Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September 19

• Why did Postmates hire Silicon Valley’s most famous bankers only to raise cash from its existing investors? Back in March, Recode reported that delivery startup Postmates had hired Qatalyst, the famed Silicon Valley investment bank known for helping internet companies find acquirers. But six months later, Postmates still hasn’t been sold. Instead, Postmates will likely raise an investment of at least $100 million, TechCrunch first reported and Recode has confirmed. What is weird, however, is where Postmates’ new money is coming from: Its existing investors, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, instead of a new investor Qatalyst was hired to find (if it was going to be an investment and not a sale). Huh? Let’s back up and replay this sequence of events to see if we can find the logic. First, Postmates hires Qatalyst to help it explore selling the company or raising money from new investors. Qatalyst bankers go out and talk to a bunch of would-be acquirers and would-be investors but don’t find a deal. So Postmates’ current investors decide to pony up a bunch of new money instead because, really, what is the alternative when you’re backing a fast-growing but money-losing company that you think may still have home-run potential? This means one of the following scenarios is true. Either A) Postmates thinks its business is more attractive than would-be acquirers or new investors do, or B) Qatalyst didn’t do its job well, or C) both of the above. 

• Rise, Fall, Redemption in Alibaba’s Two Years Since IPO:  Two years ago this month, the listing of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. set off a 36 percent surge that lifted the Chinese Internet company past Facebook Inc. by market value. The gains didn’t last and the stock went on to tumble through 2015 as sales growth slowed along with China’s economy. Revenue growth has accelerated this year, and so too have the shares, sending Alibaba ahead of Tencent Holdings by value.

• AngelList Braces for Rainy Days as Startup Seed Funding Falls: AngelList is preparing for winter. The company, which runs an online portal connecting entrepreneurs with private investors, is assembling a “rainy day” fund and exploring new businesses as the market for investing in young startups slows. Naval Ravikant, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the San Francisco startup, said he’s looking outside Silicon Valley to keep the money flowing in a downturn. He aims to secure commitments from sovereign-wealth funds, endowments and other investors around the world to invest $1 billion through AngelList in the coming years. Last year, China’s CSC Venture Capital, the U.S. arm of private-equity firm China Science & Merchants Investment Management Group, committed $400 million, he said. “If there’s a cash crunch and valuations come down drastically, then that’s when you want to be investing,” said Ravikant, a prolific seed investor who made early bets on Uber Technologies Inc. and Twitter Inc. “That’s what raising this institutional money is about. It’s our rainy day money.”  The rapid rise of AngelList coincided with a startup boom. The website has facilitated seed investments by mainly wealthy Americans in more than 1,000 startups, as well as funding for some later-stage companies, including Cruise Automation and Dollar Shave Club, which were each acquired this year. AngelList typically takes a 5 percent cut of the profit from each investment made through its platform, which it collects once a startup gets bought or goes public. It also plays the role of investor—through a $20 million fund, which it recently exhausted, and a newer $35 million fund.

• Want to Find Fulfillment at Last? Think Like a Designer: You’re going to learn how to find a fulfilling career. You’re going to learn how to better navigate life’s big-moment decisions and kill your “wicked problems” dead. How? By training yourself to think like a designer. That, anyway, is the premise of “Designing Your Life,” a class taught at Stanford University (the school’s “most popular class,” according to Fast Company magazine) as well as the just-published book that grew out of it, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life” (Knopf). The two men who created the class and wrote the book are Silicon Valley veterans, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They believe they have hit upon a system to help you deal with almost any challenge. But everything else? The two professors claim that you can design an amazing life in the same way that Jonathan Ive designed the iPhone. They say the practices taught in the class and the book can help you (in designing-your-life-speak) “reframe” dysfunctional beliefs that surround life and career decisions and help you “wayfind” in a chaotic world through the adoption of such design tenets as bias-for-action, prototyping and team-building. After nine years of teaching their secrets to future Google product managers and start-up wunderkinds, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Evans are opening up the curriculum to everyone. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and “Am I living a meaningful life?” aren’t only subjects for late-night pot-fueled dorm hangouts, the men said.The book includes things that are not in the class, like what Mr. Burnett and Mr. Evans call “anchor problems” — overcommitted life choices that keep people stuck and unhappy. A common mistake that people make, they said, is to assume that there’s only one right solution or optimal version of your life, and that if you choose wrong, you’ve blown it.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 12

