Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 1

• In Video, Uber CEO Argues With Driver Over Falling Fares: “I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s fine,” Kamel says. The pair begin talking shop, and Kalanick explains that they’re going to cut down on the number of black cars, which will reduce competition and should be good for Kamel. Then Kamel says what every driver has been dying to tell Kalanick: “You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices.” Kalanick: “We’re not dropping the prices on black.” Kamel: “But in general the whole price is—” Kalanick: “We have to; we have competitors; otherwise, we’d go out of business.” Kamel: “Competitors? Man, you had the business model in your hands. You could have the prices you want, but you choose to buy everybody a ride.” Kalanick: “No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business.” Kamel: “What? Lyft? It’s a piece of cake right there.” Kalanick: “It seems like a piece of cake because I’ve beaten them. But if I didn’t do the things I did, we would have been beaten, I promise.” The two bat that idea around, and Kamel brings the conversation back to his losses. Kamel: “But people are not trusting you anymore. … I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. Yes, yes, yes. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day.” Kalanick: “Hold on a second, what have I changed about Black? What have I changed?” Kamel: “You changed the whole business. You dropped the prices.” Kalanick: “On black?” Kamel: “Yes, you did.” Kalanick begins to lose his temper. “Bullshit,” he says. Kamel: “We started with $20.” Kalanick: “Bullshit.” Kamel: “We started with $20. How much is the mile now, $2.75?” Kalanick: “You know what?” Kamel: “What?” Kalanick: “Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!” Kamel: “Good luck to you, but I know [you're not] going to go far.” The door slams. Kamel drives away. Later, the Uber driver app prompts him to rate Kalanick, as he does all his riders. Kamel gives him one star.

• YouTube unveils YouTube TV, its live TV streaming service: After a year of rumors, YouTube is finally drawing back the curtain on its latest play for entertainment industry domination — a live TV service. At the company’s Playa Vista offices, a crowd of roughly 100 journalists settled into tables and chairs arrayed in the company’s hangar-like foyer to the strains of “Video Killed the Radio Star” and “Coffee and TV” to hear the news. (Seriously, YouTube’s music game is on point). Distinct from YouTube Red, the new service, YouTube TV, which has been in the works for years at Google’s internet video behemoth, has quietly been inking contracts with media companies to distribute their content on its TV service. As previously reported by The WSJ and Bloomberg News, a steady drumbeat of leaks had already set the tone for what will be offered by the service. According to Bloomberg, YouTube had been talking with all of the major networks to roll up content. CBS was the first major TV network to sign on to the service, with all of the other studios also roped into discussions including 21st Century Fox, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Disney, which owns ABC, ESPN and others.

• Amazon AWS S3 outage is breaking things for a lot of websites and apps: Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service is experiencing widespread issues, leading to service that’s either partially or fully broken on websites, apps and devices upon which it relies. The AWS offering provides hosting for images for a lot of sites, and also hosts entire websites, and app backends including Nest. The S3 outage is due to “high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,” according to Amazon’s AWS service health dashboard, which is where the company also says it’s working on “remediating the issue,” without initially revealing any further details. Affected websites and services include Quora, newsletter provider Sailthru, Business Insider, Giphy, image hosting at a number of publisher websites, filesharing in Slack, and many more. Connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware is also being impacted, with many unable to control these devices as a result of the outage. Amazon S3 is used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains, according to data tracked by SimilarTech, and its popularity as a content host concentrates specifically in the U.S. It’s used by 0.8 percent of the top 1 million websites, which is actually quite a bit smaller than CloudFlare, which is used by 6.2 percent of the top 1 million websites globally – and yet it’s still having this much of an effect.

• Drone startup Lily filed for bankruptcy as pre-order customers await their refunds: The Lily drone was supposed to ship by now, but the company shut down in January before ever delivering a single one of its hyped drones to any of the over 61,000 people who pre-ordered one. Following a lawsuit by the San Francisco District Attorney charging the company of misleading business practices, as well as a raid by federal agents, the now defunct drone company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday in Delaware. In 2015 and 2016, Lily had amassed $34.8 million in pre-sales for its drone and received $15 million in investment from some of Silicon Valley’s most high profile firms, including Spark Capital, SV Angel, High Line Venture Partners, Slow Ventures and Sherpa Capital. According to its bankruptcy filing, Lily plans to issue refunds and auction off its intellectual property. Though many pre-sale customers report having received their money back, dozens have emailed or called me in the past month complaining that they have yet to receive their refund despite repeated attempts to contact the company. “I have tried emailing the company multiple times with no response,” complained one pre-order customer last week. Lily was able to attract so many customers thanks to a highly produced video showcasing the product that went viral in 2015, but according to the lawsuit from the district attorney’s office, the footage that was supposed to be from the Lily drone in the promotional video wasn’t real. Rather it was captured with a “GoPro mounted to a Lily prototype,” wrote Lily CEO Antoine Balaresque in an email obtained by the district attorney. “I am worried that a lens geek could study our images up close and detect the unique GoPro lens footprint. But I am just speculating here: I don't know much about lenses but I think we should be extremely careful if we decide to lie publicly,” Balaresque wrote in another email to the producer of the video.

