Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 31

• YouTube creators have complained about declines in ad revenue: Some YouTube creators might get less money from Google, at least temporarily, as the company adds new controls for advertisers in the wake of an ad controversy that erupted two weeks ago. A number of big-name advertisers suspended ads on YouTube last week and the week before after discovering their ads were making money for videos containing hate speech or supporting terrorism. Google has responded by promising greater transparency and saying it will be more aggressive in ensuring brand safety of ad placements. “If you’re seeing fluctuations in your revenue over the next few weeks, it may be because we’re fine tuning our ads systems to address these concerns,” reads a YouTube community manager post from Thursday. The changes stem from tweaks to the ads system, rather than any revenue loss that might have come after advertisers pulled their business, according to a source close to the situation. YouTube could lose $750 million in revenue this year over advertisers halting business, according to analyst firm Nomura Instinet. Some YouTube creators appear to have lost ad revenue altogether, which the post addresses: “If you think your video was demonetized in error, request an appeal by clicking on the yellow $ icon next to the video in Video Manager.”

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes history by launching a ‘flight-proven’ rocket: From a distance, it looked like any other rocket at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, a soaring tower of thrust and power, ready to blast off into orbit. Upon closer inspection, though, there were signs of something different about this rocket. The Falcon 9’s first-stage booster was not as clean and shiny as they usually are. It was just a touch dull, showing, ever so slightly, the scorched wear from its first launch, almost a year ago — a “flight-proven” rocket, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX likes to call it. On Thursday evening, almost one year after it had previously flown the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX launched it again. The launch, at 6:27 p.m., marked the first time that a rocket had flown a payload to orbit, landed vertically and then been reused. The flight signaled an important landmark, capping years of work and some fiery theatrics of boosters screaming back from space only to explode in failed attempts to land on ships at sea. In December 2015, SpaceX was able to land its first rocket on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. A few months later, the company did it again, this time at sea. Since then, it has made landing rockets as exciting — or more so — than the 3-2-1, bone-rattling liftoffs of fire and smoke that have reignited interest in space exploration. After the successful launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space.”

• Embattled Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey leaves Facebook: Palmer Luckey is out at Facebook. The Oculus co-founder, who helped kickstart the recent VR craze with a prototype headset built out of his parents’ garage, has left the company after a year that heralded the launch of the consumer Oculus Rift but also a number of lawsuits and a pro-Trump meme scandal. Oculus has confirmed the report of Luckey’s departure, first spotted by UploadVR, in a statement to TechCrunch that reads about as much as a eulogy as it does a farewell. In an era filled with seemingly countless examples of “bro” founders emerging from top universities and starting companies with their frat brothers, Luckey appeared to be a breath of fresh air. The home-schooled college dropout was a tinkerer who frequented message boards asking for help taking apart and rebuilding game consoles in his parents’ garage before expanding to a deep interest in 3D screens and head-mounted displays. This fascination eventually brought him to encounter legendary game developer John Carmack, who helped the young Luckey gain the attention of the gaming community after showcasing one of his VR headset prototypes at a major gaming conference. The excitement led to a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign that later brought the interest of some major investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Formation 8. Facebook acquired Oculus in March of 2014 for $2 billion. Luckey has not commented on what exactly he earned from the deal, but Forbes pins his net worth at $730 million. Luckey’s departure follows a lengthy period of absence from public view brought about by a Daily Beast piece revealing his involvement and funding of a pro-Trump troll group called Nimble America. News of his support came during a time when very few figures in Silicon Valley were publicly showing support for candidate Trump, the most notable being Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook who started the VC firm Founders Fund, which backed Oculus, as well.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 30

• Samsung launches Galaxy S8 and dreams of recovery from Note 7: Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S8 flagship smartphone as it battles to regain the market leadership it lost to Apple after the embarrassing withdrawal of the fire-prone Note 7s. Boasting some of the largest wrap-around screens ever made, the long-awaited S8 is the South Korean technology company's first new premium phone since its September recall of all Galaxy Note 7 smartphones equipped with fire-prone batteries. Samsung halted their sales in 10 markets, and the phones were banned from aircraft in the United States, denting a revival of the firm's mobile business. Two versions of the Galaxy S8, code-named Dream internally, were launched at a media event in New York on Wednesday, with 6.2-inch (15.75 cm) and 5.8-inch curved screens - the largest to date for Samsung's premium smartphones. They will go on sale on April 21.The S8 features Samsung's new artificial intelligence service, Bixby, with functions including a voice-commanded assistant system similar to Apple's Siri. There is also a new facial recognition application that lets users unlock their phones by looking at them. "The Galaxy S8 is the most important phone for Samsung in a decade and every aspect will be under the microscope following the Note 7 recall," said Ben Wood, a veteran smartphone industry analyst with UK-based CCS Insight.

• Amazon is shutting down Diapers.com — whose founder is now at war with Amazon: Amazon said on Wednesday that it is shutting down Quidsi, one of its largest-ever acquisitions, which runs six shopping sites, including Diapers.com, Soap.com and Wag.com. The shutdown will result in layoffs of 263 people, according to a New Jersey state filing. But Bloomberg, which first reported the news, said some of these employees would be able to apply for new positions at Amazon. Amazon bought Quidsi almost six years ago to the day in a deal valued at around $545 million — the company’s fourth-largest purchase as of now. The acquisition was the culmination of an intense price battle between the companies that were threatening to push Jersey City-based Quidsi out of business. Quidsi’s co-founder and then-CEO Marc Lore worked at Amazon for a few years following the deal, but it is an open secret in the industry that he did not enjoy his time there. He went on to launch an Amazon competitor, Jet.com, in 2015, which he sold last year to Walmart for $3.3 billion.

