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.