Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 1

• Why you should delete the online accounts you don’t use anymore — right now: Despite falling out of vogue years ago, MySpace — that old precursor to Facebook — still has details on more user accounts than the United States has people. And now a hefty chunk of those account credentials has been leaked to the entire Internet, in a humbling reminder that the Matchbox Twenty-inspired username you probably made in high school is still worth a heck of a lot to companies and criminals. As many as 360 million MySpace accounts turned up for sale Friday in a 33-gigabyte dump online, according to reports that were confirmed Monday by MySpace's parent, Time Inc. The massive leak includes passwords, email addresses and usernames that were swiped from MySpace in a hack dating back to June 2013, before MySpace made a site redesign that closed some security gaps. It's unclear how many of the accounts in the MySpace hack were still "active," in the sense that they belong to people who continue to log into the service today. But chances are at least some of these accounts hadn't been touched for years. The reason this makes you vulnerable is the same reason experts say you shouldn't use the same username and password for every online service — it makes it easy to take one set of stolen credentials and plug them into others, giving hackers potential access to large swaths of your digital life. Personal data from the MySpace breach was going for sale to the tune of thousands of dollars, highlighting how even outdated information can still carry significant value. But whether your old data gets used for marketing, fraud or some other nefarious purpose is still at least partly within your control.

• Inside Uber’s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car: In its relentless pursuit for growth, Uber needs new drivers, and many of those drivers need cars. To help them get started, Uber has been offering short-term leases since July through a wholly owned Delaware-based subsidiary called Xchange Leasing, LLC. It partners with auto dealerships, advertises to drivers, manages risk, and even pays repo men to chase down cars whose drivers aren't making their payments. Xchange may be key to Uber's continued expansion as it tangles with Lyft in the U.S. and a bevy of competitors abroad. Uber announced a partnership with Toyota last week to finance even more cars. This year, Uber said its financing and discount programs, which include Xchange, will put more than 100,000 drivers on the road. That requires dipping into the vast pool of people with bad or no credit. In a deal led by Goldman Sachs, Xchange received a $1 billion credit facility to fund new car leases, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal will help Uber grow its U.S. subprime auto leasing business and it will give many of the world's biggest financial institutions exposure to the company's auto leases.  The credit facility is basically a line of credit that Xchange can use to lease out cars to Uber drivers.

• Instagram Adds Business Profiles in Advertising Growth Push: Facebook’s photo-sharing application Instagram is unveiling tools to help businesses differentiate themselves from regular users in a bid to help drive advertising revenue. Instagram, which has been heralded by analysts as a key source of growth for Facebook, will now let businesses create special profiles that will allow customers to contact them directly rather than posting public comments. Instagram will also offer business users new data on which posts are getting the most engagement and give them the ability to turn posts into advertisements. Facebook is working to leverage Instagram’s 400 million monthly users to keep up its pace of revenue growth. Instagram ads are expected to bring in $1.53 billion in revenue in 2016, or 15 percent of Facebook’s total ad sales, according to eMarketer. Instagram has 8.5 million users in Canada, Levine said.

• Microsoft sells patents to Xiaomi, builds 'long-term partnership': Software maker Microsoft  is selling about 1,500 of its patents to Chinese device maker Xiaomi [XTC.UL], a rare departure for the U.S. company and part of what the two companies say is the start of a long-term partnership. The deal, announced on Wednesday, also includes a patent cross-licensing arrangement and a commitment by Xiaomi to install copies of Microsoft software, including Office and Skype, on its phones and tablets. Both companies declined to discuss financial terms of the deal.  Jonathan Tinter, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said the company was keen to tap into Xiaomi's young, affluent and educated users by having its products pre-installed on their devices. He declined to go into detail about the patent deals, but said the overall deal was something "we do only with a few strategic partners." Microsoft has cut licensing deals with many Android device makers over the years, but has had less luck with Chinese manufacturers. Florian Mueller, a patents expert who consulted for Microsoft in the past, said it was rare for Microsoft to actually sell its patents, adding "it's possible Microsoft found it easier to impose its Android patent tax on Xiaomi as part of a broader deal that also involved a transfer of patents." 

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 31

• The military’s stealth motorcycles are as quiet as an electric toothbrush: The military is funding stealth motorcycles, which would allow riders to quickly sneak up on unsuspecting enemies. The motorcycles operate at 55 decibels — about the level of an electric toothbrush or typical conversation — yet still can reach 80 mph in speed. The extreme quiet is due to the use of electric motors. The motorcycles also feature two-wheel drive to improve traction on gravel, sand or any challenging terrain. The narrow dimensions of the motorcycles allow them to be driven in forests or other places some military vehicles can’t go.The electric motors have limited range — the SilentHawk lasts two hours and the other bike, NightMare, has 60 miles of power. So the motorcycles are modified with hybrid engines that can burn almost any type of fuel, such as gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene or diesel. The thinking is these hybrid engines, which are about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, can be used on the part of a mission where being quiet isn’t essential. Using the back-up engine increases the SilentHawk’s range to 170 miles.

• VR Experience From McDonald's Lets You Watch Life-Size Angry Birds Take Over a Restaurant: McDonald's ald's has partnered with Sony and Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, to create a 360-degree video promoting the upcoming feature film The Angry Birds Movie. The 60-second spot puts the viewer in the center of a McDonald's restaurant, as the film's feathered flying stars zip in the air from table to table, dance in the aisles and take selfies with dining families. The film was created in partnership with DDB Chicago and has racked up more than 4.5 million views in less than a week. According to John Maxham, chief creative officer at DDB Chicago, it's the first 360-degree video for McDonald's (unless you count the VR Happy Meal painting activation during SXSW). Maxham said it's also the first time a 360-degree film has been shot for any quick service restaurant. To combine animation with reality, DDB Chicago worked with Rovio for the animations using pre-existing bird assets and with Optimist to stitch everything together. According to Shelby Georgis, DDB's creative director, the trick was choreographing animations ahead of time so that the actors were set to work on a specific cadence that makes it look like they're interacting with the animals.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 30

• China to open e-commerce, other sectors to foreign investment: newspaper: China will lift restrictions to investments by foreign firms in a range of service industry sectors, including e-commerce, logistics, accounting and auditing, the China Securities News quoted commerce minister Gao Hucheng as saying. Gao said China would also promote the orderly opening of other service fields including finance, education, culture and health care, the report published on Saturday said without elaborating or giving a time-frame. China's trade in services would exceed $1 trillion by 2020, the minister predicted. The Ministry of Commerce has previously said the value of China's services trade was expected to exceed $750 billion this year.

• Thiel-Gawker Fight Raises Concerns About Press Freedom: The story of Gawker versus Hulk Hogan — or, perhaps more accurately, Peter Thiel — has some asking whether press freedom in the United States is in peril if a scorned billionaire can help deliver a crippling blow to a media company. But since Mr. Thiel spoke to The New York Times on Wednesday about his reasons for funding the lawsuit against Gawker, the debate surrounding the dispute has expanded to encompass ideological battles in media, technology and politics. A variety of observers, including other billionaires and figures involved in GamerGate, have entered into the fray to address themes like Mr. Thiel’s political motivations, and the wider issue of Silicon Valley power players and their involvement with the news media. Several journalists felt that Mr. Thiel’s political views and connection withDonald J. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, could be worrisome based on Mr. Trump’s previous comments about changing libel laws to make it easier to sue media outlets.