• It sounds like Munchery’s early investors are screwed: Munchery, an on-demand food delivery startup that has already raised more than $120 million, is reportedly looking to raise an additional $15 million in funding that would force a recapitalization of the company, Bloomberg reports. Munchery reportedly has raised more than $5 million in this new financing. As part of the recapitalization, Munchery issued shares to new investors in the form of a convertible note, which can later be exchanged for equity in the result of another equity raise or liquidity event. One person told Bloomberg that the valuation on the note is capped at $80 million. Munchery’s last round of funding was an $85 million Series C, which valued the company at around $300 million. So Munchery wouldn’t be valued at more than about a quarter of what it once was. This new deal essentially wipes out the stakes of pre-existing investors and early Munchery employees. Recapitalizations generally happen when the company can’t find outside investors to drive the valuation further up, so it resets the cap table and starts from scratch. Munchery has had a rough last 12 months, between scathing reports of the company wasting an average of 16% of the food it makes, laying off 30 employees, and burning through most of the money it’s raised.

• Pandora is in trouble, and Big Music is surprisingly sad about that: Pandora’s days seem numbered. And the music business isn’t happy about that. Pandora, once a music streaming pioneer, now looks like a music streaming casualty. While competitors like Spotify and Apple Music are booming, Pandora has been treading water. Pandora’s management is under investor pressure, yet again, to explain why they shouldn’t sell the company. Sirius XM remains, as always, the logical buyer. The new, new thing is that Big Music — the music labels and publishers that dominate the industry — aren’t gleeful about that prospect. That’s a change from years past, when Pandora was the company the music guys loved to hate, because Pandora had figured out how to build a big streaming music service without charging for music, and without making deals with Big Music. Instead, Pandora took advantage of U.S. copyright rules that let them pay a set price for each song they streamed, without ever negotiating with the labels and without ever charging consumers. You will not be surprised to know that the Big Music guys argued that Pandora built a multi-billion dollar business with their stuff without giving them their proper cut. But that was then! Now, things are different in two significant ways: Pandora ended up negotiating licenses directly with the big guys. Pandora now plans to launch a subscription service, which will mirror the ones sold by the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. “They’ve seen the light,” said a Big Music executive, explaining why the industry would like to see Pandora stay afloat.

Daily Tech Snippet: March 29, 2017

• Tencent of China Takes 5 Percent Stake in Tesla: Tencent Holdings, one of China’s internet giants, has acquired a 5 percent stake in Elon Musk’s electric-car maker Tesla, according to a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The purchase of 8.17 million shares makes the Chinese company one of Tesla’s largest shareholders. Tencent, whose internet empire includes businesses as diverse as online games and chat services, paid $1.8 billion for the stake, according to the filing. Shares of Tesla rose 3 percent in early trading in New York. The purchase came as Tesla has recently sought to raise more cash before it begins production of its Model 3, an electric vehicle targeting the mass market. Tesla has previously focused on higher-end electric vehicles that begin around $91,000, and the introduction of the Model 3 will probably represent a significant increase in production for the carmaker. The company expects to make 5,000 Model 3s a week in the fourth quarter, and 10,000 a week at some point in 2018, according to a shareholder letter. This month, Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said it would sell $250 million of common stock and $750 million of convertible senior notes. Tencent controls WeChat, the popular messaging service in China. It also reached a deal last year to take control of Supercell, the maker of the popular Clash of Clans game.

• Silicon Valley Startups Favor IPOs Over Deals as M&A Languishes: Until recently, startups could count on generous private funding, with the associated generous implied valuations, and avoid the perceived hassle of being accountable to public investors. If a company had both exit options on the table -- an IPO or an outright sale -- the sale option looked attractive. The pendulum is starting to swing the other way, according to Lise Buyer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group.The shift is at least partly due to the success of some recent listings, Buyer said. That includes Snap Inc.’s IPO, which was 10 times oversubscribed, people familiar with the matter have said, and has soared as much as 59 percent above its IPO price. Cloud-software maker MuleSoft Inc. jumped 46 percent in its debut this month. “People get excited about the last transaction,” she said. “It’s a bit of, ‘What has the market done for me lately?’” Since September, 17 U.S. technology and communications companies have raised $6.3 billion through IPOs, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, compared with 13 companies that raised $4.6 billion in the year-earlier period. The four new 2017 stocks have gained an average of 31 percent, outpacing the 4.6 percent climb in the S&P 500 Index, the data show. Okta, which was valued at $1.2 billion in its most recent private financing round in 2015, filed for an IPO after about a year-long effort to sell itself. No suitors were willing to pay more than $1 billion to acquire the eight-year-old software maker, people familiar with the matter said.

• BlackRock cuts fees and jobs; stockpicking goes high-tech: BlackRock Inc on Tuesday said it would overhaul its actively managed equities business, cutting jobs, dropping fees and relying more on computers to pick stocks in a move that highlights how difficult it has become for humans to beat the market. The world's biggest money manager has faced active stock fund withdrawals and the revamp is its biggest attempt yet to engineer a turnaround. Last May, BlackRock said it had recruited Mark Wiseman, the head of Canada's biggest public pension fund, to oversee the stockpicking operations after he revamped that fund's operations to embrace data-mining and other technological approaches to investing. BlackRock is rebranding or adjusting investment strategies on about 11 percent of its $275 billion active stock fund business, putting a greater emphasis on technology-driven investing approaches in the largest set of sweeping changes for the business since transformational mergers that allowed it to grow to manage more than $5 trillion in assets. Among the changes, BlackRock is removing some seven traditionalist "Fundamental" portfolio managers from their current assignments, according to a source familiar with the matter. More than 40 employees are being laid off, including some of the portfolio managers, according to another source.

