Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 18, 2016

• Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. The deals were spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division, and brought about 300 robotics engineers into Google. Rubin left the company in October 2014. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. At the heart of Replicant’s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term. Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent e-mails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them. The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, who was temporarily in charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, “we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years."

• Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services: Alibaba has formally thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring after the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its own VR research lab, dubbed GnomeMagic Lab. The company invested in red hot augmented reality company Magic Leap earlier this year, in a deal that put Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai on the board, and it has tinkered with 360 degree panoramic video for Youku Tudou — the Chinese video site it invested in and is in the process of acquiring for $3.5 billion — but this is its official entry into the space. Alibaba, which claims 400 million users across its services, said that GnomeMagic Lab will work with its shopping businesses with a view to integrating VR into the shopping experience while exploring other applications, such as video with Youku Tudou and entertainment via Alibaba Pictures. In a press announcement, former Facebook engineer Zhao Haiping, who is on the Alibaba’s GnomeMagic Lab team, said VR could enable customers to shop virtually on New York’s Fifth Avenue from the comfort of their own home. On a more practical level, Alibaba wants to help merchants use VR to sell on its sites, it said it has already created VR visuals for hundreds of products. That’s the plan for where Alibaba believes that VR is going, or could go, in the longer term. For now, the company is setting up a store dedicated to VR hardware to help companies tap into its vast audience.VR is the hot topic of the moment, and it’s more a case of which tech companies aren’t getting into it. Samsung has already shipped a headset. Facebook bought Occulus, which is about to launch its Rift VR and an initial 30 games. HTC’s is arriving imminently and Sony’s effort is also on its way. On the content side, Facebook, YouTube and — today — even British broadcaster Sky are opening themselves up to the virtual future.

• Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won’t give them a college degree: One of the biggest booms in the job market right now: an influx of coders graduating from three- to six-month coding crunch programs in lieu of traditional four-year Computer Science degree programs. These for-profit programs, non-accredited and operating without much regulation, have been cropping up in response to a swelling market demand for STEM workers. They vary in quality, but most bootcamps promise steady, high-paying work upon graduation, prompting aspiring coders to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 of personal money to enroll. Now, colleges and universities are teaming up with these private schools, or rolling out their own bootcamp-style programs to offer accelerated coding workshops to their students. Northeastern, UPenn, and Rutgers have announced in-house bootcamps in the couple of months, while Lynn University and Concordia University have paired with programs like General Assembly and The Software Craftsmanship Guild. It’s a response to thetremendous growth in bootcamp enrollment, which increased by 138 percent from 2014 to 2015, compared to more modest growth in traditional Computer Science degrees (14 percent from 2013 to 2014). The demand is clear. But should universities be borrowing bootcamp tactics? O’Neill, who is Principal Architect at Monetate, agrees. He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said. A typical four-year CS degree will require students to study theoretical principles of programming on top of straight coding skills. Bootcamps, on the other hand, focus on programming alone, with an emphasis on in-demand languages in popular sectors like app development, functioning more like vocational school. But Anupam Joshi sees the immediate benefits of these programs. He’s Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which doesn’t currently have plans to incorporate bootcamp style programs into its CS department (though the university does have a “training center” that offers vocational services, including coding). But he appreciates the bootcamps' quick adaptability to industry fads and the wider scope of needs they fill amidst the student body. “Bootcamps are good for someone who wants to get an entry level job,” he said of the promotion of coding over theory. “It’s like every other trade.”

• Blackstone nears $940 million deal to buy HP Enterprise stake in India's MphasiS: sources Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is nearing a deal to acquire Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) (HPE.N) controlling stake worth about $940 million in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS Ltd (MBFL.NS), according to three sources directly involved in the deal. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and the U.S.-based parent had been looking to exit from the Indian venture to shore up its capital. Bids for buying the MphasiS stake were submitted earlier this month and the U.S. private equity firm has emerged as the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter, the sources said. Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS' stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company's total market value is about $1.6 billion.