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.