• Alibaba passes earnings milestones, silent on SEC probe: China's Alibaba Group Holding posted its best revenue growth since before the e-commerce titan's listing in late 2014, lifting its shares to their highest level in a year. But Alibaba was silent on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into its accounting practices, which have long been the subject of criticism. In the three months to June 30, Alibaba also made more money from mobile shopping than from PCs for the first time, helping to send its shares up by more than 5 percent to $92.10 in New York, its highest level in more than a year."This is a decoupling of revenue from GMV (gross merchandise volume)," he said, referring to a measure of the total value of goods transacted on Alibaba's online shopping platforms. Despite GMV growth remaining low compared to previous years, rising 24 percent to 837 billion yuan, Alibaba is squeezing more money out of its e-commerce business, chiefly from advertising. That translated to quarterly revenues of 32.15 billion yuan ($4.84 billion), a 59 percent leap from the previous year and the highest growth rate since late 2013. While China e-commerce was strong for Alibaba in its first quarter, the company is also investing in other businesses including cloud computing arm Aliyun, driverless vehicles and online shopping in Southeast Asia. It hopes these can become an eventual source of growth as Alibaba faces the prospect of a saturated online retail market in China. Although some are showing promise - Aliyun sales rose 156 percent, though only contributed 4 percent of total revenue - most are still loss-making.

• Microsoft is buying a company that lets viewers control video game live streams: Today, Microsoft announced its plans to acquire live streaming service Beam, a Seattle-based company that lets users influence and interact with a video game being streamed by another player. Beam launched in January to compete against well-established game streaming services from Twitch and YouTube. It set itself apart by taking a core concept made popular by streamers — the notion of letting players control a game from afar — and turning into a unique streaming platform. For instance, Beam lets viewers suggest challenges for streamers and even alter in-game aspects like weapon loadout and quest selection. It also lets developers create special button layouts for viewers to interact with games being streamed through Beam. To maintain quality, the company's technology drastically reduces the lag between a player's actions and what the viewers see on the stream, whereas competitors like Twitch have a roughly 10 to 15 second delay. It's unclear how Microsoft plans to incorporate Beam's technology into its own online gaming platform. But the company points to Minecraft, now a Microsoft property, as the type of game well-suited to Beam's technology. Microsoft did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 15

• Uber Sets Sights on Leveraged Loans for Even More Money: Uber has raised more than $14 billion using all sorts of creative funding sources. Now it may add something new to the list: the leveraged loan market. The ride-hailing start-up is looking to issue as much as $2 billion in securities to investors, said a person briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are managing the process, said the person, adding that the deal has not begun yet and may still fall apart.By tapping leveraged loans, Uber is adding to its trove of billions made up of many types of securities, which the company has been spending as it expands worldwide. Uber has raised equity from traditional venture capital sources, strategic corporate investors and private equity. This month, the company said that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Uber has also raised billions in convertible debt, which can be exchanged for equity at a future date. Uber has redefined private fund-raising, drawing hundreds of millions in new cash or debt at a rapid pace of once every few months. The company needs financing as it now operates in at least 69 countries and is fighting an expensive battle in China against a rival, Didi Chuxing, which is also raising money to expand. Leveraged loans are rarely used among start-ups. A leveraged loan is a security issued to a company that has a lot of debt on its books already, and thus is perceived by investors as being a higher risk. The loans are typically used for leveraged buyouts and are seldom seen in Silicon Valley. Uber has been able to tap less traditional funding sources because investors think its size and scale make it a safer bet than other Silicon Valley companies. Uber’s valuation of $62.5 billion — making it the highest valued venture-backed start-up in the world — would not change with this new investment. Leveraged loans also allow Uber to raise money without diluting the holdings of its many equity investors — some of which have been through more than a dozen rounds of financing.

• Twitter has invested in music streaming service SoundCloud: Two years ago Twitter thought about buying SoundCloud, but ended up walking away from the music service. Now Twitter has bought a piece of SoundCloud instead. Twitter has invested around $70 million in the music service, as part of a round that should end up in the $100 million-range, according to sources familiar with the deal. The round is expected to value SoundCloud at about $700 million — the same value that investors placed on the company in 2014, when it raised $60 million; since then it has also raised a debt round. It’s unclear whether the Twitter investment is part of a strategic partnership, but that would make sense: Twitter might view via an integration with SoundCloud as a way to increase growth and engagement, and SoundCloud may look at Twitter as a way to promote its newly launched subscription service, which is crucial to the company’s plans. And both companies could use some help. Twitter has been punished by Wall Street for its inability to add users at a rapid clip; SoundCloud’s flat valuation indicates that investors are also worried about its own growth prospects.