• Salesforce.com forecasts lower-than-expected Q1 profit; shares fall: Salesforce.com raised its revenue forecast for its full fiscal year to slightly above analysts expectations but lowered its outlook for its next quarter to a lower-than-expected profit, sending its shares down 2 percent in extended trading on Tuesday. Revenues for Salesforce's core sales software increased 13.3 percent to $3 billion, a faster rise than in recent years and surprise to analysts who considered it the oldest and therefore least likely revenue growth driver among the firm's product lines. Analysts attributed the expansion to new features in the product such as recommendations for who salespeople should call next and a growing overall market for sales software.Salesforce, which is considered as a barometer for cloud-computing, reported a better-than-expected profit and revenue for the fourth quarter helped by strong demand for its cloud-based sales and marketing software services. The company's net loss widened to $51.4 million, or 7 cents per share, in the quarter ended Jan. 31, from a loss of $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, a year earlier.

• Angry Birds-dependent games maker Rovio swings to annual profit: innish mobile games and animation studio Rovio Entertainment swung to an annual profit in 2016 as its Angry Birds movie release helped boost its game sales and tackle competition from new challengers such as Nintendo Co's Pokemon GO. However, analysts noted the private-held company must find new franchises and reduce its dependence on the Angry Birds brand to succeed in the highly competitive game industry. Following years of falling earnings, job cuts and divestments, Rovio's revenue increased 34 percent in 2016 to 190 million euros ($201 million). The operating result improved to a profit of 17.5 million euros from a loss of 21 million in 2015.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 28

• Uber’s SVP of engineering is out after he did not disclose he left Google in a dispute over a sexual harassment allegation: Amit Singhal has left his job at Uber as its SVP of engineering because he did not disclose to the car-hailing company that he left Google a year earlier after top executives there informed him of an allegation of sexual harassment from an employee that an internal investigation had found “credible.” Singhal was asked to resign by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick this morning. Uber execs found out about the situation after Recode informed them of the chain of events between Singhal and the search giant this week. Indeed. According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story. But, after the Christmas holidays, he then decided to resign himself after a 15-year career there. Sources said that Google was prepared to fire Singhal over the allegations after looking into the incident, but that it did not have to do so after he resigned.

• Tesla plunges another 5 percent on fears of Model 3 delays: Shares of Tesla dropped on Monday after a downgrade by Goldman Sachs, bringing the electric carmaker's decline to 11 percent since its quarterly report last week stoked worries about how much cash it is using to launch its Model 3 sedan. Concerns that Tesla's Model 3 production this year might be delayed, as well as expectations the company will sell stock to raise $1.7 billion, led Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino to downgrade Tesla to "sell" from "neutral". That helped push the stock down 4.83 percent to $244.52 in morning trade on Monday. If it closes at that level, it will have been the worst three-day performance for the shares since June last year. Even with the recent drop, Tesla has surged more than 30 percent since early December and is up 14 percent in 2017. Tesla investors and short sellers disagree about whether the company will become a carbon-free energy and transportation heavyweight or be overtaken first by older, deep-pocketed manufacturers such as General Motors.

• SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018: SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, they would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. Mr. Musk made the announcement on Monday in a telephone news conference. He said two private individuals approached the company to see if SpaceX would be willing to send them on a weeklong cruise, which would fly past the surface of the moon — but not land — and continue outward before Earth’s gravity turned the spacecraft around and brought it back for a landing. “This would do a long loop around the moon,” Mr. Musk said. The company is aiming to launch this moon mission in late 2018, he said. The two people would spend about a week inside one of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsules, launched on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft would be automated, but the travelers would undergo training for emergencies, Mr. Musk said. He did not say how much the travelers would pay for the ride, but the Falcon Heavy itself has a list price of $90 million. He said the two would-be private space travelers wished to remain anonymous for now, and he declined to describe them except to say that they knew each other. In response to a reporter’s question, Mr. Musk did say the two were not Hollywood people.