• Facebook pivots into Stories: In its biggest change in a decade, Facebook is evolving from text and link-focused sharing to the visual communication format it admits “Snapchat has really pioneered.” Starting today, all users will soon have access to the new Facebook Camera feature that lets them overlay special effects on photos and videos. They can then share this content to a Snapchat clone called Facebook Stories that appears above News Feed on mobile and works similarly to Instagram’s 24-hour ephemeral slideshows. Users also may share these posts to News Feed, individual friends through the new Facebook Direct private visual messages that disappear once digested or any combination thereof. But really it was the rapid ascent of Instagram Stories to 150 million daily users that he says inspired Facebook to start testing its own Stories in January, and keep expanding it to 12 countries before today’s rollout. That’s the worst news for Snapchat and best news for Facebook since the world’s biggest social network adopted the strategy of copying the competitor that refused its acquisition offer. If Facebook Stories clearly cannibalized News Feed sharing and consumption, it would have to demolish its most popular and lucrative feature to make way for the future where the camera is the new keyboard. And if users saw Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp’s Stories features as uncool clones or redundant as a set, it might have had to limit its attack on Snapchat to just one of its core apps. Instead, Facebook can charge in full-speed, attacking Snap from every angle without much penalty to its existing business. And with its enormous engineering and design teams, plus billions in profit each quarter, it can throw more resources at Camera, Stories and Direct visual messaging than Snap can. That product development strength is on display with today’s launch, and apparent from Facebook’s insistence on showing reporters forthcoming special effects that one-up Snapchat’s iconic lenses. Until now, Facebook was just running missile tests and fighting skirmishes on the frontier. Today Facebook declares total war on Snapchat.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 28

• Dyson's Latest Cordless Vacuums Drive Sales Past $3 Billion: Dyson Ltd. continues to prove making high-priced vacuum cleaners is a lucrative and growing business.The closely held U.K. firm said total sales grew 45 percent in 2016, to 2.5 billion pounds ($3.12 billion), largely due to demand for a new line of battery-powered cordless cleaners. The models, first introduced two years ago and costing about 500 pounds each, are the fastest-selling vacuums in the company’s 25-year history. Dyson’s profit excluding some costs surged 41 percent to 631 million pounds.The new vacuum design moves the device’s motor to near the hand grip, allowing it to double as a traditional upright vacuum or a handheld cleaner to suck up debris in harder-to-reach spaces. Dyson, with about 3,500 employees, has for years been expanding beyond vacuum cleaners, with air purifiers, heaters, fans and robots. A new hair dryerthat took four years and $70 million to develop was introduced last year. The company has committed to spending 2.5 billion pounds on future technologies, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Among Dyson’s biggest bets are batteries. Last year, the company said it would spend 1 billion pounds on research over the next five years. In 2015, it acquired the maker of solid state batteries Sakti3 for $90 million.

• Uber Self-Driving Car Tests Resume Three Days After Crash: Uber’s self-driving cars were back on public roads Monday, three days after a crash in Arizona put the company’s testing program on hold. The ride-hailing company resumed testing in San Francisco Monday morning, and planned to restart the program in Tempe, Arizona, and Pittsburgh later in the day, according to an Uber spokeswoman. One of Uber’s Volvo self-driving SUVs was involved in a high-impact crash on Friday in Tempe. The vehicle was not responsible for the incident and there were no injuries, Tempe police said. Another car failed to yield for the Uber car, causing the autonomous vehicle to flip on its side, according to the police report. Uber paused testing after the incident over the weekend to better understand what happened. The company said it was confident in returning the vehicles to the road on Monday.

• Snap surges after IPO banks give flurry of 'buy' ratings: Shares of Snap Inc jumped nearly 5 percent on Monday after several of the Snapchat owner's IPO underwriters handed it badly needed "buy" ratings. Snap's initial public offering on March 1 was the largest by a technology firm in three years but trading has been volatile, with many investors critical of decelerating user growth. Snap has warned it may never become profitable. Analysts unrelated to the IPO had in recent weeks mostly assigned neutral or negative ratings to Snap, making it one of the worst-rated stocks on Wall Street. But on Monday, at least eight banks involved in Snap's IPO gave it positive ratings, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Its stock rose 4.79 percent to end at $23.83. That left Snap up 37 percent from its $17 initial public offer price, but still down more than $3 from its peak in its second day of trading. The Los Angeles-based company's app, which allows users to share short-lived messages and pictures, is popular with young people. But it faces intense competition from larger rivals like Facebook Inc.

