Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 16

• Sony PlayStation VR to launch globally in October, cost $399: Sony Corp announced on Tuesday that its virtual reality headset for PlayStation will launch globally in October for $399, a move that undercuts its biggest competitor by hundreds of dollars. Andrew House, head of Sony's gaming division, made the announcement during a press event at the Video Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where virtual reality gaming counterpart Oculus Rift announced its headset a day earlier. The headset, a visor-style frame with a 5.7 inch (14.5 centimeters) screen, includes 360 degree head tracking, a 100 degree field of vision and latency of 18 milliseconds between the time a user's head moves and the time they see the correct image. At $399,the package is notably less than the $599 price announced Monday by Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus Rift. Oculus will also sell bundles that include an Oculus Ready PC and a Rift for preorder in February starting at $1,499. The company said more than 230 developers are building content for the PlayStation VR device and 50 games are expected to be ready by the launch date. Users can download the Playroom VR at the PlayStation store and play six free games. The company has also teamed up with development company EA Sports and Lucasfilm for a Star Wars Battlefront game that will be released as a PlayStation VR exclusive.

• Uber Could Give Us a Lesson in Productivity: In Los Angeles, traditional taxi drivers have a passenger in the car for 40.7 percent of the miles they drive. By contrast, Uber drivers have a passenger in the car for 64.2 percent of their miles, or a 58 percent higher capacity utilization rate. In Seattle, the other city surveyed with mileage data, Uber drivers were 41 percent more productive. When measured by time, Uber drivers in Boston, San Francisco and New York on average have a passenger in their car about half the time their smartphone app is turned on. That compares to a range of 32 percent of the shift for taxi drivers in Boston to 49.5 percent for cabbies in New York. The service's use of internet-based mobile technology to connect passengers and drivers certainly contributes to its efficiency, according to the report. It makes sense: tapping your smartphone screen a few minutes before you need a ride is often easier than waiting on a street corner and hoping an empty cab drives past. Meanwhile Uber allows drivers to set their own shifts, and when combined with their use of so-called surge pricing that increases fares during times of increased ridership, supply and demand are more smoothly matched. Uber drivers are also exempt from regulations that prevent taxi drivers who drop off a passenger in a jurisdiction outside the one that granted their occupational license from picking up another customer in the same location. Given their 38 percent advantage, Uber drivers could charge 28 percent less than traditional taxis and still earn the same amount per hour under certain assumptions, including ignoring fixed costs, according to Cramer and Krueger. That may be one reason investors last year valued the company at $62.5 billion, more than Ford Motor Co.,  General Motors Co., and 80 percent of companies in the S&P 500.

• Instagram is switching its feed from chronological to best posts first: The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what’s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram announced it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Instagram will order posts “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” The testing will start out slowly; at least at first “all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.” But eventually, low-quality posts might be filtered out entirely. The changes mean if you don’t check your feed until the next morning but a friend whose photos you usually Like posted something awesome the night before, it could appear at the top of your feed even if it is hours old. This is essentially how Facebook’s feed works, and how Twitter recently reconfigured its feed to work. On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Instagram feed will make sure you don’t miss great content even if you don’t neurotically check it all the time. You’ll be able to follow more accounts without worrying about them drowning out your favorites. And it will be easier to keep up with international friends who might normally post while you’re asleep. At the same time, remixing the feed will make Instagram less useful as a real-time content feed because the most recent posts won’t necessarily be at the top. Users will have to worry about making their posts good enough to be chosen by the algorithm or their posts could be de-prioritized. And brands might lose the reach of a previously reliable marketing channel, the same way they did with Facebook Pages. Filtered feeds tend to score more attention from users, as there are few boring posts that push them to close the app and do something else. And at this point, Instagram is so ingrained in people’s lives that they’re unlikely to ditch it over this change. But with Instagram and Twitter both moving to algorithmically sorted feeds, getting seen on social media will become more of a competition than ever.

• LinkedIn’s Lynda.com Videos Are Now Free on Some Commercial Flights: Here’s a tip for helping your video content stand out online: Make sure people see it when they don’t have many other options. That’s exactly what LinkedIn is doing to promote Lynda.com, the library of online classes it bought last year for a whopping $1.5 billion. LinkedIn announced Tuesday that it’s partnering with Virgin America to offer those classes for free to in-flight passengers. Beginning in April, a handful of classes will be free on all Virgin flights, and the entire Lynda.com library will be free for flights with higher quality Wi-Fi technology. No money is changing hands as part of the partnership, according to a LinkedIn spokesperson, but the potential benefits to LinkedIn are simple enough to understand. You’ll still need a Lynda.com account to watch videos, so it may help LinkedIn sign up more users. Plus, the competition for eyeballs on an airplane is usually pretty weak. The chance to learn a new skill or brush up on stress management may seem more appealing than random episodes of “Deadliest Catch” or “Cupcake Wars,” especially to business travelers. It’s basically a free opportunity to introduce its video library to potential new users — in the hope they will like the videos enough to pay for them sometime later down the road. If not, it still doesn’t cost LinkedIn anything in the process. It has offered free Lynda.com courses before. But this move does show how serious the company is about generating attention for Lynda.com. It paid a lot of money for the online classroom, and now it’s working to make it all back.

• Uber India Is Working on Offering Ride-Booking on Snapdeal: Uber’s India arm is in talks to partner with Indian e-commerce platform Snapdeal, multiple sources told Re/code. If a deal is reached, Snapdeal shoppers in India would be able to hail an Uber from within the newest iteration of Snapdeal’s app, these people said. As of March 9, Snapdeal had only released its new app to a select group of its customers, but indicated in a company blog post it would soon roll out to a larger group of users. The newest version of the Snapdeal app already includes integrations with travel booking service Cleartrip, food-delivery service Zomato and bus-booking service Redbus. As Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl told Re/code last April, the company believes it can differentiate from e-commerce competitors Flipkart and Amazon by broadening its focus beyond selling physical retail products. Last year, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge, a recharge service for prepaid phones, and RupeePower, a comparison site for credit cards and loans. “What’s the delta between retail and consumption?” Bahl asked rhetorically. “It’s things like financial services, education, utilities, health care. But today, all everyone is doing is products.”

• India Opens Market for Solar Battery Makers Such as Tesla: India plans for the first time to include energy storage as a requirement when a solar project is tendered this month, opening what could become a significant new market to battery makers such as Tesla Motors Inc., Samsung SDI Co. and Panasonic Corp. The state-owned Solar Energy Corp. of India, which is responsible for implementing the government’s green targets, will ask bidders to include a storage component in 100 megawatts of the 750 megawatts of solar capacity tendered in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, Managing Director Ashvini Kumar said in an interview. The intention of the pilot program is to reduce fluctuations in electricity supply in order to make possible the transfer of clean energy between states. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a goal of 175 gigawatts of clean energy by 2022. The Andhra Pradesh project include 15 minutes of storage each for two solar installations. Warehousing power is considered a crucial component of India’s green targets. The requirement, if more broadly adopted, has the potential to invigorate the storage market because of India’s outsized ambitions for the industry. It would give manufacturers the scale they need to help bring down costs of battery storage that are holding back wider adoption.