• Twitter's retreat from 'Buy' buttons puts its payments partner Stripe in an awkward spot: In September, payments startup Stripe trumpeted a new product that would allow retailers to sell goods directly in social networking and content apps. The biggest partner app Stripe launched with was Twitter, whose 'Buy' buttons allowed users to buy items directly from a tweet. But just a month later, Twitter disbanded the team working on 'Buy' buttons, as Recode reported on Thursday, and shifted its focus on commerce to other initiatives. The 'Buy' button technology still exists, and retailers can still use Stripe's new product, Relay, to sell products on Twitter. But the perception that Stripe's biggest partner no longer considers it a priority doesn't look good. You could imagine the challenge convincing potential retail partners that they should invest in a program whose biggest platform partner no longer appears to be interested. The idea behind Relay is that people will increasingly want to purchase items online wherever they discover them, even if it's not on a shopping site or app. And as people spend more of their online time on Twitter and other social apps, they should have the option to complete transactions quickly without leaving those apps, the thinking goes, rather than getting redirected to another site that may be difficult to navigate on a mobile phone. In addition to Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook have also bought into this thinking to some degree. Each has introduced 'Buy' buttons, with varying levels of investment. But neither one of them currently works with Stripe on the Relay product. The open question for Stripe is whether retailers and users will show real interest in Twitter's Buy buttons without the company promoting them — and, if not, whether Stripe can find another big-name app to replace Twitter as the anchor partner.

• Amazon built a tool that puts Alexa in your browser: Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is super useful in the Echo and lot of fun to use. But if you don't have an Echo or can't buy one because you're outside of the US, it can be hard to appreciate Alexa's skill set. In light of this, Amazon has created a web app that lets you play with Alexa right in your browser. You can access the web app at echosim.io and it lets you ask Alexa all kinds of questions. What it doesn't let you experience is the always listening nature of the Echo device and its far field microphone array — you have to click and hold a button on the site before you speak to it. (That makes it closer to the experience you get with the Amazon Tap than the Echo itself.) The real purpose of this simulator is to let international devs see what Alexa is capable of, since Amazon doesn't yet the Echo or other Alexa devices outside of the US. Amazon says it was inspired by a project from a hackathon last year. Still, it's open to anyone with an Amazon account, so fire it up and start pelting Alexa with questions.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 27

• Google Prevails as Jury Rebuffs Oracle in Code Copyright Case: A jury ruled in favor of Google on Thursday in a long legal dispute withOracle over software used to power most of the world’s smartphones. Oracle contended that Google used copyrighted material in 11,000 of its 13 million lines of software code in Android, its mobile phone operating system. Oracle asked for $9 billion from Google. Google said it made fair use of that code and owed nothing. The victory for Google cheered other software developers, who operate much the way Google did when it comes to so-called open-source software. Unlike traditional software created by corporations and tightly held, open-source products are released, often with some restrictions, for anyone to use and modify. “Great news for progress and innovation,” Chris Dixon, a technology investor with Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, posted on Twitter after the verdict. Android relies in part on Java, an open-source software language that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Oracle argued that Google executives violated Oracle’s copyright by using aspects of Java without permission. The courtroom fight was something of a watershed for technology and could offer clarity on legal rules surrounding open-source technology, which is used in everything from smartphones and digital recording devices to the software that runs many of the world’s biggest data centers. People who work with open-source technology worried that a victory for Oracle would have led other companies to make similar demands of open-source products. “It does give a lot of breathing room to other companies and individuals trying to do a lot of innovative activity,” said Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.

• Bessemer-Backed Twilio Files for Initial Public Offering: Twilio Inc., the San Francisco-based company that helps clients including Uber Technologies Inc. build web and mobile applications, filed for an initial public offering. The software developer, backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, filed with an initial offering size of $100 million, a placeholder amount used to calculate fees that will probably change. Twilio had more than 28,000 active customers at the end of March, according to the prospectus filed Thursday. They include enterprise-software company Box Inc., department-store chain Nordstrom Inc. and rideshare company Uber. Twilio said in the filing its communications software is embedded in Uber’s mobile app, helping it update riders in real-time about their ride requests as well as helping the company scale its business. Bessemer holds a stake of 28.5 percent in Twilio, according to the prospectus. Union Square Ventures holds 13.6 percent and Fidelity owns 6.1 percent. Twilio has yet to make a profit. It posted a net loss of about $36 million in 2015, on sales of $167 million, even as revenue grew 88 percent that year after a 78 percent bump in 2014. The company said that it expects its growth rate to decline over time. WhatsApp Inc. contributed a significant chunk of that revenue. The messaging tool owned by Facebook Inc. uses Twilio’s technology in its applications to verify new and existing users. WhatsApp accounted for 17 percent of Twilio’s sales last year and 15 percent in the first three months of 2016.

• Snapchat raises $1.81 billion in new funding round: Messaging app Snapchat has raised $1.81 billion in funding, the company reported in a U.S. regulatory filing on Thursday, a sign that investor interest is strong despite concerns among some venture capitalists that the platform is struggling to attract advertisers. Venture capital database PitchBook estimated the company's valuation after the financing at $17.81 billion, up from $16 billion at it most recent financing in February.Snapchat, headquartered in Venice, California, has faced concerns from big investors familiar with the company that its estimated valuation is not justified because of an uneven revenue stream. Its advertising business, which began last October, is the company's only significant revenue source. But, with a strong user base of 13- to 24-year-olds, the app provides an attractive platform to reach millennials and hook young consumers on brands. The company has more than 100 million active users, about 60 percent of whom are 13- to 24-year-olds. Snapchat early this year raised $175 million from Fidelity Investments in a "flat round" of financing that did not adjust the company's valuation. The mutual fund bought shares at $30.72 each. Fidelity has repeatedly adjusted the estimated valuation of its stake in the company, slashing it by at least 25 percent last year only to boost it by more than 60 percent in February. Investors in this latest round include General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine, among others, tech blog TechCrunch reported on Thursday. TechCrunch also reported that Snapchat's revenues in 2015 were $59 million, according to a presentation to investors that was seen by the news site. That's up from $3.1 million for the first 11 months of 2014, sources told Reuters last year.
• InMobi grapples with senior, mid-level attrition amid concerns about future: Online advertising startup InMobi , one of India's early 'unicorns,' is struggling to retain senior executives amid questions about whether new strategic initiatives are working as well as worries about the future of the company. InMobi, which was founded by Naveen Tewari in 2007 and was the first startup in which Japan's SoftBank invested, now has some 1,500 employees compared to twice that number at its peak. The Japanese conglomerate, which has since backed Snapdeal and Ola, poured $200 million into InMobi in 2011 but wrote down most of that amount in 2014. The exits also come during a time when InMobi is struggling to raise funds and chart out a sustainable business model that can adapt to the massive changes that are taking place in the online and mobile advertising space, according to both current and former executives at the company. According to these executives, InMobi, which was estimated to be valued at $1 billion, now generates between around $300 million in annual revenue. InMobi has not registered profits since its founding in 2007. InMobi's challenges have been compounded by the fact that its flagship product Miip -- that targeted global retailers like Walmart -- hasn't taken off. Miip also took much longer than expected to scale and customers found the product underwhelming, according to at least two customers who have used the product.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 26

• Alibaba Facing SEC Investigation Over Accounting Practices: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell the most in four months after the e-commerce giant said it’s being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices and whether they violate federal laws. The company is providing documents and cooperating with the probe, according to the Hangzhou, China-based company’s annual report. The investigation is looking into consolidation practices, related party transactions and data reported from its Singles’ Day promotion. Singles’ Day is Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, attracting more than 90 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) of sales on its e-commerce platforms in a 24-hour period last year. Alibaba fell 6.8 percent to $75.59, the biggest drop since January. It was down less than 1 percent this year through Tuesday.

• In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge: Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about. Valleywag declined to play the game. It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised but were off the table. It said Google co-founder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That the Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker’s wedding was seriously over the top. Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay. This was gossip with an attitude, and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Mr. Thiel’s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag’s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in $140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing. The revelation of Mr. Thiel’s involvement in the suit this week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media once again to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone’s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies are less transparent about what they do.