• Amazon’s Ambitions Unboxed: Stores for Furniture, Appliances and More: For years, retailers have been haunted by the thought of Amazon using its technological prowess to squeeze them into powder. That battle has mostly played out on Amazon’s home turf, the world of online shopping.Now the fight is coming directly to retailers on actual streets around the globe, where Amazon is slowly building a fleet of physical stores. And while most of the attention has been focused on Amazon’s grocery store dreams, the company has a more ambitious collection of experiments underway. If those experiments work — and there is no guarantee of that — they could have a profound influence on how other stores operate. Over time, they could also introduce new forms of automation, putting traditional retail jobs in jeopardy. At the same time, locating those stores close to customers’ homes could also help Amazon further its ambitions of delivering internet orders within hours.The company is exploring the idea of creating stores to sell furniture and home appliances, like refrigerators — the kinds of products that shoppers are reluctant to buy over the internet sight unseen, said one of several people with knowledge of the discussions who, in conversations with The New York Times, spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans were confidential. The stores would serve as showcases where people could view the items in person, with orders being delivered to their homes. These would not be your average Home Depots: Amazon has considered using forms of augmented or virtual reality to allow people to see how couches, stoves and credenzas will look in their homes, the person briefed on the discussions said. Amazon is also kicking around an electronics-store concept similar to Apple’s retail emporiums, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. These shops would have a heavy emphasis on Amazon devices and services such as the company’s Echo smart home speaker and Prime Video streaming service. And in groceries — a giant category in which Amazon has struggled — the company has opened a convenience store that does not need cashiers, and it is close to opening two stores where drivers can quickly pick up groceries without leaving their cars, all in Seattle. It has explored another grocery store concept that could serve walk-in customers and act as a hub for home deliveries. Overseas, Amazon is quietly targeting India for new brick-and-mortar grocery stores. It is a vast market, and one still largely dominated by traditional street bazaars where shoppers must wander from stall to stall haggling over prices and deliberating over unrefrigerated meat sitting in the dusty open air. Amazon’s internal code name for its India grocery ambitions: Project Everest.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 24

• YouTube Hate Videos Haunt Advertisers on Google: Major advertisers across Europe are still appearing alongside extremist YouTube videos days after technology giant Google said it was taking steps to protect its clients from inadvertently supporting hate. An anti-semitic clip claiming the existence of a “Jewish World Order” was featured alongside advertisements in Germany from insurer AXA SA, oil company Total SA in France, Range Rover vehicles in South Africa, footwear retailer Skopunkten and website Tradera in Sweden, Bloomberg searches of YouTube from each country found on Thursday.Separately, a sermon by preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril, who according to U.S. prosecutors once took credit for a terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, can be viewed alongside advertisements from Nissan in Sweden and wireless carrier MTN Group in South Africa. Meanwhile, the Islamophobic English Defence League gathers support from advertisers Total, Netflix Inc., IBM and watchmaker Tag Heuer International in France. The controversy over ad placement, now in its second week, is expanding at a pace Alphabet Inc.’s Google has struggled to match in its response. On Thursday, as Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said Google could “get pretty close” to guaranteeing companies’ ads won’t be placed near hateful material, advertisers throughout Europe were confronting more than a dozen new examples and scrambling to protect their brands. The latest examples show the scope of the Google’s problem isn’t confined to two large markets. It’s global, affecting major advertisers in big European markets including Germany, France and Sweden, as well as South Africa.

• Theranos is offering investors Elizabeth Holmes’ shares if they promise not to sue: One way Theranos is hoping to stay afloat is by offering double the shares — including some of founder Elizabeth Holmes’ own shares — to investors if they promise not to sue. Theranos is knee-deep in an avalanche of lawsuits from investors and consumers of its blood-testing products after it was discovered last year the tests had an accuracy problem and didn’t meet with the company’s own standards. Its main partner, Walgreens, has since pulled out and is also suing the company. According to The Wall Street Journal, Theranos’ board approved a move in February to shuffle shares, including from founder Elizabeth Holmes, to investors as a way to appease them. It’s not clear how many shares Holmes is offering up herself, but at least a couple of investors aren’t taking the deal. Theranos has reached a separate agreement with Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox Inc., who refused to agree to the same deal as other investors — possibly for tax reasons. Theranos will instead buy back his shares for $1, according to the Journal’s sources. Another investor, San Francisco-based hedge fund Partner Fund Management LP, which sued Theranos in October and participated in the $198 Series C round attributed to have driven Theranos to its former $9 billion valuation, also refused the agreement.

• Amazon.com wins $1.5 billion tax dispute over IRS:  Amazon.com Inc on Thursday won a more than $1.5 billion tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over transactions involving a Luxembourg unit more than a decade ago. Judge Albert Lauber of the U.S. Tax Court rejected a variety of IRS arguments, and found that on several occasions the agency abused its discretion, or acted arbitrarily or capriciously. Amazon's ultimate tax liability from the decision was not immediately clear. The world's largest online retailer has said the case involved transactions in 2005 and 2006, and could boost its federal tax bill by $1.5 billion plus interest. It also said a loss could add "significant" tax liabilities in later years. Amazon made just $2.37 billion of profit in 2016, four times what it made in the four prior years combined, on revenue of $136 billion.

• Uber stalls India leasing scheme as driver incomes drop: sources: Global ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies is rethinking its car leasing strategy in India, its second-biggest market, as drivers have returned dozens of leased cars early after the company cut incentives, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Uber had planned to buy 15,000 new cars last year and lease them out in a bid to attract more drivers - a strategy it has used in other markets - but it suspended the scheme for a while in December after leasing just a third of that total. After burning through millions of dollars over three years in a battle for market share with local rival Ola, backed by Japan's Softbank, Uber has cut the incentives it gives to drivers and raised the fares it charges passengers.Two people with knowledge of the matter said Uber miscalculated the impact that the reduced incentives would have on drivers' earnings, especially those making lease payments.To lease a new small car through Uber's scheme, drivers pay a 33,000 rupee ($499) deposit - less than what they would pay to buy a car from a dealer with a bank loan. But weekly payments of about 5,500 rupees over three years add up to nearly double what drivers would pay to service a car loan.That wasn't an issue when incentives were high. Several Uber drivers said they feel trapped as a surge in the number of cars on Uber's platform has led to fewer rides, at a time when incentives have been cut, making it harder to keep up lease payments.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 23

• Google Ad Crisis Spreads as Biggest Marketers Halt Spending: Google’s advertising crisis went global after some of the biggest marketers including AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson halted spending on YouTube and the internet company’s display network, citing concern their ads would run alongside offensive videos.The controversy erupted last week after the London-based Times newspaper reported that some ads were running with YouTube videos that promoted terrorism or anti-Semitism. The U.K. government and the Guardian newspaper took down ads from the video site and Havas SA, the world’s sixth-largest advertising and marketing company, pulled its U.K. clients’ ads from Google’s display ad network and YouTube. On Wednesday, the boycott spread across the Atlantic as U.S. companies that are among the heaviest ad spenders pulled back, potentially costing Google and YouTube hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business. AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. wireless carriers, said they had stopped non-search advertising spending with Google. Johnson & Johnson, the world’s biggest health-care company, paused all YouTube advertising globally.

