Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 18, 2016

• Facebook’s ambitious plan to make you a VR convert: Alongside announcements about drones, bots and other plans to use its Messenger app to take over the world, Facebook also spent quite a bit of time talking about virtual reality. The company, of course, is the owner of Oculus — the VR firm with the most general recognition — and just released its first commercial VR headset, the Rift. The Rift is focused on gaming right now, but Facebook has been saying since it bought Oculus in 2014 that it has broader plans for making Oculus's technology work for more general social interaction. Sheikh laid out a world where users could play a poker game with friends over VR that is so sensitive that you can read their tells. He describes what it could mean to people who live far away from their families to be able to interact with them through a headset. And he said that eventually his team hopes to make VR social interaction "indistinguishable from real life." Of course, this will all take a lot of work. Right now, the commercial Rift doesn't even represent your hands in VR, though that is poised to changebefore the year is out. But Sheikh also described research that would let users put their whole bodies in a virtual world and accurately map facial expressions. The team is also trying to analyze real-world social interactions, to figure out how to let virtual interactions flow as seamlessly as in-person meetings. He also warned that all the visions he laid out in his portion of the keynote speech were far from ready for prime-time. A study released Wednesday by Greenlight VR predicted that it will take six to eight years for virtual reality to go fully mainstream. Given all the research that Sheikh said had to be completed to make social presence really work during the Facebook keynote, that sort of timeline could actually seem a little ambitious.

• Kahoot App Brings Urgency of a Quiz Show to the Classroom: Kahoot, an online quiz system from Norway that is fast gaining market share in schools across the United States, plays out like a television game show spliced with a video game. Cast in the role of game host, teachers introduce a multiple-choice quiz — on, say, plant life or English grammar. Using the Kahoot platform, they project one quiz question at a time onto a whiteboard or screen at the front of their classrooms. Players typically have 30 seconds to click an answer on their laptops, tablets or smartphones. They earn points for correct choices, and extra points for clicking faster. During the answer period, Kahoot emits a catchy countdown tune, reminiscent of retro video games like Monkey Island. A gong sounds when time is up, and the classroom board immediately tallies the class’s correct and incorrect answers. Next, a leaderboard appears, ranking the top five students by points accrued. Kahoot’s gamelike features and easy-to-use format have helped turn it into a classroom phenomenon. Of the 55 million elementary and secondary school students in the United States, about 20 million used Kahoot last month, the company said. “It’s fun. Everyone is doing it. It pulls all the children in,” Tosh McGaughy, a digital learning specialist at the Birdville Independent School District in Haltom City, Tex., told me recently. “They get competitive and excited.”

• Apple Falls on Report iPhone Output Cut for Second Quarter: Apple  shares fell after it was reported that the company would extend an estimated 30 percent cut in iPhone production for another three months. Slower-than-expected sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have prompted Apple to reduce its orders, the Nikkei Asian Review reported, citing unidentified suppliers. The shares dropped as much as 2.1 percent and had declined 1.7 percent to $110.22 at 2:07 p.m. in New York. Apple introduced a smaller, cheaper handset dubbed the iPhone SE last month in an effort to plump up sales ahead of rolling out a new flagship model later this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the biggest suppliers of chips to Apple, on Thursday forecast revenue below analysts’ estimates for the second quarter, saying that demand for smartphones that cost more than $500 is waning. “Ahead of the iPhone 7 people are holding onto their phones a little longer,” said Walter Piecyk, a New York-based analyst at BTIG LLC who recommends buying Apple shares. “But if this is as a result of lengthening product cycles then it could be a structural change for the industry.” In January, Apple said sales would decline for the first time in more than a decade. Global smartphone sales will rise by less than 10 percent this year, the smallest increase since the market’s inception, researcher Gartner Inc predicted last month. Nikkei reported that Apple cut iPhone production by an estimated 30 percent in the January to March quarter and that the reduction is being extended for the subsequent three months. Apple suppliers including Broadcom, Qorvo, Knowles and NXP Semiconductors also fell following the report.

• Tech Companies Face Greater Scrutiny for Paying Workers With Stock: For the last few years, LinkedIn, the professional social networking company, has doled out increasingly large amounts of stock to pay its workers. In 2014, LinkedIn paid employees $319 million in stock, or 14 percent of revenue; in 2015, that rose to $510 million, or 17 percent of revenue. At the time, those figures were largely met with shrugs from Wall Street. Now that attitude may be changing. As LinkedIn prepares to report its latest quarterly earnings next week, Wall Street is increasingly scrutinizing the number of stock grants that the company pays employees — especially after LinkedIn projected lower growth for this year and its stock price has fallen. The Silicon Valley company’s stock-based compensation “provides additional reason to remain cautious” on LinkedIn, Mark May, an Internet analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a research note. The issue is not limited to LinkedIn. With tech earnings season kicking off on Monday, investors are paying more attention to stock-based compensation at many tech companies. Paying employees with stock is largely unquestioned when times are good, since the move theoretically aligns the interests of the workers with company performance. The practice is technically a corporate expense, but during boom periods, Wall Street typically focuses on a company’s operating results that exclude that expense. Yet public tech companies have had a rockier time in the stock market this year. That has led investors to begin looking more closely at the quality of the companies’ financial results. The scrutiny means examining earnings with stock-based compensation expenses included — and certain financial measures, like earnings and margins, invariably look worse when that expense is factored in.