Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 13

• Apple Starts to Woo Its App Developers: When Apple’s App Store opened in 2008, there were well under a thousand apps, and the relationship was obviously beneficial for both sides. But now, when there are more than 1.5 million apps fighting for attention in the App Store, the benefits for developers, particularly smaller ones, have become much less apparent. “Is Apple coasting on its relationship and lead with developers? I think the answer is yes,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. “Their app store is considered an unappealing experience by many people. Their rules are arbitrary, and they take a big slice of money from sales.” For a long time, Apple didn’t have to care. But now it faces flat sales of its flagship iPhones, a lack of excitement about newer products like its smart watch and Apple TV, growing competition from Google’s Android platform and the rise of new challengers like Amazon’s Echo device, which responds to a user’s voice commands at home with the kind of magic that used to be an Apple hallmark. As the company prepares to hold its annual developer conference in San Francisco next week, there are signs that it wants to improve its relationship with app makers. Among the announcements expected at the gathering: Apple plans to finally give developers access to its Siri voice assistant so they can incorporate it into their apps.Apple’s charm offensive began in earnest in December, after it put Philip W. Schiller, its senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in charge of the App Store. Under Mr. Schiller, the company accelerated the app approval process, cutting typical review times from two weeks to a day or two. On Wednesday, Apple announced that it would soon begin allowing app makers to buy ads that would appear at the top of search results in the App Store, like the ads already on Google’s Play Store and website. Apple also said that it would cut its usual 30 percent commission on all subscriptions to 15 percent after an app subscriber had been active for at least a year.

• What happens when your search engine is first to know you have cancer:This week researchers demonstrated that by analyzing a person’s Web searches they could in some cases predict an upcoming diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The team of researchers aren’t pancreatic cancers experts, but computer scientists at Microsoft. Unlike traditional medical professionals, they have the advantage of access to a trove of data that Microsoft collects through its search engine, Bing. The Microsoft researchers identified Web users who had recently searched for queries indicating they have pancreatic cancer, such as “I was told I have pancreatic cancer, what to expect,” and then looked back months earlier to examine patterns in the symptoms that the users searched for. This included phrases such as “dark or tarry stool,” “abdominal swelling,” “dark urine” and “yellowing skin.” From this analysis they realized trends in the queries of users who were soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, identifying 5 to 15 percent of cases with low false-positive rates. The research was published in the Journal of Oncology Practice.

• Alibaba Bears Pounce as SEC Probe, SoftBank Sale Squeeze Shares:Traders have never been more bearish on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company facing a regulatory probe and the loss of a key investor. The total number of outstanding shares borrowed for short selling peaked at more than 124 million last week. That’s the most since its 2014 initial public offering and is up from about 60 million in December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit. Prominent short sellers including Jim Chanos and John Hempton have been red-flagging Alibaba for months, suggesting that its growth figures might be too good to be true. Bearish bets spiked in the past two weeks after the company disclosed a regulatoryprobe of its Chinese delivery unit and SoftBank Group Corp. disclosed plans to sell a $10 billion stake. Alibaba, which claimed more than 75 percent of the e-commerce market share in China last year, made history with a record $25 billion initial public offering in September 2014. Traders in New York clamored for the stock, which was priced at $68 a share, as a way to tap into the potential profits available from the country’s growing middle class. The shares have dropped 6.4 percent to $75.92 since May 25 when the company said that the SEC is looking at data reported from the company’s Singles’ Day promotion, Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, and how the company consolidates results from affiliates, including logistics partner Cainiao Network. While SoftBank’s divestment comes as part of a broader strategy to find new investments in startups and strengthen its debt-heavy balance sheet, the move can be unsettling to investors as the Japanese technology giant first bought into the company 16 years ago, said Henry Guo, a New York-based analyst at M Science. “The stake sale by SoftBank caught the market off guard, which damped Alibaba shares as it’s one of the early investors,” Guo, who has been covering Chinese internet stocks traded in the U.S. for about 10 years and has a positive outlook on Alibaba, said by phone.

• Amazon is preparing to launch streaming music service - sources: Amazon.com Inc is preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service, placing it squarely in competition with rival offerings from Apple Inc and Spotify, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The service will be offered at $9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, and it will offer a competitive catalog of songs, the sources said. Amazon (AMZN.O) is finalizing licenses with labels for the service, which likely will be launched in late summer or early fall, the sources said. Amazon, which offers a free streaming music service with a limited catalog to subscribers of its Prime shipping and video service, did not respond to a request for comment about the new, full-fledged music plan. Although it will be a late entrant to the crowded streaming space, Amazon believes a comprehensive music service is important to its bid to be a one-stop shop for content and goods, the sources said. The new music offering also is intended to increase the appeal of the Amazon Echo, its home speaker, which searches the Internet and orders products from the retailer with voice commands.

• Why Line’s Two-Year Wait for IPO Cost It $4 Billion in Valuation: Line Corp. has finally pulled the trigger on an initial public offering after a two-year hiatus. That period of hesitation may have cost the messaging service $4 billion in valuation as Facebook Inc. began encroaching on its turf and markets cooled on technology company debuts. Japan’s leading mobile messaging service is aiming to raise as much as 113 billion yen ($1 billion) in July at a market value of roughly 588 billion yen, according to data in its Friday IPO filings. That’s down 40 percent from an estimated 1 trillion yen when it first filed for an offering in 2014. The price range will be set on June 27, and the final price July 11. That may be as good as it gets. Line’s gearing up for a battle with far larger rivals like Facebook and China’s WeChat as it looks to expand its 218 million user base beyond its strongest markets of Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. The Tokyo-based company, owned by South Korean search portal Naver Corp., plans to use the proceeds to spearhead an expansion across Asia and, eventually, the U.S. “Line will have its market in Japan fairly fortified from the likes of WhatsApp or even Facebook Messenger,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. “Outside of its core markets, it’s going to be a massive challenge.”