• China Bets on Sensitive U.S. Start-Ups, Worrying the Pentagon: When the United States Air Force wanted help making military robots more perceptive, it turned to a Boston-based artificial intelligence start-up called Neurala. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military. So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from an investment firm backed by a state-run Chinese company. Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington. According to a new white paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American start-ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China’s military capacity as well as its economy.

• Amazon delays its entry into Southeast Asia: Amazon has postponed its much-anticipated entry into Southeast Asia. The company initially planned to launch local e-commerce services in Singapore during the first quarter of this year, as we reported in November, but two sources with knowledge of the plans told TechCrunch that the schedule has slipped to “later this year”. The Singapore launch project has been fairly guarded within Amazon itself, details of the initiative are not widely known by Amazon staff in the region, but it appears that the groundwork required to set its business up has taken longer than the company originally anticipated. In an interesting recent twist, it looks like Amazon is gearing up to launch in Australia first. A Twitter account associated with the U.S. firm this week teased an imminent launch, while ABC News reported that Amazon has hired a team of over 100 in Sydney to kick things off. Nonetheless, Amazon’s eventual entry to Southeast Asia will create a new front for its battle with Alibaba, which purchased a major share in regional e-commerce firm Lazada for $1 billion last year and is already fighting Amazon in India, where it has a major stake in e-commerce and payments firm Paytm.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, March 22

• Apple drives further into Facebook, Snap territory with video app Clips: With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple Inc is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world, where its huge base of iPhone users could help it compete with Snap Inc's Snapchat and Facebook Inc's Messenger. Clips, which will hit Apple's App Store in April, lets customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colorful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters. The functions closely resemble those that drive Snap's wildly popular Stories feature. With Stories, Snap users string together photos and videos, embellish them and then post them to their feeds. Ttech giants obsess over messaging because it is where users are headed, according to analyst firm Gartner. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of U.S. and UK smartphone owners who used social media apps dropped from 85 percent to 83 percent while messaging apps jumped from 68 percent to 71 percent, a trend Gartner expects will continue.

• Pinterest expects to make more than $500 million in revenue this year: Pinterest may finally be growing into its $11 billion valuation. Pinterest, which makes all of its money from advertising, is targeting more than $500 million in revenue in 2017, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Some believe the company could generate as much as $600 million this year. Even on the low end of that range, that would be a jump of at least 67 percent over the $300 million in revenue Pinterest brought in last year, when it had internal goals to bring in $1 million per day. The company generated $100 million in revenue in 2015. Pinterest’s business is still relatively new. The company is in its third full year selling advertising and has just one ad product, Promoted Pins, which let advertisers push their posts to users who may not follow them on the service. But those close to the company believe Pinterest is on the path to an IPO. Sources say Pinterest won’t IPO “soon” but that it’s currently putting the pieces in place. The company hired its first CFO, Todd Morgenfeld, from Twitter back in October, and has Facebook’s former monetization director, Tim Kendall, overseeing all of Pinterest's revenue efforts, among other things. Those close to Pinterest believe that if Snap, which generated roughly $400 million in revenue the year before its IPO and shares tens of millions in revenue with media partners, can fetch a valuation north of $20 billion on the public markets, Pinterest is in good shape to do something similar.

• What happened to tablet sales? In the past month, both Apple and Samsung have refreshed their flagship tablets for the first time since 2014. A lot has changed in the space in the intervening years — mostly for the worse, as overall sales have continued to slip. In Q4 of last year, IDC reported that shipments had dropped 20 percent, year over year, while Strategic Analytics has the number at half that. There’s room for debate as far as precisely how down the overall market is (not to mention what precisely qualifies a device as a tablet), but there seems to at least be a consensus that early predictions of the tablet space eclipsing PCs missed the mark. The space has suffered for a variety of reasons. Among them, the fact that users simply aren’t refreshing tablets at a rate many manufacturers no doubt predicted. “The iPad 2 is still in use today,” IDC Senior Analyst Jitesh Ubrani tells TechCrunch. “The [original] iPad Minis and Air are all still in use today. They were being supported by Apple until very recently. People have been hanging onto these devices and they’re finding that they work just as well as they did when they were released.” There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, users haven’t been conditioned to upgrade slates on the same cycle as smartphone — something that’s been hammered into consumers in almost Pavlovian fashion through carrier upgrade cycles. There’s also the simple fact that we tend not to put the devices through the same sort of day to day wear and tear of smartphones, or even laptops, with many users simply leaving their devices at home and breaking them out when it’s time to watch some Netflix. The growing size of smartphone displays has gone a ways toward cannibalizing tablet sales, as well, limiting the need for a much larger device when so many handsets are now within the six-inch range. 

