Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 21

• Facebook considers letting users add a tip jar to make money from posts: Facebook is exploring new ways for individual users to profit from their posts on the network, The Verge has learned. A user survey distributed this week hints at a broad range of ways that users could make money or promote a cause, including a tip jar, branded content and taking a cut of the ad revenue Facebook earns from posts. The survey also asked users to indicate their interest in a “call to action” button, a way to let followers make donations and a “sponsor marketplace” to match users with advertisers. It’s unclear whether Facebook is considering making these options available to all users; the language of the survey indicated it is targeted at verified users. The survey was spotted on the page of a verified user with a relatively small following. (Okay, it was me.) Facebook does not currently offer individual users a way to earn money by posting on Facebook. It has allowed publishers to sell advertising inside its fast-loading Instant Articles format, and recently clarified rules allowing posts sponsored by brands to be shared by verified pages. Facebook is also testing ads within the suggestions that pop up after you watch a video, sharing money with publishers. But recently, the company has taken steps to make its publishing tools more widely available. In February, the company began letting anyone publish Instant Articles.

• Line's Plan to Outflank Facebook in Asia: Think Local: Line Corp. has an instant message for Facebook Inc.: Asia is ours. Country by country, the chat app from Japan is signing up new users by adopting a different strategy in each place. In its home market, cute bunny and bear stickers drew in everyone from schoolgirls to suit-clad businessmen. In Indonesia, Line built a classmate-connecting service after learning that alumni networks are a powerful social glue there. In Muslim countries, Line rolled out special features for people observing the Ramadan fast. All of this is aimed at getting new users hooked onto Line before they have a chance to become loyal to a rival service, such as Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp, or China's WeChat. That, along with Line's knack for making money from its app, bolsters the company's plan to hold an initial public offering as soon as this year. Line, a subsidiary of South Korean Internet company Naver Corp, now has more than 215 million monthly active users. One of Line's biggest foes in Asia is Tencent Holdings's WeChat, which boasts 697 million users. In some ways, WeChat is more than a just messaging service, with a myriad of features that let people book car rides, find dates and exchange money—all from within the app. Line isn't just good at reeling in new users, it also knows how to make money off of them. A third of the company's 120.7 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in 2015 revenue came from virtual-sticker sales. Idezawa also appears to have figured out how to make advertising work inside a messaging app. Under one marketing program, companies can pay 40 million yen to give customers access to sponsored stickers for two weeks. People are more likely to pay attention to ads if they appear while chatting with friends, Idezawa says. Line is also targeting other Southeast Asian countries, the Middle East and even South America. The company now has 3,800 employees (average age, 31) supporting services in 19 languages. In order to snag local users, Idezawa dispatches teams of engineers, designers, marketers and business developers to each new country—they are empowered to come up with new features and services that appeal to those markets. For example, in Latin America, Line rolled out a selfie app called B612, which now has more than 50 million users. Facebook, for its part, is keeping WhatsApp—a no-frills service with 1 billion users—just the way it is, even after buying the messaging app for $22 billion in 2014. At the same time, Facebook has started to add features to Messenger, the companion to its social-networking website, letting people book car rides, read news and, yes, download stickers.

• Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for E-Tailer to Make One Too: Rain Design has been selling an aluminum laptop stand on Amazon.com Inc. for more than a decade. A best-seller in its category, the $43 product has a 5-star rating and 2,460 customer reviews. In July, a similar stand appeared at about half the price. The brand: AmazonBasics. Since then, sales of the Rain Design original have slipped. “We don’t feel good about it,” says Harvey Tai, the company’s general manager. “But there’s nothing we can do because they didn’t violate the patent.” Rain Design’s experience shows how Amazon is using insights gleaned from its vast Web store to build a private-label juggernaut that now includes more than 3,000 products -- from women’s blouses and men’s khakis to fire pits and camera tripods. The strategy is a digital twist on one used for years by department stores and big-box chains to edge out middlemen and go direct to consumers -- boosting loyalty and profits. At first, AmazonBasics -- launched in 2009 -- focused on batteries, recordable DVDs and such. Then for several years, the house brand “slept quietly as it retained data about other sellers’ successes,” according to the report. But in the past couple of years, AmazonBasics has stepped up the pace, rolling out a range of products that seem perfectly tailored to customer demand. In his annual shareholder letter earlier this month, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said Amazon is the “best place in the world to fail.” That philosophy applies to private-label products, which quickly disappear if they receive poor customer ratings. About 96 percent of AmazonBasics products had a rating of 3.5 stars or more, according to the Skubana report. The authors’ advice to merchants: “If you have a product that is lower than 3.5 stars, that product is dead to you and your customers. Liquidate and move on.” Amazon’s size gives it an advantage over so-called direct-to-consumer startups such as mattress seller Casper and eyewear merchant Warby Parker because Amazon can experiment with one product rather than having to build out an entire line. If an item flops, it’s no big deal. Amazon isn’t only copying products made by small, little-known merchants like Rain Design. Its private-label lines are increasingly competing with name brands, and nowhere is that happening more than in apparel.

• Review: Curb, energy monitoring for an entire home: Curb is a comprehensive household energy monitoring system. The system monitors the entire home by using sensors installed in the circuit breaker. For many consumers this means being able to monitor the energy consumed by a clothes dryer or electric range or all the outlets and lights in a bedroom. It cannot, however, easily monitor and report how much energy is consumed by a computer or espresso machine. I had the system installed in my house over a month ago. It took licensed electrician about three hours. He had to install a sensor on each breaker and configure the system through an iPad app. This is not something an average homeowner can install themselves and that’s kind of the point. Curb aims to serve a homeowner with data not previously available. Other energy monitoring services either monitor the entire home or individual outlets. Curb sits in the middle of the two at the circuit break box. Each breaker gets a sensor and an app can display real-time consumption information as well as a dollar approximation of how much the energy is costing the homeowner. But what do I do with all this data? That’s where the system stops being useful. Obviously I can stop using my electric dryer and hang the clothes outside. Or teach my kids to turn off their lights. But I need help from there. The system should be able to display more historical data. Right now all it can do is show how much energy a particular circuit consumed — but now a total amount of watts. It can show how much power a home has consumed over a set of dates and also what the average was during that period. But what about the individual circuits? I want the system to let me dial down to a granule level. The web and smartphone app are basic at this point. The founder tells me the company is working towards implementing new features. The team is also playing with weekly emails that gives the consumer a breakdown of their energy usage and if anything abnormal occurred. Apparently, according to him, the system can identify when an appliance is consuming extra electricity, which could be a sign that it is nearing the end of its life. Currently, just after launch, the user experience of Curb leaves me wanting more. It is collecting so much information about my energy usage yet I feel it’s not benefiting me in a major way. Of course I should use appliances less.Yet the system shows a lot of promise in surprising ways. A few weeks family and I were standing in line for the Easter Bunny. This was the day before Easter so we were in line for over an hour. And like any good parent, I spent the time putzing around on my phone. Mindlessly, I opened the Curb app and discovered the stove was drawing power though I thought I had turned if off. I texted my neighbor who went over and discovered the oven was still on.