• HP Inc profit beats Street amid weak market for PCs, printers: HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday. HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday.The company's revenue fell about 11 percent to $11.59 billion.Revenue in the personal systems business, the company's biggest, fell 9.9 percent in the second quarter, while revenue declined 15.8 percent in the printing division.Total costs and expenses fell by 10.3 percent to $10.75 billion in the second quarter ended April 30, from a year earlier.

• Salesforce inks deal with AWS to expand international presence: AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com, with Salesforce naming the cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increase its international presence without having to build its own data centers in countries that have data sovereignty laws, which require that data stays in-country. It’s expensive to build their own, so they are turning to a public cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon to do the heavy lifting for them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke glowingly of AWS. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” he said in a statement. It’s worth keeping in mind, however that Salesforce also has a deep relationship with Microsoft — and CEO Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference last fall. But the relationship has a flip side and the companies also compete with one another. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research, points out that this announcement should help Salesforce compete with Oracle and Microsoft overseas.

• Terrapattern is reverse image search for maps, powered by a neural network: Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn’t Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout — and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It’s remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. How does that work? And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it — and for under $35,000? The secret, as with so many other interesting visual computing projects these days, is a convolutional neural network. It’s essentially an AI-like program that extracts every little detail from an image and looks for patterns at various levels of organization — similar to how our own visual system works, though the brain is infinitely more subtle and flexible. In Terrapattern’s case, the neural network was trained to look at small squares of the landscape and, comparing those patterns to a huge database of tagged map features from OpenStreetMap, it learned to associate them with certain concepts. Think of how a camera recognizes a face and knows when it is blinking or smiling. It doesn’t actually “know” what faces, smiles and eyes are, but it associates them with certain patterns of pixels, and can reliably pick them out. Once Terrapattern had been trained to recognize and categorize all manner of geographical features, from boats to water towers, its creators set it free on detailed maps of the greater New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Francisco areas. It scoured the landscape and built a huge database of features and similarities — which can be quickly queried and the results returned immediately (the neural network isn’t doing any “thinking” when you click on a feature — its work is done for this dataset). Of course, you could just search for “tennis fields in Oakland” or the like and get perfectly good results, but this allows one to search for things that may not be listed so formally. What if you were looking for houses in the middle of fields, or cul de sacs, or dead lawns, or circular parking lots? Terrapattern knows where those are just as much as it knows where the airports and ferry terminals are. They’re all just assemblages of features to the neural network.

• Facebook will shut down FBX, its desktop ad exchange: Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we’ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this is part of Facebook’s shift to mobile (in its most recent earnings report, mobile accounted for 82 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue). He said: "Mobile is now a necessary component of effective marketing campaigns, and Facebook is helping millions of businesses understand their customers’ purchase path across devices. Dynamic Ads and Custom Audiences have mobile at their core and are delivering excellent results for businesses, so Facebook Exchange spending has shifted towards those solutions. This is about giving people more relevant ads and marketers more effective formats, especially in an increasingly mobile world. Our ads API is open to all developers so they can innovate on our platform and build great ad experiences for brands and their customers." Facebook launched FBX back in 2012, but its focus seemed to have shifted away from the exchange in recent years.

• Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too: The company is taking a $950 million charge to unwind the last vestiges of the Nokia deal. Microsoft is further scaling back its flagging phone business, exiting the consumer market and cutting another 1,850 jobs. As part of the move announced Wednesday, Microsoft will take a $950 million charge and cut what little remained of its Finland-based phone hardware business, unwinding the last of its disastrous $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's phone unit. Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end"feature phone" business.  The company has been scaling back its phone ambitions ever since the Nokia deal closed, with CEO Satya Nadella quickly shifting to a strategy focused on bringing Microsoft's software and services to Android and iOS rather than trying to convince phone buyers to shift to Windows. Despite all the cuts — and having already seen its market share dip below 1 percent — Microsoft says it isn't totally out of the phone-making business. The company insists it will continue to serve phones aimed at the business market and license Windows 10 to any other hardware makers that want to give Windows Phone a try.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 25

• Toyota and Volkswagen Step Up Investments in Tech Start-Ups: On Tuesday, two of the world’s largest automakers, Toyota and Volkswagen, said they were stepping up to invest in technology start-ups that are working to change the way people travel by car. Toyota said it had formed a partnership with and invested an undisclosed amount in Uber, the biggest ride-hailing company. Gett, the app popular in Europe, said it was working with Volkswagen, and the automaker was investing $300 million in the start-up. The alliances are the latest in a string of pairings between technology companies and traditional automakers that are scrambling to reposition themselves. For decades, automakers had abided by the well-worn formula of making bigger and more powerful cars to fuel their growth. But start-ups like Uber and Lyft and technology companies like Google and Tesla have disrupted that cadence. These companies, mostly located in Silicon Valley, have in the last few years sped the development of self-driving cars, electric vehicles and ride services. Automakers have become increasingly concerned about those technologies and their potential to help people travel easily and cheaply without owning a car — or even without knowing how to drive. In January, General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft, the ride-hailing app popular with American users, with a focus on developing networks of autonomous vehicles. Ford Motor is making over its Dearborn, Mich., headquarters into a Silicon Valley-like campus of green buildings connected by self-driving shuttles. And a few weeks ago, Fiat Chrysler and Google agreed to produce a test fleet of driverless minivans. Both BMW and Mercedes-Benz have started to pilot ride services. Even other technology companies only tangentially related to automobiles are becoming more involved in ride services. Apple, which is working on its own autos project, said this month it had invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing company that competes fiercely with Uber.

• French Tax Investigators Swoop on Google’s Paris Offices: French police and prosecutors swooped on Google’s Paris offices on Tuesday, intensifying a tax-fraud probe amid accusations across Europe that the Internet giant fails to pay its fair share. The raids are part of preliminary criminal investigation opened in June 2015 after French tax authorities lodged a complaint, according to a statement from the nation’s financial prosecutor. The probe is seeking to verify whether Google’s Irish unit has permanent establishment in France and whether the firm failed to declare part of its revenues in France. Prosecutors will probably go after Google’s management in Ireland, according to Alain Frenkel, a tax lawyer in Paris. “That doesn’t mean Google won’t also face a recovery order from France’s tax authorities,” he said in a phone interview. The raids come as Google, which is part of parent company Alphabet Inc., faces outrage in Europe over the small amount of tax it pays in the region. France has called on the company to pay back taxes of about 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion). While no one has been charged of any wrongdoing, French penalties for aggravated tax fraud have recently been ramped up. Convicted managers can potentially face as long as 7 years in jail and a 2 million-euro fine.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spin off its troubled services business in an $8.5 billion deal: Six months after the Silicon Valley stalwart Hewlett-Packard split into two companies, one half announced a surprise plan to split yet again. Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it will spin off its long-troubled services unit and merge it with the IT services firm CSC in a deal worth about $8.5 billion. The complex deal, in which HPE will combine its $20 billion Enterprise Services unit — accounting for more than one third of HPE's 2015 revenue — with CSC into a combined company of which HPE shareholders will end up owning about half. The total consideration of the deal includes the creation of $4.5 billion of new shares, a cash dividend worth $1.5 billion, and the transfer of about $2.5 billion in debt and other liabilities off HPE's books and into the new company. HPE also expects to trim its operating costs by about $1 billion as a result of the spinoff. What will remain at HPE is a leaner $32 billion company that leads the world in sales of servers, the computers that are stacked together in data center racks that power the Internet. It competes with networking giant Cisco Systems in selling gear for corporate networks, with EMC in data storage gear, and also sports a small software business that did about $3.6 billion in sales last year. The new company — HPE and CSC are calling it Spinco for now — will be a pure player in the low-margin, IT outsourcing market that had been a shrinking, expensive weight around the old HP's neck during the time it was struggling to bounce back. Revenue in the unit has declined for several years, during years that its customers went through wrenching changes in how they purchase and consume technology. The move will also unwind what in hindsight has turned out to be one of the worst acquisitions in the old HP's history, the $14 billion acquisition of the IT services firm EDS, consummated in 2008 under yet another prior HP CEO, Mark Hurd, now the CEO of Oracle.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 24, 2017