• PebblePost raises $15M to combine online data and old-school mail: PebblePost is betting that there’s a big marketing opportunity in printed postcards and catalogs. The startup is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The round was led by RRE Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners and Tribeca Ventures. RRE’s Jim Robinson is joining the PebblePost board of directors. PebblePost describes its offering as “programmatic direct mail.” The idea is to send customized follow-ups to potential customers based on their online activity — so if you’re browsing a retailer’s website, you could get a postcard a few days later highlighting some of their products and maybe offering some discounts. CEO Lewis Gersh was previously a founder at seed investment firm Metamorphic Ventures (now known as Compound), where he said he built “probably the largest portfolio of retargeters of any fund in the country” — namely, companies that use your online behavior to target you for ads. (The ad companies he backed include iSocket, Mass Relevance and Movable Ink.) However, he said digital advertising has become “the new junk mail,” where marketers have to get more and more aggressive in the hopes of getting eyeballs and clicks. One of the problems, Gersh said, is that ads are often shown when someone is “100 percent not disposed to action — and worse.” In contrast, he said that when someone gets physical mail, they usually stick all the relevant stuff into a pile to deal with when they have more time. That means that when they actually go through their mail, they’re more likely to be receptive to a brand’s message — and maybe even ready to do some shopping. To be clear, you’re not necessarily going to get a postcard talking about the exact product you were looking at — Gersh acknowledged that would be “annoying” and “spooky.” Instead, you might see other products that are in the same category, serving as a “gentle, relevant reminder.” The approach seems to be working, with an average of 7 to 10 percent of PebblePost mail resulting in a purchase.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 27

• Ola raises $330 mn at $3.5-bn valuation: Ola, India’s largest taxi aggregator, has raised $330 million in fresh funding, at a valuation of about $3.5 billion, from Japanese investor SoftBank and two other existing ones. The round saw Ola’s valuation dropping 30 per cent from a peak of $5 billion, as global rival Uber significantly stepped up its challenge to the Indian firm.

• Google and Uber Are Fighting Over Lidar Technology. What Is It? Lidar is a radar-like system that uses lasers instead of radio waves to build a 3-D image of the surrounding landscape. Since satellite navigation systems are only accurate to within 16 feet and can be easily flummoxed by high-rise and glass-fronted buildings, autonomous vehicles require an array of other sensors to position themselves precisely and maintain awareness of nearby pedestrians, vehicles and other objects. Lidar comprises a series of rotating, stacked lasers that shoot out at different angles. Each layer is called a channel, and is made up of two laser beams. The signal from each individual channel creates one contour line, and together, those lines generate a 3-D image of the surrounding environment. That means that, the more lasers in each stack, the higher the resolution. Velodyne, for instance, manufactures products with 16, 32 and 64 laser channels. The main hurdle to lidar becoming a widely adopted technology in mass-produced cars is cost. A 64-channel unit from Velodyne can cost more than $50,000, while the lower end 16-channel product sells for $7,999. Since a car might require several lidar units, it quickly makes the cost prohibitive for anything but the most expensive luxury cars. Velodyne and competitors such as Quanergy Systems Inc. are working to reduce the price. That would be accelerated by major orders for mass market cars.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 24

• Alphabet’s Waymo is suing Otto and Uber for allegedly stealing the design of a key self-driving system: Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving car unit, is suing Otto — the self-driving trucking company co-founded by former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski and quickly acquired by Uber — for allegedly stealing the company’s proprietary design for its laser-based radar system. According to Waymo, before Levandowski left what was then a part of Google’s moonshot labs, he downloaded 14,000 “highly confidential” files to an external hard drive, including the design for the company’s lidar circuit board. The company decided to perform a forensic investigation of Levandowski’s former company computer after a Waymo employee was inadvertently copied on an email from a lidar supplier with the subject line “Otto Files.” The email was being sent to a list of people that Waymo believes were Uber employees. Attached to the email were drawings of Otto’s lidar circuit board. It looked just like Waymo’s design, the company alleged in the suit filed today, “the design of which had been downloaded by Mr. Levandowski before his resignation.” “The Replicated Board reflects Waymo’s highly confidential proprietary LiDAR technology and Waymo trade secrets,” the complaint reads. “Moreover, the Replicated Board is specifically designed to be used in conjunction with many other Waymo trade secrets and in the context of overall LiDAR systems covered by Waymo patents.” To then verify its suspicions, Waymo filed a public records request to the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and Department of Motor Vehicles in February for Otto’s communications with the departments. In that correspondence, Otto indicated that the company was using custom lidar that it built in-house. Waymo cites this as evidence that Uber and Otto are using a circuit board that “bears a striking resemblance” to Waymo’s. Lidars are seen by most as a crucial piece of self-driving technology. The radar shoots lasers at objects in order to detect them and works closely with the cameras and normal radars to create a thorough image of the car’s surroundings.

• Thistle launches meal kits to make nutritious baby food at home: Food delivery startup Thistle was never in the business of making meal kits, those boxes of pre-measured ingredients and recipes to help customers cook at home. The startup’s married cofounders, Ashwin Cheriyan and Shiri Avnery, thought that prepared meals, ready-to-heat or raw and ready-to-eat, were a better fit for their busy customers. Meal kits, they said, felt like time consuming and frustrating cooking lessons when they tried them personally. The Thistle Baby meal kit consists of vacuum-sealed bags of apportioned, organic ingredients, flash-frozen to preserve flavor. A parent would open up the pouch, and steam and puree it however they like, then add spices also provided in the meal kit at levels they or their kids like best. The company says its prices work out to $2 per toddler or infant meal. Before now, the startup was trialing its Thistle Baby service with an invitation-only group of subscribers. As of next week, Thistle Baby will become available to any customers who sign up for it.

