Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 10

• The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise: Many of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget. At the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon — a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop. What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere. It isn’t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks — playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list — that you can already do on your phone. But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add Popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too. In this way, Amazon has found a surreptitious way to bypass Apple and Google — the reigning monarchs in the smartphone world — with a gadget that has the potential to become a dominant force in the most intimate of environments: our homes. First, it’s simple to learn, and its voice-recognition capabilities are more intuitivethan those of many other vocal assistants (like Apple’s Siri or Google Now). More than that, it keeps gaining new powers. More important, just like the early iPhone, Amazon has managed to turn the Echo into the center of a new ecosystem. Developers are flocking to create voice-controlled apps for the device, or skills, as Amazon calls them. There are now more than 300 skills for the Echo, from the trivial — there is one to make Alexa produce rude body sounds on command — to the pretty handy. It can tell you transit schedules, start a seven-minute workout, read recipes, do math and conversions, and walk you through adventure games, among other possibilities. Makers of digital home devices like Nest are also rushing to make their products compatible with the Echo. Alexa can now control your Internet-connected lights, home thermostats and a variety of other devices. Hardware makers can also add Alexa’s brain into their own devices, so soon you won’t need an Echo to consult with Alexa — you could find it in your toaster, your refrigerator or your car.

• Dorsey-led Square's revenue beats in first quarterly report since IPO: Mobile payments company Square Inc's revenue beat analysts' estimates in its first quarterly results since going public in November, easing pressure on CEO Jack Dorsey who is also leading turnaround efforts at Twitter. Square's shares rose as much as 7 percent after market on Wednesday, before giving up some of the gains. The stock had closed up 4.8 percent at $12.03 during the day. The company's shares have mostly stayed below the first trading close of $13.07 and even slipped below the deeply discounted IPO price of $9, hitting a low of $8.06 on Feb. 3. Since then, the stock had risen nearly 50 percent through Wednesday's close. The company's gross payment volume (GPV) — the total dollar amount of all card payments processed by sellers — rose 47 percent to $10.2 billion in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31. Transaction revenue — earned from businesses processing payments through Square's devices — grew 44.7 percent to $298.5 million. However, Square is facing rising competition in the payments market, from large companies such as PayPal Holdings Inc to smaller startups such as Stripe. Also, Dorsey's dual role as CEOs at Twitter and Square has been a sore point with investors at both companies. On his part, Dorsey has looked to play down the concerns. Square's total net revenue rose 49.2 percent to $374.4 million in the quarter, beating analysts' average estimate of $343.2 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. However, net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $80.5 million, or 34 cents per share, from $37.1 million, or 25 cents per share. The loss for this quarter included a charge of 14 cents per share due to a stock dividend for holders of one class of preferred shares in the company. Square has been investing heavily in new hardware and building out its lending business, Square Capital.

• Master of Go Board Game Is Walloped by Google Computer Program: A Google computer program stunned one of the world’s top players on Wednesday in a round of Go, which is believed to be the most complex board game ever created. The match — between Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and the South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol — was viewed as an important test of how far research into artificial intelligence has come in its quest to create machines smarter than humans. Go is a two-player game of strategy said to have originated in China 3,000 years ago. Players compete to win more territory by placing black and white “stones” on a grid measuring 19 squares by 19 squares. The play is more complex than chess, with a far greater possible sequence of moves, and requires superlative instincts and evaluation skills. Because of that, many researchers believed that mastery of the game by a computer was still a decade away. Before the match, Mr. Lee said he could win 5-0 or 4-1, predicting that computing power alone could not win a Go match. Victory takes “human intuition,” something AlphaGo has not yet mastered, he said. But after reading more about the program he became less upbeat, saying that AlphaGo appeared able to imitate human intuition to a certain degree and predicting that artificial intelligence would eventually surpass humans in Go. AlphaGo posed Mr. Lee a unique challenge. In a human-versus-human Go match, which typically lasts several hours, the players “feel” each other and evaluate styles and psychologies, he said. “This time, it’s like playing the game alone,” Mr. Lee said on the eve of the match. “There are mistakes humans make because they are humans. If that happens to me, I can lose a match.” Kim Sung-ryong, a South Korean Go master who provided commentary during Wednesday’s match, said that AlphaGo made a clear mistake early on, but that unlike most human players, it did not lose its “cool.” “It didn’t play Go as a human does,” he said. “It was a Go match with human emotional elements carved out.” Mr. Lee said he knew he had lost the match after AlphaGo made a move so unexpected and unconventional that he thought “it was impossible to make such a move.”

• Facebook Buys Face Swapping App Masquerade to Challenge Snapchat's Rainbow Vomit: Facebook Inc. said it bought Masquerade, an app that puts fun filters, masks and special effects on selfies and videos like those popularized on the disappearing photo-sharing app Snapchat. The company didn’t disclose how much it paid for Masquerade, but said it would keep the application running and incorporate the technology for Facebook users. “Over the past year we’ve focused on building out more creative tools for people on Facebook,” the Menlo Park, California-based company said in an e-mail. “Masquerade has great technology to help us bring even more creative tools to Facebook, and help extend this work to video.” Facebook is making the move in part amid increasing competition from Snapchat Inc., where silly photo filters have been a major draw. Snapchat debuted the feature last year with one that animates a user’s face so they vomit a rainbow while their eyes bulge, and more recently started using the filters as a revenue source. One of Masquerade’s most popular features is “face swap,” which lets people to trade faces with one another in photos.

• Shared Office Startup WeWork Raises Funds at $16 Billion Valuation for Asia Expansion:  WeWork Cos., a New York-based shared-office startup, raised $430 million from Chinese investors as it prepares to expand throughout Asia. Investors valued the company at $16 billion as part of the financing round, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the terms were private. Chinese investment firms Legend Holdings and Hony Capital led the round, WeWork said. The real estate startup's website lists China, Hong Kong, India, and Seoul among the places where it will offer service "soon." John Zhao, the chief executive officer at Hony Capital, said in a statement that WeWork's "fit for the Chinese culture is unparalleled." WeWork has about 50,000 members globally, who rent desks and offices in shared spaces operated by the company in 21 cities. Memberships start at $45 a month, and the company is also exploring residential rentals. WeWork is in talks with an Australian developer about forming a global venture to lease offices and living spaces to other companies, Bloomberg reported last week. Corporate documents filed Tuesday night in Delaware show that WeWork has authorized the sale of as much as $780 million in shares as part of the round. Fortune and the Wall Street Journal reported details of the sale earlier. WeWork's last financing round, disclosed in June, valued it at $10 billion.