few weeks in an email to contract drivers who deliver parcels for Amazon Flex, a program launched last year to handle speedy deliveries of common household goods to customers using Prime Now, a mobile app that comes with Amazon's popular $99-a-year Prime membership. They are not Amazon employees. If the gambit works, industry analysts said it could help Amazon contain its shipping costs, which grew more than 18 percent to $11.5 billion last year. It might also create a logistics network to compete with UPS and FedEx.

• Blippar’s New Augmented Reality App Is Supposed to Recognize Any Object You Point It At. Augmented reality app Blippar has been around since 2011, but until recently it focusedmostly on advertising and content for brands: Point your Blippar smartphone app at a bold “B” embossed on the pages of a magazine or a bottle of ketchup and more information would pop out on your phone’s display. But it’s safe to say that augmented reality is coming into a new phase: The contextual information being supplied is getting smarter, and people are gradually becoming more aware of the capabilities of AR and virtual reality (some are even excited to wear headsets, if you can believe it). So Blippar, in an effort to evolve along with the rest of the AR world, has just launched a new version of its smartphone app that is supposed to recognize literally any object you point at it — whether it has been “tagged” with an AR code or not. Blippar co-founder and CEO Ambarish Mitra showed off the new version of the mobile app today at the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif. He pointed the app at a variety of random objects — a magazine, a salad and an apple — to demonstrate how the app’s image recognition capabilities work. “This is a really big change in our business model,” Mitra had said in an interview before the conference kicked off. “Initially, AR was about very static image recognition. You store images of Starbucks or Coca-Cola or General Mills in our database, and the images match. But now you’re able to analyze any environment in the world in real time, over a 3G connection.” Mitra said over the past year and a half he has moved his technology team from the U.K. to Mountain View, Calif., to focus on machine learning, which is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now, with everyone from small upstarts to behemoths like Google trying to crack the code on how to make accurate predictions from large sets of data. (Google, actually, has an app that works similarly called Google Goggles, but it works when you point the app at a QR code or a famous landmark or something else recognizable — not necessarily everyday objects.) In short, this is not an easy thing to do. In fact, ahead of the event, one of our staffers tried it out by pointing the app at his dog, and it thought the pup was a goat. Mitra has said that, right now, the technology has elementary capabilities, like the brain of a six-year-old; it can recognize “car,” but not “Prius,” or it can recognize an item of clothing, but not the label. However, with machine learning, the app should be able to get to the level of an 18-year-old pretty quickly, Mitra said, in terms of its recognition abilities. And during the onstage demo, it did properly identify a pug named Milton as a dog.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 17

• Virtual Reality Companies Look to Science Fiction for Their Next Play: Tech companies have spent years developing better, cheaper devices to immerse people in digital worlds. Yet they are still figuring out how to make virtual reality the kind of technology that people cannot live without. So for inspiration, they are turning to science fiction. At Oculus, a leading virtual reality company, a copy of the popular sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” is handed out to new hires. Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality start-up, has hired science fiction and fantasy writers. The name of Microsoft’s HoloLens headset is a salute to the holodeck, a simulation room from “Star Trek.” “Like many other people working in the tech space, I’m not a creative person,” said Palmer Luckey, 23, a co-founder of Oculus, which was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. “It’s nice that science fiction exists because these are really creative people figuring out what the ultimate use of any technology might be. They come up with a lot of incredible ideas.” Those ideas are especially relevant now, as some of the biggest technology companies are nearing a major push of a new generation of virtual reality products. In the next few months, virtual reality headsets from Oculus, Sony and HTC go on sale. Venture capital money is pouring into the industry. But how people will interact with the imaginary worlds remains largely unknown territory. And that is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is shaping the language companies are using to market the technology, influencing the types of experiences made for the headsets and even defining long-term goals for developers. “Science fiction, in simplest terms, sets you free,” said Ralph Osterhout, chief executive of the Osterhout Design Group, which builds augmented reality glasses. Techies do not need any encouragement from their employers to read or watch science fiction, long a pillar of geek culture. The genre has influenced many corners of technology, from smartphones to robotics to space exploration. But there is something unique about the interplay between science fiction and virtual reality, a technology that is essentially an instrument for fooling people into believing they are someplace — and often someone — they are not. Virtual reality is a medium, like television or video games, that can borrow liberally from the virtual worlds experienced by fictional characters. Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Fla., and which counts Google as one of its big investors, has gone even further than most companies by hiring three science fiction and fantasy writers on staff. Its most famous sci-fi recruit is Neal Stephenson, who depicted the virtual world of the Metaverse in his seminal 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” In an interview, Mr. Stephenson — whose title is chief futurist — declined to say what he was working on at Magic Leap, describing it as one of several “content projects” underway at the company.

• How to write emails if you want people to actually respond:  Having trouble getting replies to your emails? Apparently, one of the best ways to get a reply is to write as if you're 9 years old. That's according to the makers of the Boomerang mail plug-in, who found that writing at a third-grade reading level seems to be the right level of complexity for the average message, after mining their user data for information on what kind of writing actually gets replies. Here's a full list of the tips from the makers of Boomerang: Use shorter sentences with simpler words. A 3rd grade reading level works best. Include 1-3 questions in your email. Make sure you include a subject line! Aim for 3-4 words. Use a slightly positive or slightly negative tone. Both outperform a completely neutral tone. Take a stand! Opinionated messages see higher response rates than objective ones. Write enough, but not too much. Try to keep messages between 50-125 words.