• Baidu's Sales Tops Estimates as It Pushes New Businesses: Baidu Inc. posted quarterly results that topped analysts’ estimates, as China’s biggest search engine pushes into new businesses such as news aggregation to overcome government restrictions on web advertising. Revenue for the fourth quarter came to 18.21 billion yuan ($2.62 billion), compared with estimates for 18.17 billion yuan, Baidu said in a statement. Net income, adjusted for certain items, was 4.61 billion yuan, compared with the 2.52 billion yuan average of analyst estimates. Shares in the company rose more than 1 percent in after-hours trading.

• Snapchat Founders’ Grip Tightened After a Spat With an Early Investor: One of the biggest questions that Snap has faced from potential investors is why its two founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, have retained such a hold on voting power in the company — power that public shareholders will not gain. Exploring that question helps explain how years-ago dealings with venture capitalists helped lead to this point. At the heart of that is a Lightspeed venture capitalist, Jeremy Liew, and the terms he embedded in his 2012 investment in what was then known as Snapchat. The terms gave Mr. Liew outsize power over the company’s future financing round. That ended up irking Snapchat’s chief executive, Mr. Spiegel, who took steps to reassert control over the company.The end result was a largely severed connection. Today, Lightspeed is listed in Snap’s I.P.O. prospectus as the company’s second biggest venture investor, with 86.6 million shares, or a stake of more than 8 percent, and Mr. Liew has appeared on television shows, podcasts and in technology publications to discuss Snap. Yet he and Snap no longer have close ties, and Mr. Spiegel has not had meetings or hung out with Mr. Liew since the early investment rounds.Mr. Liew and Mr. Spiegel met in March 2012, when Mr. Liew used Facebook to contact Mr. Spiegel, a Stanford University student who had recently started Snapchat with Mr. Murphy, a fraternity brother. At the meeting that followed, Mr. Spiegel said his father was tired of paying Snapchat’s bills. Mr. Liew offered to help. Mr. Liew offered to invest $485,000 in Snapchat, which Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy accepted. The investment was completed in less than two weeks. What Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy paid less attention to were the exact terms that Mr. Liew embedded in the deal. Those terms gave Lightspeed the right of first refusal to invest in a future round of funding and the ability to increase its share of the company that round. Lightspeed could also take 50 percent of the future round. Such terms effectively let Lightspeed have veto power over the next investment at Snap. It also made Snap an unattractive investment for other investors — who would not be able to take as large a stake as they would like in the company.Mr. Spiegel was unhappy with the outcome. Over the years, he has alluded to his early dissatisfaction with venture investors. In a 2015 interview at a start-up awards show, he said, “when we were first getting started and took financing, our lawyers would take us through the documents and they’d say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s all standard.’” “I’ve since learned that standard means either the person who’s walking you through documents doesn’t understand them or you could be getting taken advantage of,” Mr. Spiegel continued. “When someone says something is standard, just ask why, and why and why and why, until you really understand intricately, I think, how the deal is structured.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 23

• Snapdeal orders mass lay-off: Once a success story of the burgeoning start-up ecosystem, Gurgaon-based online marketplace Snapdeal on Wednesday said it would cut more jobs, stop paying its founders and sell its digital wallet FreeCharge.  Co-founder Kunal Bahl, in an email to employees on Wednesday, finally accepted tough decisions— including letting go of people and a full pay cut for him— are being taken. It has also put on sale FreeCharge and is in talks with Naspers, the South Africa-based internet group, to sell it for $300 million. Though the company refused to divulge the exact number of people to be sacked, sources close to the development said 800 employees would be laid off over the next few days. Sources confirmed 100 were asked to go on the day itself, within a few minutes of Bahl’s email. “By the time we finished reading the mail, HR (human resource) called us to their office. They said we would get three months of severance pay. We said yes, as that was the only option on the table,” said an employee who was sacked on Wednesday. According to sources, employees from marketing, ad-tech, category, digital marketing, engineering team, catalogues, have all been asked to leave. Bahl and his co-founder Rohit Bansal said they will not take pay henceforth. Job cuts at the beleaguered start-up continued, as it struggled to raise fresh funds and compete against larger rivals such as Flipkart and Amazon. SoftBank-backed Snapdeal would have 1,300 people left on its rolls after the current round of retrenchment— a cut of 87 per cent since its peak of 10,000 in February 2016.

• Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture: Interviews with more than 30 current and former Uber employees, as well as reviews of internal emails, chat logs and tape-recorded meetings, paint a picture of an often unrestrained workplace culture. Among the most egregious accusations from employees, who either witnessed or were subject to incidents and who asked to remain anonymous because of confidentiality agreements and fear of retaliation: One Uber manager groped female co-workers’ breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas. A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate during a heated confrontation in a meeting. Another manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee’s head in with a baseball bat.