• Tiger Global may be part-exiting Flipkart with 3x return: Tiger Global, the biggest investor in Flipkart, may have struck a deal with Microsoft and other new investors to sell a part of its stake in the e-commerce company in the latest fund-raising round that valued it at $9.3 billion pre-money, a person familiar with the conversations told VCCircle. While US online retailer eBay, Chinese tech major Tencent and Microsoft are investing $500 million each in the round, the part-sale of Tiger’s shares would mean Flipkart is still short of the $1.5 billion it was targeting to raise in this round. That means either one of the three would put in additional money, or a fourth investor—potentially Google Capital—would help Flipkart close the round within a few weeks, added the person cited above. The part-sale of its Flipkart stake aligns with Tiger Global’s strategy to book some gains before actively investing in the country again, VCCircle had reported earlier. It is part of its broader plans to monetise stakes in its major bets, such as Flipkart, Ola and Quikr, in the near term. The secondary transaction of Flipkart shares between Tiger Global and Microsoft would result in the former’s stake in the company decreasing to around 25%, from the current 33-35%, depending on the deal size. This would also mean Tiger getting some of its money back—the firm is believed to have invested around $1 billion in Flipkart. This part-exit would mean three-fold return for Tiger Global’s biggest investment in India, better than some of its poor exits such as Caratlane last year, where it practically made no gains at all. Except MakeMyTrip and JustDial, Tiger has seen no impressive exits in India yet.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 21

• Foursquare is launching an analytics platform to help retailers understand foot traffic: While Foursquare started as a social check-in app, the company has always said there is a bigger picture — mainly related to unique ways of leveraging its database of check-ins at nearly 100 million public places. There’s no better example than when Foursquare predicted that Chipotle same-store sales would fall 29 percent after the Mexican chain was hit with E. coli outbreaks. The actual decline announced by Chipotle ended up being a spot-on 30 percent. As you can imagine, these analytics can be very valuable to retailers, allowing them to better understand customers’ habits as well as predict store traffic. So today the company is announcing Foursquare Analytics, a foot-traffic dashboard for brands and retailers. The platform is available for retailers with any number of stores, no matter how small. Previously the only way for companies to access this data was through one-off deals with Foursquare. Retailers will be able to use the dashboard to see foot-traffic data across metrics like gender, age and new versus returning customers — on a national or citywide scale. They also can compare their foot traffic against a set of competitors and their category as a whole. The data is collected via Foursquare’s existing database of locations (which powers more than 100,000 apps, including Snapchat), as well as anonymized in-store-visit data collected from users of Swarm and Foursquare who have opted in to always-on location sharing. Foursquare then normalizes this data to make sure it accurately represents the U.S. population as a whole.

• Ant Financial Said Considering Higher Offer for MoneyGram: Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Financial is considering whether to make a higher offer for MoneyGram International Inc., according to a person familiar with the negotiations, after the U.S. company said a smaller rival’s bid could be a better deal. In January, China-based Ant Financial announced its plan to acquire MoneyGram for $13.25 a share in cash, pending regulatory approval. Last week, Euronet Worldwide Inc. swooped in with a $15.20-a-share offer, a proposition that “could reasonably be expected” to result in a superior proposal, Dallas-based MoneyGram said Monday in a statement. Douglas Feagin, Ant’s head of international operations, said he’s “confident” that the deal will go through. It’s likely that Ant Financial will either counter the bid with a higher offer, or say that it will wait until Euronet finishes carrying out its due diligence before delivering a rival bid, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. If MoneyGram declares Euronet’s bid superior, Ant will have four days to respond. MoneyGram’s shares rose 0.9 percent to $16.43 at the close in New York. They have more than doubled in the past year.

• Vodafone-Idea merger: Birth of a telecom giant: Facing intense competition from cash-rich Reliance Jio, the Aditya Birla Group and British telecom giant Vodafone Plc on Monday announced the merger of their Indian wireless telephony businesses, creating the largest telecom operator in the country. In a news conference in Mumbai, Vodafone Group Plc Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Vittorio Colao and Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla said the merger would create a new champion of digital India. It would launch new services soon. As the first step of the merger, Birla-owned Idea Cellular and Vodafone India would merge their operations at a swap ratio of 1:1. Then, Birla’s holding companies would buy a 4.9 per cent stake from Vodafone at Rs 110 per share, investing close to Rs 3,900 crore. This will increase Idea’s stake to 26 per cent and bring down Vodafone Plc’s stake to 45.1 per cent. The Birlas would have the right to acquire another 9.5 per cent stake from Vodafone in the next four years, so that both partners eventually hold an equal stake in the company (about 35.5 per cent each). “India was earlier the jewel in our crown. Now with this merger, we have got a bigger jewel,” Colao said, adding: “This is our Make in India initiative.” At present, Vodafone and Idea together have a customer base of 400 million. Their joint revenue share is likely be 41 per cent, after the merger is complete at the end of 2018. Bharti Airtel, which used to be the biggest market player till now, will be a distant second, with 268 million customers in India. Revenue-wise, too, Airtel would be on the second spot with a market share of 35.6 per cent, along with Telenor. Airtel and Telenor are planning to merge their operations. nvestors of Idea Cellular, however, were not happy with the transaction; its shares closed with a 9.55 per cent fall at Rs 97.6 a share after the deal was announced. Birla said the investors’ reaction was a “knee-jerk” one. He was confident that like other Birla group mergers and acquisitions, investors would gain in the long run. Analysts said the consolidation in the telecom sector, triggered by Jio’s $25-billion (about Rs 1.7 lakh crore) investment, was likely to continue. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 20