• Snapchat is raising more money around $20 billion valuation: Snapchat may have first made its name in the crowded world of mobile apps with an ephemeral messaging service, but the startup and its wildly popular app are not disappearing anywhere soon. TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that Snapchat is raising yet more financing at around a $20 billion valuation. Sources with knowledge of the deal say the social media giant is in the process of a round of about $200 million. This new financing, we understand, is a follow-on to the $175 million Series F round led by Fidelity. Snapchat was said to be valued at $16 billion in that round, flat on the year before. However, filings from earlier this month and embedded below, uncovered for us by market analysts VC Experts, show that the Series F was expanded.Expanding the Series F with a Series FP, as it’s described in the document below, would also fit in with a description we’ve heard more than once about Snapchat’s fundraising: The startup is “always raising” on a “rolling” basis, partly because investors are so interested. “They get offers all the time,” one investor close to the company said. “And once you start to grow on this path, many people come to give you money. You don’t know how to value the company, so the best way to do that is to do some kind of rolling funding. When you have a hot company and many people are approaching you, you do a market of discovery.” That may be different from other startups, but in a way it reflects Snapchat’s own fast growth and its taste for trying out new things like QR codes to connect to accounts and content, their crazy face-changing filters and more.

• Spotify revenue surged, losses grew too, but far more slowly -  which is great news for Spotify: Spotify lost more money in 2015.  And its managers and investors are probably very happy about that. That's because the music streaming service's revenue increased much faster than its losses — something it hasn't always been able to say.  Given that Spotify has told its investors it is headed for an IPO in the next few years, it's the kind of performance it will need to be able to replicate with consistency. Filings show that Spotify, based in Sweden and the U.K., generated revenue of $2.12 billion last year, up about 80 percent from the $1.18 billion it brought in the prior year (all prices in the story converted from euros to dollars at the exchange rate from December 31, 2015). Losses, meanwhile, hit $188.7 million — but that number was only up 6.7 percent from the previous year's total of $176.9 million. That's a much, much better performance than 2014, when Spotify's losses ballooned by 289 percent, and its revenue was only up 45 percent. As in the past, most of Spotify's revenue comes from its subscription service, which now boasts more than 25 million users worldwide. And most of that money goes right back out the door to music labels, artists and other music rights-holders. If Spotify can keep it up, then it will have pulled off something special by showing it can run — and grow — a streaming music service at scale. Traditionally, streaming music services have struggled because their music expenses increased at the same pace as their growth — or even faster than their growth.

• Amazon no longer offers price match refunds on anything but TVs: Amazon has quietly ended its price protection policy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when a handful of startups have launched to help consumers automate the process of requesting refunds when prices change on online sites, including Amazon and dozens of other e-commerce stores. For example, newcomer Earny recently debuted a mobile app that helps consumers get their money back on purchases after price drops. Earny co-founder Oded Vakrat says that, so far, around 50 percent of the refund requests the app handled were for Amazon purchases. Earny also competes with Paribus, which offers a similar service both online and on mobile. Meanwhile, older sites like camelcamelcamel allow consumers to track Amazon price drops and receive alerts. Prior to this policy change, Amazon’s price protection policy was already one of the least friendly to consumers, as it used to provide seven days of price matching on price drops. That means if you purchased an item from Amazon which the company later marked down, you could request a refund. However, unlike many stores, Amazon only matched its own prices for items, not competitors’ pricing — with the exception of TVs and cell phones. In comparison, other stores have more pro-consumer policies, including Best Buy, which provides price matching during its return and exchange period (15 days is standard) and Walmart, which offers 90 days of protection, for example. As for how this change will impact startups like Earny and Paribus? Vakrat optimistically referred to this blow as a “great opportunity” to show why consumers need startups like Earny to have their back. Amazon insists that its price policy has not changed — it says that its prices are dynamic and that its customer service agents have made exceptions in the past, but that wasn’t the rule. In addition, Amazon wants to caution its customers that sharing their credentials with third-parties puts their accounts at risk.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 23

• To halt smartphone slide, Samsung rewrites playbook: From the way it chooses smartphone components to the models it brings to market, Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has undergone a painful process of breaking from its past to reverse a slide in its handset business. For example, the world's largest smartphone maker agonized over camera specs for its flagship Galaxy S7 until the last moment - ultimately defying industry convention by opting for fewer pixels in exchange for improved autofocus features and low-light performance, a move that contributed to early success. It also pared back its product line-up, overcoming internal resistance, enabling it to streamline production, an executive said. The handset business has now stabilized, and had its best profit in nearly two years in January-March, though historically low smartphone industry growth still leaves Samsung looking for the "next big thing". After peaking in 2013, a sharp drop in mobile profits exposed Samsung as slow to adjust to the changing market: its budget devices were overpriced and unappealing versus Chinese offerings, and the 2014 version of its Galaxy S flopped. That prompted a cull among executives and stoked investor worries Samsung might not be able to recover as rivals including Apple, Huawei  and Xiaomi gained market share at its expense. There was no sweeping, across-the-board fix. Rather, Samsung embarked two years ago on an overhaul that included a shift from a phone-for-all-needs approach towards a line-up that emphasized economies of scale. It revamped design, using metal frames and curved screens, and gave high-end features such as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens to its low- and mid-tier products. The product cull paid off; the revamped models helped Samsung recover in big markets such as India. "There was a feeling the sheer number of phones in the market was confusing for customers," said a Samsung India executive, declining to be identified as he was not authorized to speak with the media.Samsung's Kim says his focus now is on premium-end smartphones - those costing $600 and above - where not all industry players have the muscle to compete.

• Selling Uber Shares May Be Tougher Than You Think: SharesPost Inc., a broker of private technology stocks, approached investors with what seemed like an alluring offer: a potential investment in a fund that would hold Uber Technologies Inc. shares. In exchange for exposure to the high-flying ride-hailing startup, they were asked to part with at least $100,000 each and agree to hold the stake until the company goes public or gets acquired, with no vote in business decisions or visibility into its operations or finances. But SharesPost said it called off the proposed deal. The plan was to purchase as much as $10 million in preferred shares from Uber’s most recent round of financing and package them in an investment fund to be sold at a premium, according to offering documents obtained by Bloomberg. SharesPost said it wouldn’t pursue the transaction, citing a “lack of investor interest.” “It became clear that the minimum funds would not be collected for this deal, and as a result, the sales team began to inform interested clients of this fact,” Greg Berardi, a spokesman for SharesPost, wrote in an e-mail. The erstwhile offering shows the complexity of giving investors the chance to gain shares in a startup that wants to tightly control who gets a sliver, no matter how small. Like many startups, Uber limits sales of its shares. Such transactions can distort a company's valuation, leave control in the hands of unknown investors and result in tax liabilities for the company, its employees and other shareholders. Uber declined to comment on the SharesPost proposal, but a spokeswoman said when Uber learns of potential unauthorized shares on the market, the company contacts the people involved. SharesPost's role in share sales has drawn regulatory scrutiny. The broker settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012 to resolve claims that the online marketplace for private-company shares acted as an unregistered broker. SharesPost paid $80,000 and Greg Brogger, then the company’s president, paid $20,000, without admitting wrongdoing. Brogger is now SharesPost’s chief executive officer and chairman, and the company is registered with the SEC. SharesPost's spokesman called the 2012 settlement “completely irrelevant to a 2016 fund that never got off the ground.” Speaking to a Silicon Valley audience in March, SEC Chair Mary Jo White cautioned that secondary transactions could amplify “errors or misconceptions in valuation.” She highlighted the lack of transparency in such deals as cause for concern. For the proposed Uber transaction, the documents said a fund managed by a member of SharesPost’s board of directors would buy the shares at a 2 percent premium to their price in last year’s funding round, which valued the company at $62.5 billion, and then resell them for 5 percent more. It’s unclear where the SharesPost fund would acquire the Uber stake from. VC Experts, a private-market research firm, estimated that the transaction would give Uber an implied valuation of more the $70 billion.