• New details emerge about Palantir’s custom software for spy agencies: A new report by The Intercept provides some compelling specifics on collaboration between Palo Alto’s secretive big data shop Palantir and the intelligence agencies that it keeps on its client roster. While some broad strokes are known about Palantir’s relationship with spy agencies, the finer points seldom see daylight. That guarantee of secrecy no doubt aids the company’s growth into 2017, though its cozy relationship with a presidency keen on implementing aggressive policies with big opportunities for big data certainly can’t hurt, either. The report goes into more detail on the development of two particular software systems, one called Kite and one known as XKEYSCORE Helper. Through Kite, implemented by GCHQ, Palantir offered deep customization: “Out of the box, Kite was able to handle a variety of types of data (including dates, images, geolocations, etc.), but GCHQ was free to extend it by writing custom fields for complicated types of data the agency might need to analyze. The import tools were designed to handle a variety of use cases, including static data sets, databases that were updated frequently, and data stores controlled by third parties to which GCHQ was able to gain access.” Designed in apparent collaboration with Palantir, XKEYSCORE Helper sought to make data obtained through the NSA’s muscular XKEYSCORE program more digestible and offered a way to port it into Palantir’s more analyst-friendly interface: “This collaborative environment also produced a piece of software called “XKEYSCORE Helper,” a tool programmed with Palantir (and thoroughly stamped with its logo) that allowed analysts to essentially import data from the NSA’s pipeline, investigate and visualize it through Palantir, and then presumably pass it to fellow analysts or Five Eyes intelligence partners.”

• Fitbit's Sales Plummet as Device's Popularity Fades: Fitbit Inc.’s fourth-quarter revenue fell 19 percent, hurt by fading consumer demand for its once-popular wearable fitness trackers. Revenue in the quarter -- which includes the holiday shopping season -- dropped to $573.8 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement. Fitbit in Januaryhad forecast sales of $572 million to $580 million. Before then, analysts had been predicting $736.4 million, the average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company’s loss excluding certain costs was 56 cents a share. Analysts on average had projected a loss of 53 cents a share. Chief Executive Officer James Park has been trying to prove that Fitbit is more than just a maker of trendy gadgets. The appeal of its wristbands has waned with consumers as the company faces competition from Apple Inc.’s higher-end watch and cheaper Chinese models, and last month Fitbit said it would eliminate 6 percent of its workforce. Park is seeking to diversify the business, including expanding into the smartwatch category and pushing its corporate-wellness offerings. His goal is to turn Fitbit into a digital-health company -- one that relies less on consumers and focuses on selling to the health-care industry -- but that strategy will take years to unfold.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 22

• Rakuten Surges on Share Buyback at Half the Price of 2015 Issue: Rakuten Inc. surged the most in more than a decade after the Japanese e-commerce operator announced plans to buy back as much as 100 billion yen ($881 million) of stock at a significant discount to a share issue just 20 months ago. Shares climbed 11 percent to 1,149 yen in early Tokyo trade, headed for the biggest gain since 2004. Before today, the stock had fallen 46 percent since the 2015 issue. Back then, Rakuten sold almost 100 million shares for 1,905.5 yen apiece, raising about 181 billion yen. The stock closed on Tuesday at 1,032.5 yen, a drop of 46 percent over the period. Like other Japanese companies sitting on a comfortable cash pile, Rakuten has enough on its balance sheet to fund the repurchase: 548 billion yen as of end-December. The buyback was prompted as shares were undervalued, Mikitani told the Nikkei newspaper in an interview. He said he there’s a big discrepancy between the current stock price and how Rakuten sees its corporate value. Rakuten has increasingly positioned itself as a provider of financial services in Japan, in addition to its online marketplace. It also owns the Viber messaging application, which is ranked seventh behind WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Tencent’s QQ, according to Statista.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 21

• Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee: The chief executive of Uber on Sunday opened an internal investigation into claims of sexual harassment made by a former engineer at the company. The engineer, Susan Fowler, said that she was sexually harassed by her direct supervisor during her time at Uber and that after she reported those claims to the human resources department, they were ignored. She gave her account in a lengthy post on her personal blog on Sunday. “It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR,” Ms. Fowler wrote. “Upper management told me that he ‘was a high performer’ (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.” Ms. Fowler left Uber in December and this year joined Stripe, a payments processing start-up. Ms. Fowler’s story is particularly resonant because of Uber’s reputation for having an intense workplace culture with high turnover. Hours after Ms. Fowler’s post, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said it was the first time the issue had come to his attention. He said he had instructed Liane Hornsey, the company’s recently hired chief of human resources, “to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations.”