• Uber president Jeff Jones quits, deepening turmoil: Ride services company Uber Technologies has been thrust deeper into turmoil with the departure of company president Jeff Jones, a marketing expert hired to help soften its often abrasive image. Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco company, an Uber spokesman said on Sunday. The reason for his departure was not immediately clear, but Jones' role was put into question after Uber earlier this month launched a search for a chief operating officer to help run the company alongside Chief Executive Travis Kalanick. Jones is the latest in a string of high-level executives to leave the company. Last month, engineering executive Amit Singhal was asked to resign due to a sexual harassment allegation stemming from his previous job at Alphabet Inc's Google. Earlier this month, Ed Baker, Uber's vice president of product and growth, and Charlie Miller, Uber's famed security researcher, departed. Uber, while it has long had a reputation as an aggressive and unapologetic startup, has been battered with multiple controversies over the last several weeks that have put Kalanick's leadership capabilities and the company's future into question. A former Uber employee last month published a blog post describing a workplace where sexual harassment was common and went unpunished. The blog post prompted an internal investigation that is being led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Then, Bloomberg released a video that showed Kalanick berating an Uber driver who had complained about cuts to rates paid to drivers, resulting in Kalanick making a public apology. And earlier this month Uber confirmed it had used a secret technology program dubbed "Greyball," which effectively changes the app view for specific riders, to evade authorities in cities where the service has been banned. Uber has since prohibited the use of Greyball to target local regulators.

• At Peter Thiel’s Palantir, Allegations of Theft and Deception: Marc Abramowitz thought he’d found kindred spirits in the founders of Palantir Technologies Inc. Like Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp and billionaire Chairman Peter Thiel, Abramowitz was a Stanford University alumnus looking to build a business empire. In 2006, Abramowitz made an investment in their then unknown startup and became a regular around the office. In recent years, Palantir has risen to be a global data mining giant with a $20 billion valuation. Abramowitz’s shares are estimated to be worth $60 million. But his relationship with the founders has turned toxic, and they now have competing lawsuits in two states. Abramowitz’s suit was filed last week in Delaware’s Chancery Court, saying Palantir thwarted his efforts to sell shares and that the company must disclose its books and records. Bloomberg has obtained an unredacted copy of the suit, which hasn’t been previously reported. It alleges that Palantir blocked a planned sale of Abramowitz’s shares to Chinese private equity firm CDH Investments Fund Management Co. and that Palantir violated an agreement with Abramowitz to provide him with quarterly financial statements and access to shareholder meetings. Palantir, which sued Abramowitz in September for attempting to claim patent ownership for the company’s work, said the new suit is without merit. It said it shouldn’t have to disclose information about its inner-workings or finances because Abramowitz’s interests are at odds with the company’s. “This lawsuit is nothing more than a blatant attempt to distract from Mr. Abramowitz’s unlawful and egregious theft of our intellectual property,” Palantir wrote in an emailed statement.

• How Google and Levi’s smart jacket shows what’s coming next for wearables: Google and Levi's showed off this week a new joint project: a $350 smart jean jacket. While this jacket literally puts tech on your sleeve, it does it in a subtle way that doesn't require putting another screen on your body. In doing so, it offers a glimpse of what smart fabrics can do and of the evolution of the wearables market -- one in which consumers won't have to wear a clunky accessory that screams high tech. The smart Commuter jacket, which was introduced over the weekend at SXSW in Austin, is aimed at those who bike to work. It has technology woven into its fibers, and allows users to take phone calls, get directions and check the time, by tapping and swiping their sleeves. That delivers information to them through their headphones so that they can keep their eyes on the road without having to fiddle with a screen. The jacket the should hit stores this fall. Its smart fibers are washable; they're powered by a sort of smart cufflink that you'll have to remove when you wash the jacket. The cufflink has a two-day battery life. Wearables are expected to be a $19 billion industry by 2018, according to Juniper Research. Products including Fitbit fitness trackers, Android Wear watches and the Apple Watch have helped fuel a rise in mainstream awareness of wearables for the past several years, even leading Fitbit to go public in 2015. But the market for wearables has taken a bit of a tumble in the past few quarters. Fitbit in January announced it had missed earnings expectations and starting cutting jobs because sales were lower than expected. It's hard to say exactly what has caused the cool-down in wearables, but one possibility is that the market for uber-techy wearables that try to put a smartwatch on your wrist is pretty saturated. Analysts have pointed to a shift in the market away from the super-functional smartwatch toward gadgets that are a little more focused and better looking to boot.

Daily Tech Snippet: March 10

• Airbnb raises $1 billion in latest round of funding: Online room renting service Airbnb Inc said on Thursday it had raised $1 billion in its latest round of funding, valuing the company at $31 billion.The company turned in a profit on an EBITDA basis in the second half of 2016 and expects to continue to be profitable this year, the source said, adding that Airbnb had no plans to go public anytime soon. The company is locked in an intensifying global battle with regulators who say the service takes affordable housing off the market and drives up rental prices.Airbnb raised $447.85 million as part of the funding, a source close to the company told Reuters. The company said in September it had raised about $555 million as part of the same round of funding. Airbnb, which operates in more than 65,000 cities, has enjoyed tremendous growth as it pushes ahead with its plans of global expansion.

• Millennials buy more clothes on Amazon than any other website: Clothing is probably not what most people think of when they think of Amazon. But the datacontinues to show they should. Case in point: Amazon registered the most apparel sales in 2016 of any online retailer in the U.S. for shoppers aged 18 to 34 — yes, millennials. The e-commerce giant accounted for nearly 17 percent of all online clothing sales to this demographic last year, more than doubling the market share of the No. 2 seller, Nordstrom. One other interesting finding from the chart above: Stitch Fix, the young company that sends personalized assortments of clothing to customer homes, is only five years old and already cracked the Top 10. And its online market share among millennials is almost equal to that of household brands like Macy’s and Gap, and larger than Banana Republic and British fast-fashion site Asos. Stitch Fix has a huge following in the middle of the U.S., fueling a business that has as much as $1 billion in annual revenue, according to industry estimates.