• Modi’s Mini-Shuttle Set to Blast Into Elon Musk’s Race for Space: India is set to launch a scale model of a reusable spacecraft on Monday, a project that in time could pit the nation against billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The winged vessel -- one-fifth of full size -- is due to blast off on a rocket from Sriharikota base on the southeastern coast, reach an altitude of 70 kilometers (43 miles) and glide back at supersonic speeds to Earth for a splashdown in the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.India put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014 for just $74 million, demonstrating a combination of technological capability and low costs that chimes with the goal of more frequent space travel being championed by Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC. Both companies seek to curb costs by making rockets reusable and are conducting test launches more often.India plans to spend about 75 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) on its entire space program in the year through March 2017, a fraction of the yearly $19-billion-dollar budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S.  The reusable space vehicle is supposed to provide a cost-effective and reliable option for operations such as launching satellites, according to the Indian space agency. Mock-upson government websites resemble the long-defunct NASA space shuttles.The nation remains about eight years away from a full-scale version of the reusable space vehicle, and still has to cross the hurdle of steering the vessel safely back to land rather than water, according to the Indian space agency. Musk’s SpaceX in December pulled off a soft, vertical touchdown after the two-stage rocket propelled its payload. Less than month earlier, Bezos sent one of his test rockets to the edge of space and landed it safely back on Earth. "India has to start somewhere, sometime," Lele said. "That time is now."

• Start-Ups Once Showered With Cash Now Have to Work for It: The balance of power is shifting across tech start-up land. Not long ago, entrepreneurs had the upper hand. With investors eager to get a piece of the next Uber or Airbnb, entrepreneurs often just lifted their little fingers to get financing. Some investors let the entrepreneurs choose their own terms, while others gave multimillion-dollar paydays to start-up founders long before their companies were a success. Now investors have the advantage. Instead of venture capitalists begging to be allowed to invest, entrepreneurs are coming to them begging for cash. Investors are exerting their newfound power by asking more questions about a start-up’s prospects and taking more time to invest. Some are pushing for management changes or for financing terms that would help cushion any losses they might face. “Venture capitalists are putting founders through everything short of a proctology exam before they invest,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The changing balance of power is evident in the numbers. Venture capitalists have put less money into start-ups in the United States in the last two quarters, according to the National Venture Capital Association; funding dropped 11 percent to $12.1 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier. With a smaller capital pie, entrepreneurs have to work harder for a piece. Investors have also been better able to negotiate financing terms that benefit them. According to a survey from the law firm Fenwick & West, investors of richly valued start-ups have been getting more provisions such as guaranteed payouts and minimum investment gains. Such terms are still relatively rare, but tend to become more common after the number and size of deals decline, said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick & West partner. Above all, investors are no longer paying any price to invest in a start-up. Since the beginning of this year, about 30 companies have had to settle for lower valuations than they previously received when they raised money, according to the research firm CB Insights. That is nearly as many as in all of 2015. “Investors have materially more time to do diligence than before,” said Ben Ling, a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. “Across our portfolio, even for the best companies, fund-raising is a longer process.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 20

• Warren Buffett Stake Suggests Apple Is All Grown Up: With this week’s imprimatur from the legendary investor Warren Buffett, it should now be official: Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization and a symbol of American technological innovation, is a “value” stock. That may prove to be a decidedly mixed blessing. Mr. Buffett is the world’s most prominent and successful proponent of value investing — an approach that seeks stocks that are undervalued and sell for less than their “intrinsic value,” as Benjamin Graham put it his 1949 classic “The Intelligent Investor.” Mr. Buffett credits Mr. Graham with shaping his own approach to investing. So value investors took notice when Mr. Buffett’s holding company,Berkshire Hathaway, disclosed it had invested $1 billion in Apple stock during the last quarter. “We’ve just looked at it again,” said Bill Smead, who manages the Smead Value Fund, one of the most successful large-cap value mutual funds over the last five years, according to Morningstar. “Anybody that discounts the thinking at Berkshire Hathaway does so at their peril, in my opinion.” Value stocks are typically unpopular among many investors, their shares often battered by disappointing short-term revenue and earnings results. They usually trade at very low price-to-earnings ratios, a common valuation measure. Nonetheless, some academic studies have suggested that over time, they outperform other stocks, in part because expectations are so low. Today there are numerous value investors, value mutual funds and value exchange-traded funds that pursue variations of the strategy, many of them probably now considering adding Apple to their portfolios, if they haven’t already. Apple “is going to attract more value investors,” said Toni Sacconaghi, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein who covers Apple. “They’re looking for beaten-down stocks with negative sentiment. Apple has traded below a market multiple for years and sentiment has become increasingly pessimistic, especially over the past month.”

• Walmart Outperforms Estimates, but Online Retail Lags: Walmart reported on Thursday that its quarterly revenue had risen 0.9 percent, exceeding analysts’ forecasts and signaling that its strategies to combat a tough retail environment were working. The results were particularly striking after dismal earnings reports by several retail chains last week, and Walmart’s shares shot up nearly 10 percent.Amazon does much more business than Walmart.com, Mr. Saunders said, and yet it still reports double-digit growth. Amazon reported that net product sales rose 13 percent, to $79.3 billion in 2015, while Walmart reported that global annual e-commerce revenue had risen 12 percent to $13.7 billion in its latest fiscal year. In other areas, Walmart significantly outperformed its peers.Over all, Walmart reported that profit fell to $3.08 billion, or 98 cents a share, compared with $3.34 billion, or $1.03 a share, a year earlier. That beat expectations of 88 cents a share, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Revenue was $115.9 billion; analysts had expected $113.2 billion.“Walmart, especially with apparel, did better than other retailers for a really stressful period,” Mr. Sosnick said.

• Salesforce Surges as Big Money Deals Help Drive Sales Growth: Salesforce.com Inc. is targeting the biggest of customers to get big itself. The company, once known for selling business productivity software to small- and medium-sized clients, is getting more traction with large companies while drawing closer to an annual sales goal of $10 billion. Salesforce said Wednesday it landed the most large deals ever in a three-month period during the fiscal first quarter, including one worth at least $100 million. The company also forecast revenue in the current quarter that topped analysts’ estimates, sending shares up the most in almost three months Thursday. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff is benefiting from a multiyear effort to persuade corporations to adopt software delivered over the Internet, or the cloud. During a call with analysts, the company touted new deals with Samsung Electronics Co., Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that expanded on existing relationships. Salesforce jumped 4.1 percent to $81.09, at the close in New York, the biggest advance since Feb. 25. That brings the gains for the year to 3.4 percent. Sales will be $2.01 billion to $2.02 billion in the fiscal second quarter, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement. Analysts on average had estimated $1.98 billion, according to data complied by Bloomberg. Revenue increased 27 percent to $1.92 billion in the fiscal first quarter ended April 30, topping the average estimate of $1.89 billion.