• Texas Oil Fields Rebound From Price Lull, but Jobs Are Left Behind: Oil and gas workers have traditionally had some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs — just the type that President Trump has vowed to preserve and bring back. But the West Texas oil fields, where activity is gearing back up as prices rebound, illustrate how difficult it will be to meet that goal. As in other industries, automation is creating a new demand for high-tech workers — sometimes hundreds of miles away in a control center — but their numbers don’t offset the ranks of field hands no longer required to sling chains and lift iron. Roughly 163,000 oil jobs were lost nationally from the 2014 peak, or about 30 percent of the total, while oil prices plummeted, at one point by as much as 70 percent. The job losses just in Texas, the most productive oil-producing state, totaled 98,000. Several thousand workers have come back to work in recent months as the price of oil has begun to rise again, but energy experts say that between a third and a half of the workers who lost their jobs are not returning. Many have migrated to construction or even jobs in renewable energy, like wind power. “People have left the industry, and they are not coming back,” said Michael Dynan, vice president for portfolio and strategic development at Schramm, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of drilling rigs. “If it’s a repetitive task, it can be automated, and I don’t need someone to do that. I can get a computer to do that.” Indeed, computers now direct drill bits that were once directed manually. The wireless technology taking hold across the oil patch allows a handful of geoscientists and engineers to monitor the drilling and completion of multiple wells at a time — onshore or miles out to sea — and supervise immediate fixes when something goes wrong, all without leaving their desks. It is a world where rigs walk on their own legs and sensors on wells alert headquarters to a leak or loss of pressure, reducing the need for a technician to check. And despite all the lost workers, United States oil production is galloping upward, to nine million barrels a day from 8.6 million in September. Nationwide, with a bit more than one-third as many rigs operating as in 2014, production is not even down 10 percent from record levels.

• Snap arrives in London to woo skeptical investors ahead of IPO: Snap Inc, owner of popular messaging app Snapchat, kicked off its first investor roadshow on Monday, looking to persuade London money managers to back its initial public offering in the face of concerns about its growth prospects, valuation and corporate governance. The U.S. company, which has yet to make a profit, is targeting a valuation of between $19.5 billion and $22.3 billion from listing on the New York Stock Exchange, after cutting its initial target of $20 billion-$25 billion last week following investor feedback. Investors attending Monday's event said Snap's 26-year-old Chief Executive Evan Spiegel gave a sleek presentation. However, they were disappointed there were no projections on the company's future revenues or advertising share - an indication of how quickly Snap thinks it can make money from its huge user base. "That's the million dollar question and we won't find out for some time," said one potential backer on his way out from the hour-long event where Spiegel ditched his usual casual wear and wore a suit with no tie. Few U.S. firms aside from Apple have made big profits on hardware, and camera and wearable gadget makers have much lower valuations than Snap is seeking. Most of the questions related to how the company plans to manage its engagement with advertisers and users, and monetize that better, according to people who were in the room. Its responses won over some potential investors. "Management did a good show, they were very convincing," said one attendee. Some fund managers have said they will stay away from Snap given its decision to adopt a three class share structure - the first of its kind - that will mean shareholders who buy in through the IPO will not have any voting rights. Instead Spiegel and his co-founder Bobby Murphy will have the right to 10 votes for every share, and existing investors one vote for each of their shares. "My view would be investors should tread with caution here, the fact the shares will carry no voting rights would be a major concern for me from a governance perspective," Richard Saldanha, global equities fund manager at Aviva Investors, said ahead of the roadshow. Aviva manages 318 billion pounds across a range of asset classes. Mike Fox, head of sustainable investments at Royal London Asset Management, said the inability to vote against a company at its annual general meeting was a "major red flag" and he would not be taking part in the IPO.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 20

• People love GIFs — but turning GIFs into ad dollars is taking some time: About 15 months ago, Tenor was trying to get its GIF search engine onto as many phones as possible. So it did the logical thing — it partnered with businesses that were already on a lot of phones. The startup, which offers a universal GIF keyboard that you can download to your phone, also signed deals with Messenger, iMessage and Kik to put its technology inside their messaging apps so users could easily search through Tenor’s library of GIFs (which are short looping video clips), and send them off to friends inside of private conversations. The deals appear to have worked: Tenor, which rebranded in October from Riffsy, says people are using its GIF search engine 200 million times per day, up from 50 million daily searches 15 months ago. It has 200 million monthly active users, a number that has also quadrupled in the same amount of time. As people are sending more and more messages, they’re sending more and more GIFs. But despite user growth, Tenor is still dealing with the same question Recode was asking 15 months ago: Are GIFs a real business? Tenor CEO David McIntosh remains adamant that they are, though his company still isn’t making any revenue despite all the messaging deals. As of October, Giphy, a competitor recently valued at $600 million, wasn’t bringing in any revenue, either. Turning those views into dollars may still be a ways off. McIntosh says that Tenor has just 22 employees, and needs to build out a sales organization. It also needs to create interest in what McIntosh believes is a new kind of targeting. “The challenge is that this is a brand-new format that has to be invented,” he said. “There’s no ad inventory today around marketers that want to purchase against emotion, and have assets that they want to buy against.”