• Alibaba Tries to Shore Up Investors’ Confidence: The Alibaba Group of China has disappointed investors since its record-breaking American stock listing nearly two years ago, as volatile financial results and regulatory run-ins have driven the price of its shares down almost to where they began. Now the e-commerce giant is trying to reassure. For the first time, Alibaba on Tuesday offered investors financial guidance for the coming year, saying that it expected revenue growth to accelerate from last year’s pace. At a meeting at its Hangzhou headquarters, Alibaba cited strength in its core business, despite China’s slowing economic growth, as well as benefits from new ventures that have raised eyebrows among some investors The forecast comes as Alibaba seeks to demonstrate that its strategy, which has long focused on growth, is good for business. In China, Alibaba operates online sales platforms that connect consumers with mom-and-pop stores, as well as with global brands like Burberry and Zara. It has been showing sales growth on its platforms using a measure called gross merchandise volume, a yardstick for transactions across its platforms. Alibaba said on Tuesday that it would de-emphasize that figure, saying it would no longer report it quarterly. It will continue to report an annual figure, and offered a target for 2020.

• India's Space Program Takes On Elon Musk: India’s space agency will launch a record 22 satellites on a single rocket as it tries to ease a global backlog and demonstrate the ability to compete with commercial spaceflight companies run by billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.Satellites from the U.S., India, Canada and Germany will enter orbit after a scheduled June 20 liftoff from the Sriharikota barrier island along the southeast coast, the agency’s chairman, A.S. Kiran Kumar, said in an interview in Bengaluru.The 22 machines being launched next week include an Earth observation satellite to capture light invisible to the naked eye. It is the biggest single launch by India, trailing Russia’s 33 in 2014 and NASA’s 29 the year before. India last month successfully launched a scale model of a reusable spacecraft, a project that in time could pit the nation against Bezos and Musk in the race to make access to space cheaper and easier. The country also injected a probe into Mars’ atmosphere in 2014 for just $74 million, about 11 percent of the cost of the U.S.’s Maven probe.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 13

• Apple Starts to Woo Its App Developers: When Apple’s App Store opened in 2008, there were well under a thousand apps, and the relationship was obviously beneficial for both sides. But now, when there are more than 1.5 million apps fighting for attention in the App Store, the benefits for developers, particularly smaller ones, have become much less apparent. “Is Apple coasting on its relationship and lead with developers? I think the answer is yes,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. “Their app store is considered an unappealing experience by many people. Their rules are arbitrary, and they take a big slice of money from sales.” For a long time, Apple didn’t have to care. But now it faces flat sales of its flagship iPhones, a lack of excitement about newer products like its smart watch and Apple TV, growing competition from Google’s Android platform and the rise of new challengers like Amazon’s Echo device, which responds to a user’s voice commands at home with the kind of magic that used to be an Apple hallmark. As the company prepares to hold its annual developer conference in San Francisco next week, there are signs that it wants to improve its relationship with app makers. Among the announcements expected at the gathering: Apple plans to finally give developers access to its Siri voice assistant so they can incorporate it into their apps.Apple’s charm offensive began in earnest in December, after it put Philip W. Schiller, its senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in charge of the App Store. Under Mr. Schiller, the company accelerated the app approval process, cutting typical review times from two weeks to a day or two. On Wednesday, Apple announced that it would soon begin allowing app makers to buy ads that would appear at the top of search results in the App Store, like the ads already on Google’s Play Store and website. Apple also said that it would cut its usual 30 percent commission on all subscriptions to 15 percent after an app subscriber had been active for at least a year.

• What happens when your search engine is first to know you have cancer:This week researchers demonstrated that by analyzing a person’s Web searches they could in some cases predict an upcoming diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The team of researchers aren’t pancreatic cancers experts, but computer scientists at Microsoft. Unlike traditional medical professionals, they have the advantage of access to a trove of data that Microsoft collects through its search engine, Bing. The Microsoft researchers identified Web users who had recently searched for queries indicating they have pancreatic cancer, such as “I was told I have pancreatic cancer, what to expect,” and then looked back months earlier to examine patterns in the symptoms that the users searched for. This included phrases such as “dark or tarry stool,” “abdominal swelling,” “dark urine” and “yellowing skin.” From this analysis they realized trends in the queries of users who were soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, identifying 5 to 15 percent of cases with low false-positive rates. The research was published in the Journal of Oncology Practice.