• Samsung to partner with Alibaba on mobile payments in China: Samsung Electronics said it had struck a deal with a Alibaba Group Holding for owners of its phones to be able to more easily make payments with Alipay accounts - a move it hopes will boost sales in the world's biggest smartphone market. Users of Samsung Pay will also have the option of paying with their Alipay accounts without having separately access the Alipay application. Alipay, which is operated by Alibaba unit Ant Financial Services Group, has 450 million active registered users. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, launched its own mobile payment system, Samsung Pay, in China in March, about one month after Apple Inc launched Apple Pay.But Alipay's dominant position has meant that it will be difficult for any latecomers in mobile payments to gain significant ground just on their own. Samsung has been losing out to Chinese rivals Huawei and Xiaomi as well as Apple and no longer ranks among the top five smartphone brands in China, according to market researcher Strategy Analytics.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 19

• This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff: Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed.: Atlassian, which makes popular project-management and chat apps such as Jira and HipChat, doesn’t run on sales quotas and end-of-quarter discounts. In fact, its sales team doesn’t pitch products to anyone, because Atlassian doesn’t have a sales team. Initially an anomaly in the world of business software, the Australian company has become a beacon for other businesses counting on word of mouth to build market share. “Customers don’t want to call a salesperson if they don’t have to,” says Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-chief executive officer. “They’d much rather be able to find the answers on the website.” The way technology companies sell software has changed dramatically in the past decade. The availability of open source alternatives has pushed traditional brands and rising challengers to offer more free trials, free basic versions of their software with paid upgrades, and online promotions. Incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which employ thousands of commissioned salespeople, are acquiring open source or cloud companies that sell differently, says Laurie Wurster, an analyst at researcher Gartner. Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub are among the companies trying to attract corporate clients with small-bore efforts that rely largely on good reviews. The idea is to distribute products to individuals or small groups at potential customers big and small and hope interest spreads upstairs. So far, though, Atlassian remains the most extreme example of this model. It’s a 14-year-old company, valued at $5 billion since going public in December, without a single salesperson on the payroll. More than 80 Fortune 100 companies use Atlassian’s software, and venture capitalists and peers often talk about trying to follow, at least partly, its sales strategy.Atlassian’s roots lie in Sydney’s barren tech scene. It was kept aloft early on not by venture capital, but by the founders’ credit cards, meaning it didn’t have impatient investors to answer to. “I don’t think their success is replicable,” says Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures.

• Cisco's forecast tops Wall Street estimates; shares rise: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported better-than-expected results and gave an upbeat forecast for the current quarter, sending its shares up about 7 percent in extended trading. The company has been beefing up its wireless security and datacenter businesses to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. Results in the latest reported quarter were mainly driven by a 17 percent jump in sales in its security business, which offers firewall protection as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems. Revenue in the company's collaboration unit, which sells IP phones, rose 10 percent in the third quarter ended April 30. Sales in the data center business, which makes servers, rose 1 percent. The company's legacy switches and routers business is still by far its largest, accounting for nearly 60 percent of total revenue. Sales in the switching unit fell 3 percent, while router sales fell 5 percent, painting a grim picture of corporate technology spending.The company's net profit fell to $2.35 billion, or 46 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $2.44 billion, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 57 cents per share. Analysts on an average had expected a profit of 55 cents per share and revenue of $11.97 billion. Revenue fell to $12.00 billion from $12.14 billion.

• Tesla to raise $1.4 billion with public offering to fund Model 3 production:Tesla will raise at least $1.4 billion through a secondary stock offering, the company announced in SEC filings today, and an additional 5.5 million shares will be purchased by CEO Elon Musk via a stock option exercise. The funds will be used to "accelerate the production ramp of Model 3," according to the filing, with Tesla moving its 500,000 vehicle per year build plan to 2018 from 2020. Musk will exercise all his outstanding stock options for a total of 5,503,972 shares, with 2,777,901 of those being offered for sale to cover his tax burden. Tesla will not receive any of the proceeds from that sale, and Musk's net holdings in Tesla will increase. The Tesla Model 3 was unveiled in March and is the first "affordable" Tesla car, priced at around $35,000. Tesla says it will go more than 215 miles on a full charge and the success of the Model 3 will determine the future of the company. The first deliveries of the car are expected in late 2017, with volume production beginning in 2018. Initial demand for the car appears to be very strong, with the company reporting that it had taken roughly 400,000 preorders with refundable $1,000 deposits as of late April. In the filing Tesla revealed that as of May 15th, it currently had 373,000 preorders after 8,000 customer cancellations and 4,200 duplicate orders were cancelled by the company. Tesla is no stranger to secondary offerings. It raised around $500 million in a smaller offering last year.

• LinkedIn Says Hackers Are Trying to Sell Fruits of Huge 2012 Data Breach:  LinkedIn said on Wednesday that hackers were attempting to sell what they claimed were 117 million email addresses and passwords of its users, suggesting that a data breach in 2012 was magnitudes bigger than initially thought.LinkedIn is investigating the authenticity of the data, the company said. But a security researcher, Troy Hunt, said on Twitter that he had verified a portion of the breach and that it was “highly likely this is legit.” The hacker is trying to sell the data on an illegal marketplace for five bitcoin, or about $2,200, according to Motherboard. In 2012, the account information of 6.5 million users was posted to a Russian hacker site. LinkedIn settled a class-action lawsuit in 2015, agreeing to compensate 800,000 people who had paid for its premium services. Since the attack, the company has stepped up its security procedures, including enabling two-step verification, a technique security experts recommend for your most sensitive online accounts.

• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo. Let the Battle Begin. Google on Wednesday introduced Google Home, a voice-controlled, Internet-connected speaker that competes directly with Amazon’s smart speaker, Echo, which costs $180. The company also introduced Allo, a messaging app, and a rebranding of its virtual assistant. Here’s a quick explanation of what these major announcements, made at the Google I/O developer conference, mean for consumers. What do Home and Echo have in common? Home and Echo are both speakers that require a wired power connection. They stream music and perform tasks like web searches, adding calendar appointments and looking up movie showtimes over an Internet connection. What are the differences between Google Home and Amazon Echo? Google has yet to share many important details, including a price tag, about Google Home, which is scheduled for release this fall. However, from the announcement we can glean a few differences: Home, which can easily be held in one hand, is shorter and more compact than Echo. Both speakers have a cylindrical shape, but the top of Home is slanted downward, whereas Echo’s top is flat. Google is allowing consumers to choose from different colors for the bottom part of Home, while Echo comes only in black. (Amazon also sells a smaller voice-controlled speaker called Tap.) Most important, the brains of Home will be Google’s virtual assistant, which draws from Google’s extensive search database, whereas Echo relies on Alexa, Amazon’s assistant. In other words, consumers can expect voice commands that already work with Google’s assistant to work with Google Home. In a recent test comparing virtual assistants from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, Google’s assistant was the most capable of performing basic tasks, largely because it drew data from Google’s search engine. Is Home smarter than Echo? Thanks to Home’s reliance on Google’s search engine, it will probably be a smarter speaker than the Echo when it comes to basic tasks like web searches and looking up traffic data. However, when it comes to actions offered by outside companies — like the ability to order a pizza from a restaurant or to set your Internet-connected thermostat — Home’s success will depend largely on whether Google persuades third-party developers to create tasks that work with it.

.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 18

• China Quietly Targets U.S. Tech Companies in Security Reviews: Chinese authorities are quietly scrutinizing technology products sold in China by Apple and other big foreign companies, focusing on whether they pose potential security threats to the country and its consumers and opening up a new front in an already tense relationship with Washington over digital security. Apple and other companies in recent months have been subjected to reviews that target encryption and the data storage of tech products, said people briefed on the reviews who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the reviews, Chinese officials require executives or employees of the foreign tech companies to answer questions about the products in person, according to these people. The reviews are run by a committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet control bureau, they said. The bureau includes experts and engineers with ties to the country’s military and security agencies. While other countries, including the United States and Britain, conduct reviews of some tech products, they usually focus on products that will be used by the military or other parts of the government that are concerned with security, and not on products sold to the general public. The Chinese reviews stand out because they are being applied more broadly, including to American consumer software and gadgets popular in China, the people briefed on the reviews said. And because Chinese officials have not disclosed the nature of the checks, both the United States government and American tech companies fear that the reviews could be used to extract tech knowledge as well as ensure that the United States was not using the products to spy. Ultimately, the reviews could be used to block products without explanation or to extract trade secrets in exchange for market access. Those secrets could be leaked to Chinese competitors or expose vulnerabilities, which, in turn, Chinese hackers could exploit. Further, tech companies are concerned that the reviews could set a precedent and that other countries will follow suit, each demanding different checks that would not only be costly but also put the companies at risk of having to hand over further secrets in exchange for market access.