• These University of Washington professors are teaching a course on bullshit: Two University of Washington professors are teaching a course to help students “think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences,” according to the introduction to the course. The 160-seat seminar, titled “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data,” begins in late March and continues for roughly 10 weeks. Members of the general public can follow the course syllabus, including readings and recordings of lectures, at the course’s website. At the end of the course, students should be able to “provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit,” according to the syllabus. One area of big problems: Big Data (one of the buzzwords of the century, which at its simplest refers to big sets of data, but has likely also been overhyped in its potential for revolution). He said he noticed methods of statistics meant for smaller data sets being applied to “big” data sets with millions or billions of examples, where it’s easy to force a correlation that isn’t necessarily accurate. He also observed situations where machine-learning algorithms were “overfitting” data. Basically, you can have an algorithm that so specifically matches a particular data set, meaning it reflects even errors or noise, it fails when applied to another data set where you would otherwise expect it to work. You would normally want an algorithm that is sufficiently general to fit more than one data set. The syllabus went viral after it was posted last month, according to a Friday story in Stat News — the instructors’ email inboxes were overflowing, and some book offers were even made. The course reportedly filled all open seats within the first minute of online registration at UW.

• Expedia and Amazon Double Down on Britain: As politicians and businesses wrestle with potential changes to U.K. border controls, one of the world’s largest online travel booking companies has decided to add hundreds of new staff in London, and it’s not alone in looking to expand. Expedia Inc. will expand its U.K. office by 138,000 square feet, or to roughly twice the size of its existing space, and has signed a new lease that runs until 2030, according to a company statement. The company currently has about 1,400 staff at its London hub. Amazon.com Inc. is also hiring for its U.K.-based voice-recognition technology, cloud computing centers and Prime Air division, it said in a statement. The moves come as the U.K technology industry frets about the fallout from the nation’s decision to leave the European Union by 2019, even as global tech companies continue to consider London the region’s major hub. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 17

• Snap lowers valuation expectations in highly awaited IPO: Snap Inc, owner of the popular messaging app Snapchat, set a lower-than-expected valuation range on Thursday, amid mounting investor concern over its unproven business model, slowing growth and tight founder control. The company, which filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, was widely expected to be valued at between $20 billion and $25 billion. However it said on Thursday it was targeting a valuation between $19.5 billion and $22.3 billion, ahead of an investor roadshow due to start on Monday in London. The lower valuation range reflected initial investor feedback. Snap wants to ensure there is sufficient demand for shares of the company that it trades up on its first day in public market. Investors have been poring over the filing for Snap's upcoming IPO to assess whether the still-unprofitable company will be the next Facebook, which has figured out how to make money from its social media platform, or if it will be more like Twitter, which is struggling to achieve the same goal.

• Apple Vowed to Revolutionize Television. An Inside Look at Why It Hasn’t: Apple has essentially settled for turning the television set into a giant iPhone: a cluster of apps with a store. "That's not what I signed up for," says one of the people, who requested anonymity to talk freely about internal company matters. "I signed up for revolutionary. We got evolutionary." Gene Munster, who covered Apple for more than a decade as a Piper Jaffray analyst and now runs Loup Ventures, echoes the criticism. "Apple TV begs the question: Why does Apple do hobbies?" he says. "Either do it right or don't do it at all."The Apple TV's history is a study in gradualism. Previewed by Steve Jobs in 2006, the first box was designed simply to stream iTunes video from a Mac to a TV set. The next version, launched in the fall of 2010, let users stream content from the internet. The latest box was announced in September 2015, a few months later than originally scheduled. Widely considered an improvement by consumers and product reviewers, the Apple TV features the App Store, voice control and a glass remote that enables motion-controlled gaming, which for example lets players use the remote like a steering wheel for a car-racing title.  But the latest Apple TV sells for $149, more than twice as much as its predecessor, $60 more than Amazon's Fire TV and $20 more than the priciest Roku. What's more, little about the viewing experience has changed. Apple TV users still have to buy an individual episode via the iTunes Store, pay extra for services like Hulu, or download an app tied to a particular channel and log in with an existing cable subscription. The Apple TV's software is also less ambitious than originally envisioned. The current model features an iPhone-like app grid, but designers had prototyped more novel interfaces. One idea, dubbed "Intentions" internally, put the four tabs in the center of the screen: three for the Apple TV's main content types (video, music, and gaming) and one for everything else. Another idea: letting viewers pull up previews of content by hovering on each icon (a feature currently reserved for apps in the top row). To a certain extent, the Apple TV is handcuffed by its parent's addiction to fat margins. Apple is constitutionally allergic to losing money on a product—even if it can make up the difference by selling content.