• Twitter not reliable predictor of election outcomes: study: In politics, it is said that all press is good press. But that does not necessarily apply to tweets, according to a study released this week. In fact, it is difficult to predict the outcome of an election based on the amount of Twitter buzz a candidate gets, according to the study from the Social Science Computer Review. The study, whose relevance to this year's U.S. election was sharply disputed by Twitter, focused on the 2013 German federal election and found that Twitter data was a more accurate measure of the level of interest in candidates rather than the level of support they will receive. The daily volume of Twitter messages referring to candidates or parties fluctuates heavily depending on the events of the day - such as televised leaders’ debates, high-profile interviews with candidates - or the coverage of political controversies and scandals," the study said. The data also showed that Twitter users did not necessarily reflect the demographics of the population as a whole. In the United States, social media platforms like Twitter and Yik Yak are often more popular among millennial voters. A Twitter spokesman argued the study was not relevant to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "I'd advise passing the next time someone sends along German Twitter data from three years ago in the context of the 2016 U.S. election," said Nick Pacilio, a spokesman for the social media site's government and news department. Pacilio cited a Time magazine website report that showed Twitter chatter favored the winning candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, in the Iowa caucuses this month.

• After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns? The $4.5 billion benefits startup moved fast and broke things—maybe even the law: In a Feb. 1 meeting at its blandly luxurious Sand Hill Road offices, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz urged the chief executive officer of one of its most prized and promising companies to resign. Zenefits makes software designed to simplify and automate such HR tasks as health insurance signups. At three years old, it’s valued at $4.5 billion and is one of the fastest-growing business software companies ever. Under founding CEO Parker Conrad, it also made software that allowed its employees to skirt state regulatory requirements, the company now admits. Days after Chief Operating Officer David Sacks gave that information to Lars Dalgaard, an Andreessen partner who sits on Zenefits’ board, Conrad was out, say three people familiar with the matter. At Conrad’s suggestion, they replaced him with Sacks, a Silicon Valley fixture who’s worked at Microsoft and co-founded Yammer, the business chat company. In Zenefits’ early days, the people say, Conrad created a deceptive program called “the Macro,” which made it look like employees were watching legally mandated online training when they weren’t. Workers who claimed to have completed the training may have been well short of the required 52 hours. Conrad used it himself, the people say. California regulators are investigating Zenefits’ use of the Macro, as well as whether its employees had licenses when they started selling insurance. On Feb. 8, Sacks announced Conrad’s resignation in an internal e-mail. “For us, compliance is like oxygen. Without it, we die,” Sacks wrote. “Many of our internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance have been inadequate, and some decisions have just been plain wrong. As a result, Parker has resigned.” Conrad declined to comment. Zenefits’ financial issues were discussed during the Feb. 1 board meeting. Andreessen co-founder Ben Horowitz, who isn’t a Zenefits director, attended. But two people close to the post-Conrad Zenefits say the Macro, not sales misses, was responsible for the CEO’s resignation. At the meeting, Conrad tentatively agreed to resign, relinquish his board seat, and make Sacks CEO, say three people close to the company. People close to Conrad now say he’s agitated by how Sacks’s very public letters to employees have characterized his departure and blamed him for Zenefits’ compliance problems. The accusations that unlicensed Zenefits brokers were selling insurance became public on Nov. 25 when BuzzFeed reporter Will Alden began publishing articles on the matter. California and Washington state are investigating Zenefits’ sales. The company says it’s cooperating with those probes and conducting its own, and it’s hired PricewaterhouseCoopers for a third-party assessment. Sacks declined to comment. Two people close to Sacks say he first began to worry about the Macro’s possible criminal implications in late January, after receiving new information from the internal investigation. To verify that an insurance sales applicant has completed the 52 hours of training, California requires a signature that carries a perjury charge if violated.

• After Nearly Going Pop, Google’s Project Loon Heads Into Carrier Testing This Year:  Google’s “moonshot” to deliver Internet to remote parts of the world using high-flying balloons has survived a brutal development phase, and will enter testing with carriers in Indonesia and elsewhere this year. But Project Loon almost didn’t make it. Google struggled to find a balloon design that could be inexpensive and durable enough to not only float but navigate to predictably travel through the stratosphere. “We busted a lot of balloons,” said Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s X unit (formerly Google X), showing off some of the designs to the crowd at the annual TED conference, which kicked off Monday in Vancouver. There were shiny balloons and round balloons and balloons that looked like giant pillows. But eventually the company found a design that could be made cheaply and still navigate precisely. That balloon, Teller said, last year travelled around the world 19 times over 187 days. “So we are going to keep going,” Teller said, noting that what was once a slow connection has advanced enough to deliver about 15 megabits-per-second Internet access, which he pointed out is enough to deliver video — such as a live broadcast of his TED talk. The next step will be seeing how it works delivering real Internet service to consumers. In addition to Indonesia, Alphabet has reached a deal with the Sri Lankan government to exchange access to needed radio frequency spectrum for a stake in the project. Alphabet is in talks with carriers around the world, Teller said, adding that the prospect is very real and that a further five billion people will have Internet access within five to 10 years. On the TED stage, Teller also talked about two moonshots that Google abandoned. The first, he said, was vertical farming, which would have used one-tenth the water and one one-hundreth of the land demanded by traditional agriculture. But although Google grew some lettuce, it never managed to grow staple crops like grain or rice. Another effort would have allowed landlocked countries to ship goods far more cheaply using a rocket-like air cargo ship that could land without a runway. The idea itself might have worked, Teller said, but just building the first unit would have cost $200 million. Even for a company with Google’s riches, that proved too much to gamble. “If there is an Achilles’ heel in one of our projects, we want to know it right now,” Teller said.