• Alibaba Bears Pounce as SEC Probe, SoftBank Sale Squeeze Shares:Traders have never been more bearish on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company facing a regulatory probe and the loss of a key investor. The total number of outstanding shares borrowed for short selling peaked at more than 124 million last week. That’s the most since its 2014 initial public offering and is up from about 60 million in December, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit. Prominent short sellers including Jim Chanos and John Hempton have been red-flagging Alibaba for months, suggesting that its growth figures might be too good to be true. Bearish bets spiked in the past two weeks after the company disclosed a regulatoryprobe of its Chinese delivery unit and SoftBank Group Corp. disclosed plans to sell a $10 billion stake. Alibaba, which claimed more than 75 percent of the e-commerce market share in China last year, made history with a record $25 billion initial public offering in September 2014. Traders in New York clamored for the stock, which was priced at $68 a share, as a way to tap into the potential profits available from the country’s growing middle class. The shares have dropped 6.4 percent to $75.92 since May 25 when the company said that the SEC is looking at data reported from the company’s Singles’ Day promotion, Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, and how the company consolidates results from affiliates, including logistics partner Cainiao Network. While SoftBank’s divestment comes as part of a broader strategy to find new investments in startups and strengthen its debt-heavy balance sheet, the move can be unsettling to investors as the Japanese technology giant first bought into the company 16 years ago, said Henry Guo, a New York-based analyst at M Science. “The stake sale by SoftBank caught the market off guard, which damped Alibaba shares as it’s one of the early investors,” Guo, who has been covering Chinese internet stocks traded in the U.S. for about 10 years and has a positive outlook on Alibaba, said by phone.

• Amazon is preparing to launch streaming music service - sources: Amazon.com Inc is preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service, placing it squarely in competition with rival offerings from Apple Inc and Spotify, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The service will be offered at $9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, and it will offer a competitive catalog of songs, the sources said. Amazon (AMZN.O) is finalizing licenses with labels for the service, which likely will be launched in late summer or early fall, the sources said. Amazon, which offers a free streaming music service with a limited catalog to subscribers of its Prime shipping and video service, did not respond to a request for comment about the new, full-fledged music plan. Although it will be a late entrant to the crowded streaming space, Amazon believes a comprehensive music service is important to its bid to be a one-stop shop for content and goods, the sources said. The new music offering also is intended to increase the appeal of the Amazon Echo, its home speaker, which searches the Internet and orders products from the retailer with voice commands.

• Why Line’s Two-Year Wait for IPO Cost It $4 Billion in Valuation: Line Corp. has finally pulled the trigger on an initial public offering after a two-year hiatus. That period of hesitation may have cost the messaging service $4 billion in valuation as Facebook Inc. began encroaching on its turf and markets cooled on technology company debuts. Japan’s leading mobile messaging service is aiming to raise as much as 113 billion yen ($1 billion) in July at a market value of roughly 588 billion yen, according to data in its Friday IPO filings. That’s down 40 percent from an estimated 1 trillion yen when it first filed for an offering in 2014. The price range will be set on June 27, and the final price July 11. That may be as good as it gets. Line’s gearing up for a battle with far larger rivals like Facebook and China’s WeChat as it looks to expand its 218 million user base beyond its strongest markets of Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. The Tokyo-based company, owned by South Korean search portal Naver Corp., plans to use the proceeds to spearhead an expansion across Asia and, eventually, the U.S. “Line will have its market in Japan fairly fortified from the likes of WhatsApp or even Facebook Messenger,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. “Outside of its core markets, it’s going to be a massive challenge.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 26

• Alibaba Facing SEC Investigation Over Accounting Practices: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell the most in four months after the e-commerce giant said it’s being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices and whether they violate federal laws. The company is providing documents and cooperating with the probe, according to the Hangzhou, China-based company’s annual report. The investigation is looking into consolidation practices, related party transactions and data reported from its Singles’ Day promotion. Singles’ Day is Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, attracting more than 90 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) of sales on its e-commerce platforms in a 24-hour period last year. Alibaba fell 6.8 percent to $75.59, the biggest drop since January. It was down less than 1 percent this year through Tuesday.

• In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge: Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about. Valleywag declined to play the game. It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised but were off the table. It said Google co-founder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That the Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker’s wedding was seriously over the top. Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay. This was gossip with an attitude, and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Mr. Thiel’s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag’s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in $140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing. The revelation of Mr. Thiel’s involvement in the suit this week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media once again to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone’s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies are less transparent about what they do.

• HP Inc profit beats Street amid weak market for PCs, printers: HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday. HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday.The company's revenue fell about 11 percent to $11.59 billion.Revenue in the personal systems business, the company's biggest, fell 9.9 percent in the second quarter, while revenue declined 15.8 percent in the printing division.Total costs and expenses fell by 10.3 percent to $10.75 billion in the second quarter ended April 30, from a year earlier.