• Google's launch of a carpooling service Monday marks the beginning of its seemingly inevitable entry into the ridesharing wars. The pilot program, which is being offered via Google's Waze navigation app, aims to connect commuters who need a ride with drivers who can supply one. In exchange, riders will help cover the drivers' fuel costs. Consolidating rides means fewer cars on the road — which is better for traffic congestion and the environment, according to Waze. Google's launch of a carpooling service Monday marks the beginning of its seemingly inevitable entry into the ridesharing wars. The pilot program, which is being offered via Google's Waze navigation app, aims to connect commuters who need a ride with drivers who can supply one. In exchange, riders will help cover the drivers' fuel costs. Consolidating rides means fewer cars on the road — which is better for traffic congestion and the environment, according to Waze.

• Apple CEO Makes First India Trip With Billion Phone Sales at Stake: Smartphone shipments may be sputtering in the U.S., Europe and other mature markets, but in India, there’s the prospect of a billion new device sales. It’s probably no surprise then that Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is making his first trip to the country. Cook, who begins his multiday visit on Wednesday, will unveil a development center for digital maps in Hyderabad and introduce an accelerator program for iOS developers in Bangalore, a person with knowledge of the trip said. Apple is pushing to open its first retail stores in the country, though it’s not clear whether any discussions will be part of the CEO’s agenda on this trip. The prize is more than 1 billion in smartphone sales in the next five years, according to researcher Counterpoint. As China’s market becomes more saturated and people across the globe upgrade their smartphones less frequently, Apple, Samsung Electronics Co. and other vendors are keen to sell to India’s middle class, which is projected to quadruple to 200 million by 2020. Signs of this explosive rise in consumption already emerged in the first three months of this year, when Apple reported that shipments in India grew 56 percent, even as iPhone sales declined globally for the first time ever.

• Can virtual reality translate into real profits? A growing number of U.S. companies are counting on virtual reality for real profits. With growth hard to come by amid the lethargic economy, companies ranging from snowmobile manufacturers to furniture sellers are incorporating virtual reality that so far has mostly been found in video games. Their bet: that the trendy headset-based technology can help them build sales and cut costs. Theme park operator Six Flags Entertainment Corp (SIX.N) is outfitting riders on some of its aging roller coasters with Samsung VR headsets, allowing the company to brand the rides as brand-new without having to build costly new attractions. nowmobile manufacturer Arctic Cat Inc (ACAT.O) has developed virtual reality rides that customers can use to try out new models at dealerships, while eBay Inc's (EBAY.O) StubHub is testing technology that allows fans to check out the view from different seats before buying tickets. In the most recent round of corporate earnings reports, some 38 companies - including the New York Times, GoPro, and furniture-seller Wayfair - highlighted virtual reality as a part of their business plans. That was a 375 percent jump from the 8 that did so at this time last year, according to a Reuters analysis of earnings calls transcripts. Nearly all were either consumer or technology companies, suggesting that virtual reality technology has a ways to go before becoming mainstream. Yet for all of the enthusiasm, there is little evidence that virtual reality can deliver substantial growth. here are few pure plays for investors who want to buy into virtual reality. Facebook Inc (FB.O), which paid $2 billion for its Oculus virtual reality division in 2014 and began shipping its first $599 Oculus Rift headsets in March, has the best-known virtual reality head gear, though other well-known companies including Google's parent Alphabet and Apple are rumored to be working on high-powered headsets of their own. Neither company returned requests to comment. Virtual reality is such a small part of Facebook's business that most analysts do not break out Oculus in their revenue or earnings estimates. Nor did Facebook give any numbers on how many Oculus headsets it expects to sell on its most recent earnings call. "This is very early and we don't expect VR to take off as a mainstream success right away ... but eventually we believe that VR is going to be the next big computing platform and we're making the investments necessary to lead the way there," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said.

• For online lenders, it’s suddenly touch-and-go:  A year ago, privately held online lenders like Prosper, SoFiand Avant looked all but certain to go public at the same unicorn valuations their venture investors had assigned them — if not higher. They were seemingly reshaping the student, consumer and small business lending business. The market they’re chasing is enormous: The U.S. consumer lending market is a $3.5 trillion business, and 22 of  the largest online marketplace platforms originated just more than $5 billion of unsecured consumer credit in 2014 and more than $10 billion in 2015. They also talked a big game. When SoFi raised a whopping $1 billion from Softbank last year, CEO Michael Cagney told Bloomberg: “I’m looking at over $1 trillion of market cap from the banks, and I think it’s all vulnerable.” Fast forward to today, and it’s online lenders that suddenly look like sitting ducks. In an SEC filing yesterday, Lending Club, which announced the surprise departure of its founder and CEO last Monday, revealed that investors who “contributed a significant amount of funding” for loans are now examining that performance “or are otherwise reluctant to invest.” For many casual observers in Silicon Valley, the first signs of trouble in the online lending category emerged in late April, when the WSJ reported that Avant made $514 million worth of new loans in the U.S. in the first quarter, a 27 percent drop from the fourth quarter of 2015. Then, two weeks ago, Prosper confirmed that it planned to cut roughly 28 percent of its staff in response to falling loan volume. And Prosper’s news came just a day after OnDeck Capital said its own first-quarter losses had more than doubled as demand for its loans began to nosedive. Of course, the kicker came last week, when Lending Club CEO Renaud LaPlanche resigned following an internal audit that turned up $22 million in loans that were sold to Jefferies yet didn’t meet the investment bank’s criteria. Smartly, some players are already looking to reimagine themselves as broader financial outfits. For example, SoFi, which began as a way for students from top universities to refinance their debt, has since branched into personal loans, wealth management and mortgages. It also said last month that it’s hoping to drum up more investor demand for the debt it originates by starting a hedge fund that will buy its own loans. Baker expects that to survive and thrive, more online lenders may need to remodel themselves into the institutions they vowed to replace, either by becoming banks, buying or selling to banks or else striking up partnerships with banks. OnDeck and JPMorgan made one such pact. Last month, JPMorgan quietly began offering online loans to its existing small-business customers using OnDeck’s technology. Indeed, there is a silver lining, and it’s that huge market opportunity. The trick for online lenders will be finding new ways to pursue it while remaining viable businesses.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 16

• Why a staggering number of Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to: Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday. This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities. The survey showed that nearly 20 percent of the survey's respondents had personally experienced some form of identity theft, an online security breach, or another similar problem over the year before the survey was taken last July. Overall, 45 percent said their concerns about online privacy and security stopped them from using the Web in very practical ways. The NTIA survey also showed that the more connected devices people owned, the more they experienced a breach of data. For those with only one laptop or computer or smartphone, 9 percent reported a security incident. That number more than tripled for those with at least five devices.

