Daily Tech Snippet: 3 June 2016

• Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage: Snapchat has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users. Snapchat has been growing quickly, boosted by its popularity among young people. The app had 110 million daily users in December, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak about the numbers. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc. but has since been surpassed by Facebook’s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Twitter has 310 million monthly active users, according to its most recent earnings report. The company doesn’t disclose how many of those people check in daily, but in the third quarter, it said about 44 percent of monthly users are active each day in the service’s top 20 markets. Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said at the time that the percentage had been stable but that “we’ll be sure to disclose” if there was a significant change. The company hasn’t given an update since then. This implies a daily active user count of 136 million. Snapchat has made communicating more of a game by letting people send annotated selfies and short videos. It has allowed people to use its imaging software to swap faces in a photo, transform themselves into puppies, and barf rainbows. (In March, Facebook said it acquired the startup behind an app called Masquerade, which offers similar photo-manipulation tools.) Snapchat encourages people to visit the app frequently with features such as the "Snapstreak," which counts the number of consecutive days they’ve been communicating with their closest friends. Snapchat’s other content, such as news and Live Stories, disappear after 24 hours.

• The incredibly brilliant way people are now paying for things in Asia: When Apple first rolled out Apple Pay in 2014, it was billed as a simpler way to buy goods and services. You take your phone out, tap it to the credit card reader, and off you go. Seems convenient, right?  But some consumers in Asia think there's an even better way to pay. In recent years, millions of people have grown accustomed to using messaging apps to communicate. Some of these apps now support person-to-person digital cash transfers. So the next step is pretty logical: Asian retailers have begun using these same messaging platforms to sell everything from clothing to hamburgers to train tickets. And as a consumer, you never have to leave the app to pay. On the surface, this alternative sounds a lot like Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay, or Android Pay, etc.). But conducting real-life and online transactions through messaging apps stands to change retail like none of these other services have. What we're seeing in Asia is the rise of mobile payments that run primarily on software, not hardware as we've tried to implement here in the United States. And that simple distinction may be the key to everything from accelerating the spread of mobile payments to unlocking deep, digital interactions with customers in brick-and-mortar stores to democratizing e-commerce away from giant online businesses like Amazon.To buy a meal with WeChat, which in China goes by the name Weixin, customers simply pull up a QR code in the app that's connected to their credit card or other financial account. Once the cashier scans the code, that's it — no further action is needed. Retailers in China will typically offerdiscounts to WeChat users as an incentive to pay with the app.

• No Uber IPO in Sight After $3.5 Billion From Saudi Arabia: Once upon a time, Silicon Valley startups raised money from venture capitalists and then, with some luck and a promising business, held an IPO to cash in and expand. Uber has no need for such traditions. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009 and valued at $62.5 billion, has now raised $11 billion as it spends heavily to expand globally and battle well-funded rivals such as Lyft Inc. and China’s Didi. The ride-hailing company’s latest infusion of cash -- a record $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund -- means Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has the finances to continue avoiding a listing of his company any time soon. "I’m going to make sure it happens as late as possible," he told CNBC earlier this year. The money from Saudi Arabia is a new wrinkle in the shifting way the world’s largest technology startups are being funded. The $3.5 billion raised by Uber Technologies Inc. this week is far larger than what most companies are able raise when they hold public offerings: Twitter Inc. netted $1.82 billion during its 2013 IPO and First Data Corp. raised $2.56 billion in the largest technology IPO of the past 12 months. In 2004, Google raised $1.67 billion during its stock-market debut.