• Snapdeal’s cash squeeze adds to funding pressure: Jasper Infotech which runs Snapdeal, had about Rs1,100-1,200 crore cash left in the bank and Rs300-400 crore at its payments unit Freecharge at the end of 2016, making it critical for the company to secure funds immediately, according to official documents and three people familiar with the matter. Snapdeal has gone into cash-conserve mode after talks for a bridge round of funding with existing investor SoftBank were deferred because of differences over valuation, the three people cited above said. Snapdeal is still in talks with at least two other existing investors, the people said, declining to be identified. Snapdeal’s dwindling cash reserves crimp its ability to compete with rivals Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm and also raise questions about how long it can survive without fresh capital.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 16

• Uber Gives Restless Employees a Way to Cash Out: Many longtime employees of Uber Technologies Inc. are multi-millionaires, at least on paper. But with no initial public offering in sight and a strict policy blocking most private share sales, they’re stuck in limbo. However, there’s a little-known option available to Uber loyalists looking to cash out. Those who work at the San Francisco company for at least four years can sell as much as 10 percent of their shares, people familiar with the matter said. The program has a built-in incentive to entice staff to stick around. The seller gets paid out over many months and must remain at Uber during that time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the program publicly. The formal plan, which has been in effect for a couple years but was previously unreported, caps buybacks at well below $10 million per employee, one of the people said. Fewer than 200 of the some 10,000 people employed by Uber currently qualify for the program, the person said. Although well-compensated by any rational standard, startup employees often take pay cuts compared with what they could receive at Facebook Inc. or Google. They join knowing a chunk of their pay is tied to the fortunes of their employer and could become worthless. What many workers hadn’t bargained for was how long they’d have to wait to find out what would happen. Airbnb Inc. and Pinterest Inc. were founded around the same time as Uber, achieved valuations in excess of $10 billion and yet remain private. But the two companies have at times allowed their employees to sell shares to interested buyers and even facilitated some of those transactions. Uber, the world’s most valuable tech startup at $69 billion, has been more restrictive about who gets to buy its shares.

• Dubai is planning to launch autonomous, one-passenger drone taxis this summer: Pilotless drones capable of carrying a person will begin to soar through Dubai’s airspace this July, according to an announcement made Monday by Mattar Al Tayer, the chief of Dubai’s Roads & Transportation Agency, at the World Government Summit. The country is turning to a Chinese-made drone, the Ehang 184, which can carry a passenger weighing up to 220 pounds for about a 30-minute trip. The egg-shaped aircraft hovers using eight propellers — two attached to each of the drone’s four arms. Test flights have already been conducted in Dubai, and the taxi service is expected to launch in July, says Al Tayer.

• Facebook is rolling out job postings and applications: Facebook is entering the job market. The social network will now let employers post jobs directly to their Page, and users can apply for those jobs on Facebook. Applications are pre-populated with a user’s Facebook data (though it can be altered), then sent to the employer via Messenger. Facebook hopes employers and prospective employees will then use Messenger to communicate throughout the courting process. Posting a job is free for employers, and there's no limit to how many posts a Page can have. Businesses were already posting jobs to their Pages, according to Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's VP of ads and its business platform. The hope is that now it'll be easier to find those postings and apply for them. The news is not so great for existing job platforms like LinkedIn, which charges recruiters to post and promote jobs on its platform. Facebook isn't necessarily the first place you think of when looking for a new job, but it could certainly offer some competition to LinkedIn and has a much larger user base. The new feature will start to roll out beginning Wednesday, but only in the U.S. and Canada.

• TripAdvisor revenue misses estimates, shares slip: Travel review website TripAdvisor reported lower-than-expected quarterly revenue, hurt by a fall in display advertisements on its websites and a drop in subscription revenue. Shares of the company, which owns websites such as TripAdvisor.com and Oyster.com, fell 5.1 percent to $49.99 in extended trading on Wednesday. TripAdvisor's total revenue in the fourth quarter was $316 million. The company's revenue from display-based advertising and subscription fell 2.8 percent to $69 million. Needham, Massachusetts-based TripAdvisor, which aggregates reviews and opinions about destinations and hotels, said its referral and transaction revenue was $154 million, flat from last year. TripAdvisor's referral revenue has been under pressure since the company rolled out its instant booking feature, which allows booking of hotel rooms directly through the company's website. 

• Verizon close to Yahoo deal, price cut of $250-350 million: sources: Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) is close to a revised deal to buy Yahoo Inc's (YHOO.O) core internet business for $250 million to $350 million less than the original agreed price of $4.83 billion, according to a source briefed on the matter. Since last year, Verizon had been trying to persuade Yahoo to amend the terms of the acquisition agreement to reflect the economic damage from two cyber attacks. A source told Reuters that the deal, which could come as soon as this week, will entail Verizon and Yahoo sharing the liability from potential lawsuits related to the data breaches.