Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 10th

• Amazon adds video calling with Echo Show: Amazon.com Inc launched Echo Show, a touchscreen device that will allow users to video call and watch clips from CNN, the latest in the company's series of popular Echo voice-controlled speakers. The device, which will go on sale in June for about $230, will feature Alexa, Amazon's voice-controlled aide, that can be used to play music, order an Uber or turn on the house lights. Echo Show will allow video conferencing between users having an Echo device or the Alexa app. It is the first to support the feature, which is absent in similar devices offered by rivals such as Alphabet Inc's unit Google.

• Snapchat has almost as many teens as Facebook, despite being an eighth of its size: Snapchat’s narrative has consistently been one of quality over quantity. Unlike Facebook, it isn’t aiming to sign up the whole world, but rather those in developed nations with expensive smartphones. Instead of focusing on huge subscriber numbers, Snapchat parent Snap touts its fervent user base. Its daily active users visit the app more than 18 times each day, according to its S-1 filing. Most importantly to a company that relies on ads for revenue, Snapchat bills itself as an app for the young — catnip for advertisers trying to reach hard-to-find millennials. Ahead of its first quarterly earnings report since going public in March, just how popular is Snapchat among young people? Not as popular as Facebook, but very impressive considering how much smaller it is. According to data from research firm eMarketer, 59 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds, 68 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 42 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds use the app at least once per month each month throughout the year. Facebook’s numbers for those age groups are 64, 77 and 81 percent, respectively. Facebook has 1.3 billion daily active users while Snapchat has just an eighth of that at 158 million. Instagram, too, boasts a lot of users in those young age groups, though Snapchat has a much tighter hold on 12- to 17-year-old future consumers than Facebook’s Instagram— nearly four times as many. And again, Instagram is more than twice as big with 400 million daily active users.

• Yelp is getting eviscerated after it toned down its expectations for the year: Yelp shares are down more than 25 percent after the company reported its first-quarter earnings report today, where it reduced its full-year guidance that it set in the previous quarter. The company said it would bring in between $850 million and $865 million in revenue for the full fiscal year of 2017. In the fourth quarter (reported in February), Yelp said net revenue was expected to be in the range of $880 million to $900 million. That means even though the company’s revenue fell only a little short of what Wall Street was expecting, the company is signaling slower growth than expected. Yelp has seen slowing revenue growth for some time now. If the company itself is paring back its growth expectations, that means it’s trying to set some model closer to reality for Wall Street — which is inevitably going to make industry observers reset their own models, and the valuation for the company along with it. Before today’s fall off a cliff, Yelp was valued at around $2.8 billion.