Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 28

• An Amazon Echo may be the key to solving a murder case: Internet-connected devices may start helping in criminal cases. Police in Bentonville, Arkansas have issued a warrant to Amazon, asking the company to hand over data from an Echo device to help prosecute a suspected murderer. James Andrew Bates, the suspect in the case, was charged with first-degree murder in November of 2015 after authorities found victim Victor Collins strangled and drowned in Mr. Bates’ hot tub. Mr. Bates told police he’d invited Collins and two other friends, Owen McDonald and Sean Henry, over to watch a football game and said he decided to go to bed about 1 a.m., leaving the victim and McDonald to hang out and drink in his hot tub. Bates has several internet-connected devices in his home, including a Nest thermostat and a Honeywell alarm system, but the key witness in the case may be his Amazon Echo, which, as per The Information, police records say could have controlled the streaming music, which was being wirelessly transmitted throughout the night using Echo’s assistant Alexa. However, it’s unclear how much data police could extract from the device or how useful that data would be in the case. Alexa is always listening through a system of seven built-in microphones but waits for you to say the “wake word” to send it commands, like asking for the weather or which music to play, according to the company. The device also streams your audio to the cloud, including a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word. Amazon has so far declined to hand over information in the case, according to court records, and the company says it will not be releasing customer information “without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Amazon objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course.”

• Amazon calls 2016 holiday season its best ever; shares rise: Amazon.com Inc said it shipped more than 1 billion items worldwide this holiday season, which the top online retailer called its best ever, and its shares rose 1.6 percent in afternoon trade. The Amazon Echo home assistant and its smaller version, Echo Dot, topped the best-sellers list, said Jeff Wilke, chief executive of Amazon's worldwide consumer division, in a press release. Sales of voice-controlled Echo devices were nine times more than they were during last year's holiday season, the company said. Amazon likely sold between 4 million and 5 million devices this year to date with Alexa, the voice-controlled assistant on the Echo, estimated Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy in a research note. Shoppers can command the Echo to perform a host of tasks, from playing music to turning on Christmas lights. More than 72 percent of Amazon's customers worldwide shopped through mobile devices, the company added, and Dec. 19 was the busiest shopping day this holiday season. Other best sellers on Amazon included 72-pack Keurig K-Cups, the movie "Finding Dory," Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's Gear VR virtual reality headset and Nintendo Co Ltd's Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon role-playing video games, the company said.

• How Jukin Media Built a Viral-Video Empire: Founded in 2009, Jukin is a market leader in a strange new industry that is organizing and monetizing the entropy of web video. A decade ago, when viral phenomena were still opaque and full of mystery, we gazed awe-struck as “Charlie Bit My Finger” rose to fame. Jukin, since then, has systematized the riddle by acquiring clips that meet viral criteria and serving them to YouTube channels and other media outlets that might help induce a spread. The process I was watching was the same one that delivered us Pizza Rat, the video of a rodent dragging a slice down the subway stairs that went viral in 2015. Jukin researchers also discovered Peanut Butter Baby (a toddler covered head to toe in peanut butter) and the “Christopher Columbus of Brooklyn” (a white guy yelling at another white person about gentrification). If you’ve seen a funny clip on a late-night show, or “Good Morning America,” or the 11-o’-clock news, there are pretty good odds Jukin dug it up. In order to meet this demand for fresh content — a demand created by the process that supplies it — Jukin scales idle browsing to industrial proportions. A researcher, on average, watches 200 clips daily. That’s a thousand videos each week, or 50,000 per year, give or take. The company’s research is aided by proprietary software called Riff, which generates feeds based on niche viral keywords. Maybe you’ve seen 15 or 20 good videos of babies tasting lemons for the first time, or troops surprising mothers at Christmas, or dogs and parakeets becoming unlikely friends. A Jukin researcher has seen these, too, plus all the duds that never made it to your feed. Of those 200 reviewed on a typical day, perhaps three or four may be good enough to license, generally for a fee between $50 and $5,000, and often a revenue split. Researchers contact clip owners by any means necessary — usually through YouTube or Facebook but occasionally over dating sites, or wherever else they can be found. In all, the company has paid out more than $10 million in royalties to video owners.

• Rent the Runway has raised a $60 million investment led by Fidelity; The company was profitable in 2016 on revenue north of $100 million. In March, Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman told Recode, “I think you need to assume it’s impossible to raise equity financing for the next two years.” Just nine months later, Rent the Runway has closed a new $60 million equity investment led by the mutual fund company Fidelity with additional money from existing investors like Bain Capital Ventures and TCV. What changed in that time? The startup best known for its dress rental business put together a profitable year on an Ebitda basis while growing its revenue to well over $100 million. Rent the Runway also launched a new product — a $139-a-month rental subscription for everyday workwear — that accounted for more than one-fifth of total company revenue in its first year. The deal underscores a renewed focus on profitability for investors and fast-growing startups alike. Just this week, news broke that the subscription meal-kit company Blue Apron — another Fidelity portfolio company — was pausing its IPO plans to focus on widening its profit margins. The investment is another bet by Fidelity, which has also backed both Uber and Airbnb, on the so-called sharing economy. In this instance, the belief is that more women will view clothing rentals beyond dresses as the norm in the future. The valuation of this Series E investment was a “significant step up” from the $520 million valuation Rent the Runway earned when it raised a $60 million round in 2014. Hyman declined to provide more specifics on the new valuation other than that it was based on the types of metrics and multiples on which public companies are valued.