• Uber China Rival Didi to Consider U.S. IPO as Soon as 2017: Apple may not need to wait that long before it reaps the benefits of investing $1 billion in Chinese car-hailing service Didi Chuxing. Didi is targeting an initial public offering in New York next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The timing will depend on how its battle with Uber Technologies Inc. in China plays out, said the people, who requested not to be named because the matter is private. Such a move may put the Chinese app ahead of its U.S. rival in going public, with Uber having said it wants to hold off as long as possible. China’s biggest ride-hailing app is in the process of raising about $3 billion of funding, including Apple’s $1 billion contribution, which has swelled the company’s valuation to about $26 billion, people familiar have said. Didi, already backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., has reached break even in about half of the 400 Chinese cities it operates in as Uber spends heavily to win both drivers and riders. At Didi’s current valuation, a U.S. IPO could be the biggest by a Chinese company since Alibaba’s record offering in 2014. The company is among a list of ride-sharing apps including Uber and Lyft Inc. that could conduct a public offering. Didi hasn’t decided on which exchange and which banks to hire yet, the people said. Didi was created last year when separate apps backed by Tencent and Alibaba merged after brutal competition drove up losses. The company now has 14 million registered drivers in China, delivering more than 11 million rides a day, and last month said it’s on track to turn an operating profit “soon.”

• Exclusive: Warren Buffett, Quicken Loans founder in Yahoo bid - sources: Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chairman Warren Buffett is backing a consortium vying for Yahoo Inc's internet assets that includes Quicken Loans Inc founder Dan Gilbert, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. While there is no certainty that the consortium will prevail in the auction, the interest of Buffett and Gilbert is a boost for the Sunnyvale, California-based company, which has been surpassed in recent years by rivals such as Alphabet Inc in the race for internet users and advertising dollars. The consortium's participation in the sale process also represents a challenge to U.S. telecommunications carrier Verizon Communications Inc, whose deal to acquire AOL last year for $4.4 billion has made it a favorite to prevail in its bid for Yahoo's assets among industry analysts.

• Amazon is going to sell its own lines of food, detergent and diapers, and it's going to be a really big deal: Amazon is going to start selling its own brands of snacks, diapers, detergent — a move lots of traditional retailers have already made. But Amazon isn't a traditional retailer, so this move could be very meaningful for Amazon, and its competitors. The e-commerce powerhouse will soon begin selling its own packaged goods, exclusively to Amazon Prime members under brands like Happy Belly and Mama Bear, the Wall Street Journal reports. While some people will point out that so-called "private-labeling" is nothing new -- grocery stores and big-box retailers have been increasingly pushing their in-house brands -- this is a much bigger deal. That's because the growth in retail is all going to be online, and Amazon owns online. It already accounts for half of all sales growth in U.S. e-commerce. So Amazon's move into consumer packaged goods gives it even more opportunity to flex its muscle with suppliers. That means giving its own products better placement on its site, and undercutting competitors on pricing. The move also offers Amazon the chance to pad its bottom line -- something Jeff Bezos hasn't traditionally been willing or able to do. Private-label brands typically carry higher profit margins , in part because the companies selling them don't put big marketing campaigns behind them. Think of the damage Amazon already does its to competitors as a low-margin business. Now imagine what happens when if it starts generating real profits on stuff like cereal and soap. The move is also a way to increase the power of Amazon Prime, the $99-a-year unlimited shipping program that fuels Amazon's retail growth. Prime customers spend more on Amazon than non-members and are more loyal, too. By adding another perk, Amazon can make its best customers even even more loyal. There's risk here, of course. Some Amazon-branded products have already flopped, including its Amazon Element diapers, which were pulled for design flaws shortly after launch.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 13th

• Facebook, Facing Bias Claims, Shows How Editors and Algorithms Guide News:  Facebook, the largest social media network, published internal editorial guidelines on Thursday, the company’s latest attempt to rebut accusations that it is politically biased in the news content it shows on the pages of its 1.6 billion users. The 28-page document details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the “Trending Topics” section of users’ Facebook pages. Facebook describes a list of processes it uses to display some of the most popular content across the network, including relying on algorithms to detect up-and-coming news trends as well as a team of editors who, much like a newsroom, direct how those topics are presented and decide what should be displayed to people who regularly use the service. As the guidelines make clear, at practically every point in the process, a human editor is given the leeway to exercise his or her editorial influence. The document was released just days after a report on the tech news siteGizmodo said Facebook editors had intentionally “suppressed” news topics from conservative publications trending across the network. The report also said editors were able to artificially inflate the importance of other topics by “injecting” them into the Trending section of users’ Facebook pages. Since those claims surfaced, Facebook has been questioned by news sites across the political spectrum and by legislators in Washington. On Thursday, critics urged the company to consider the biases of its editors. “As long as Facebook is hiring editors who lean left politically, those stories are going to get preferential treatment,” Erick Erickson, former editor in chief of the conservative website RedState and founder of another conservative site called The Resurgent, said in an email. “I’d hope that Facebook would take care to consider all views and all news.” The company has continued to deny accusations of political bias and pointed to editorial rules that discourage Trending Topics staff members from taking one viewpoint or another.

• Alibaba Bears Retreat as Sales Growth Endures China Slump: Chart: Bearish bets against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have dropped to the lowest level since January after the Chinese e-commerce leader’s quarterly revenue beat analysts’ forecasts even as the nation’s economy grows at the slowest pace in 25 years. Short interest fell to 7.1 percent this week after peaking at a two-year high of 8.5 percent two months ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit Ltd. The U.S.-traded stock has risen 4.4 percent since the company reported its quarterly results, while its main competitor JD.com Inc. tumbled 12 percent after reporting a slowdown in sales volume.

• Intel Sells $2.75 Billion of Bonds to Refinance 2016 Debt: Intel Corp. sold $2.75 billion of bonds on Thursday to refinance debt due this year and a portion of notes maturing in 2017. The world’s biggest chipmaker issued debt three parts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The longest portion was $1.25 billion of 30-year notes yielding 1.55 percentage points above comparable government debt. That’s down from an initial offer of 1.7 percentage points, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. managed the sale.S&P Global Ratings gave the bonds an A+ grade, according to a statement on Thursday. Intel is the latest U.S. blue-chip company to offer notes in what’s poised to be second-busiest week for issuance this year. In its last multibillion-dollar deal, Intel sold $7 billion of bonds in July to finance part of its $16.7 billion takeover of Altera Corp. The company plans to repay its $1.5 billion of 1.95 percent notes due in October and a portion of the $3 billion of 1.35 percent bonds due next year. Investment-grade companies have sold more than $49 billion worth of bonds so far this week as they take advantage of low borrowing costs after posting earnings for the quarter ended March 31. Companies are also front-loading issuance before the summer slowdown, according to Ben Emons, a money manager at Leader Capital Corp. in Los Angeles.

• Apple invests $1 billion in Chinese Uber rival ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing: Apple said on Thursday it has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market. The investment comes as Apple is trying to reinvigorate sales in China, its second-largest market. Apple recently has come under pressure from Chinese regulators, with its online book and film services shut down last month, and Cook is traveling to the country this month. The investment gives Apple, which has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year, a sizeable stake in Uber Technologies Inc's chief rival in China. Cook said in an interview that he sees opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.

• Strong demand for graphics chips to boost Nvidia's revenue: Nvidia Corp forecast better-than-expected revenue for the current quarter as it sees robust demand for its chips that power complex computer graphics. Shares of the company, which also reported profit and revenue above analysts' estimates, were up 7.5 percent in extended trading. The chipmaker last week unveiled its GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics processors based on its Pascal technology.Revenue from its gaming business, which designs graphics cards such as GeForce for PCs, rose 17 percent to $687 million. The company has weathered a shrinking personal computer industry by focusing on game enthusiasts, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for processors used in playing graphically demanding games.Revenue from its data center business, which includes its Tesla processors, rose 62.5 percent to $143 million.Nvidia's net income rose to $196 million, or 33 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 1 from $134 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 46 cents per share, handily beating analysts' expectations of 32 cents. Revenue rose 13.4 percent to $1.31 billion, while analysts were expecting $1.26 billion. The company also said it intends to return about $1 billion to shareholders in fiscal 2017 through quarterly dividends and share buybacks.