• Alibaba seeks $5 billion loan amid tech financing rush: Basis Point: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd is in talks with banks to raise $5 billion in new funding, sources told Thomson Reuters' Basis Point, amid a flurry of fund-raising by China's tech giants. Alibaba is looking to raises the funds offshore via a bullet loan with a five-year maturity, with the aim of using the proceeds for general corporate purposes including refinancing, the sources said. The plan comes as key rival Tencent Holdings looks to raise up to $2 billion in new debt funding, with competition heating up amongst the country's Internet firms domestically and overseas.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 9

• Wikileaks' CIA hacking dump sends tech firms scrambling for fixes: Tech companies must rapidly step up information-sharing to protect users from prying eyes, a security software executive said on Wednesday after WikiLeaks released a trove of data purporting to show that the CIA can hack all manner of devices. Dozens of firms rushed to contain the damage from possible security weak points following the anti-secrecy organization's revelations, although some said they needed far more information on what the U.S. intelligence agency was up to before they could thwart suspected but previously hidden attacks. Sinan Eren, vice president of Czech anti-virus software maker Avast, called on mobile software makers Apple and Google to supply security firms with privileged access to their devices to offer immediate fixes to known bugs. Avast, which counts more than 400 million users of its anti-virus software worldwide, was named in the WikiLeaks documents as one of the security vendors targeted by the CIA in a leaked page labeled "secret" but lacking further details. The leaks - which WikiLeaks described as the biggest in the Central Intelligence Agency's history - had enough technical details for security experts and product vendors to recognize that widespread compromises exist. However, they provided few specifics needed to offer quick fixes. The 8,761 leaked documents list a wealth of security attacks on Apple and Google Android smartphones carried by billions of consumers, as well as top computer operating systems - Windows, Linux and Apple Mac - and six of the world's main web browsers.

• Valuation Shell Game: Silicon Valley’s Dirty Secret: You want to know the dirty, little secret of Silicon Valley? It’s called the 409A valuation. Here’s how the process works: In order to attract and to retain high-powered employees, high-flying tech companies want to issue them common stock or options. To do so and to comply with Internal Revenue Service rules, they need to obtain an independent, third-party valuation of the company. This type of valuation allows hot, privately owned technology companies — like Uber, Airbnb or Nextdoor — to issue common stock or stock options to employees at a low price and, at the same time, or nearly the same time, sell preferred stock to outside investors at a price that is often three or four times higher. It’s also a way for company founders to control the market for the stock of their private companies while rewarding themselves and key employees with cheap shares that seem instantly worth a lot more than the price at which they were issued. Failure to comply with section 409A of the tax code would make employees receiving the stock grants personally liable for immediate taxation on the excess value embedded in the stock or options, plus a 20 percent penalty tax. The valuations also give the founders of technology companies extraordinary control over the market for the private sale of company stock. Whether employees realize it or not, the stock the company grants to them often explicitly prevents its sale to anyone, or in any private secondary market, without the express written consent of the founder, the chief executive or the board of directors. Obviously this becomes a problem when an employee wants to sell his or her private stock. And who wouldn’t, if for instance, the stock is issued to employees at a $500 million valuation, and then sold to outside investors at a $1.5 billion valuation. This is often the point where the founder steps in and says, sorry, no sale, or at least not at the higher valuation. Selling implies the person is no longer a true believer in the company or in its mission. This dynamic falls especially hard on early investors who are not company employees, those so-called “series A” or “series B” venture-capital investors who would like to sell at the higher valuation but can do so only with the founder’s or chief executive’s permission and only at the sanctioned valuation. Employees looking to diversify their wealth also often feel frustrated.

• Instacart, Now $400 Million Richer, Tries to Be Thrifty: Apoorva Mehta is thinking a lot about bottle deposits. Recycling fees vary by state and container size, but until recently, Mehta’s online grocery delivery startup Instacart Inc. hadn’t paid much attention to what it was charging customers purchasing soda or beer. Then they did the math and discovered that this oversight was costing the company on average 35 cents a delivery. Instacart now charges the correct amount for bottle deposits. In the last year, it made a similar adjustment to how it accounts for local sales taxes, which has saved another 20 cents per delivery, according to the company. The penny-pinching is part of a new strategy designed to show investors that Instacart can rise above the pile of on-demand startups that have bled venture capital. Enough VCs were convinced by Mehta’s pitch to contribute $400 million for Instacart’s latest round of funding. With the additional cash, the investment increases the company’s valuation to $3.4 billion, an unlikely harvest in a down market. “This is not what I’ll call ‘funny math’ here,” said Mehta, the co-founder and chief executive officer. “One of the things we’ve had as a result of this round is a lot of scrutiny from the smartest investors in the world, looking at a lot of these numbers in detail.” Mehta wants everyone to know that unlike a typical startup newly awash in cash, Instacart is going to spend it very carefully. The San Francisco-based company, which pays workers to pick up and deliver groceries from local supermarkets, is also eager to demonstrate that it’s taking in more revenue while spending less. Instacart cut its burn rate by more than half in the past year, Mehta said. In addition to the bottle deposit and sales tax adjustments, the company focused on driving down “time per delivery,” a metric that’s the source of some obsession within the walls of Instacart. For inspiration, the company filmed its most efficient shoppers to learn what they did differently and then taught those lessons to new recruits. Quicker deliveries translate not only into happier customers but cost savings resulting from higher productivity.