• Salesforce inks deal with AWS to expand international presence: AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com, with Salesforce naming the cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increase its international presence without having to build its own data centers in countries that have data sovereignty laws, which require that data stays in-country. It’s expensive to build their own, so they are turning to a public cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon to do the heavy lifting for them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke glowingly of AWS. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” he said in a statement. It’s worth keeping in mind, however that Salesforce also has a deep relationship with Microsoft — and CEO Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference last fall. But the relationship has a flip side and the companies also compete with one another. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research, points out that this announcement should help Salesforce compete with Oracle and Microsoft overseas.

• Terrapattern is reverse image search for maps, powered by a neural network: Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn’t Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout — and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It’s remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. How does that work? And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it — and for under $35,000? The secret, as with so many other interesting visual computing projects these days, is a convolutional neural network. It’s essentially an AI-like program that extracts every little detail from an image and looks for patterns at various levels of organization — similar to how our own visual system works, though the brain is infinitely more subtle and flexible. In Terrapattern’s case, the neural network was trained to look at small squares of the landscape and, comparing those patterns to a huge database of tagged map features from OpenStreetMap, it learned to associate them with certain concepts. Think of how a camera recognizes a face and knows when it is blinking or smiling. It doesn’t actually “know” what faces, smiles and eyes are, but it associates them with certain patterns of pixels, and can reliably pick them out. Once Terrapattern had been trained to recognize and categorize all manner of geographical features, from boats to water towers, its creators set it free on detailed maps of the greater New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Francisco areas. It scoured the landscape and built a huge database of features and similarities — which can be quickly queried and the results returned immediately (the neural network isn’t doing any “thinking” when you click on a feature — its work is done for this dataset). Of course, you could just search for “tennis fields in Oakland” or the like and get perfectly good results, but this allows one to search for things that may not be listed so formally. What if you were looking for houses in the middle of fields, or cul de sacs, or dead lawns, or circular parking lots? Terrapattern knows where those are just as much as it knows where the airports and ferry terminals are. They’re all just assemblages of features to the neural network.

• Facebook will shut down FBX, its desktop ad exchange: Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we’ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this is part of Facebook’s shift to mobile (in its most recent earnings report, mobile accounted for 82 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue). He said: "Mobile is now a necessary component of effective marketing campaigns, and Facebook is helping millions of businesses understand their customers’ purchase path across devices. Dynamic Ads and Custom Audiences have mobile at their core and are delivering excellent results for businesses, so Facebook Exchange spending has shifted towards those solutions. This is about giving people more relevant ads and marketers more effective formats, especially in an increasingly mobile world. Our ads API is open to all developers so they can innovate on our platform and build great ad experiences for brands and their customers." Facebook launched FBX back in 2012, but its focus seemed to have shifted away from the exchange in recent years.

• Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too: The company is taking a $950 million charge to unwind the last vestiges of the Nokia deal. Microsoft is further scaling back its flagging phone business, exiting the consumer market and cutting another 1,850 jobs. As part of the move announced Wednesday, Microsoft will take a $950 million charge and cut what little remained of its Finland-based phone hardware business, unwinding the last of its disastrous $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's phone unit. Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end"feature phone" business.  The company has been scaling back its phone ambitions ever since the Nokia deal closed, with CEO Satya Nadella quickly shifting to a strategy focused on bringing Microsoft's software and services to Android and iOS rather than trying to convince phone buyers to shift to Windows. Despite all the cuts — and having already seen its market share dip below 1 percent — Microsoft says it isn't totally out of the phone-making business. The company insists it will continue to serve phones aimed at the business market and license Windows 10 to any other hardware makers that want to give Windows Phone a try.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 13th

• Facebook, Facing Bias Claims, Shows How Editors and Algorithms Guide News:  Facebook, the largest social media network, published internal editorial guidelines on Thursday, the company’s latest attempt to rebut accusations that it is politically biased in the news content it shows on the pages of its 1.6 billion users. The 28-page document details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the “Trending Topics” section of users’ Facebook pages. Facebook describes a list of processes it uses to display some of the most popular content across the network, including relying on algorithms to detect up-and-coming news trends as well as a team of editors who, much like a newsroom, direct how those topics are presented and decide what should be displayed to people who regularly use the service. As the guidelines make clear, at practically every point in the process, a human editor is given the leeway to exercise his or her editorial influence. The document was released just days after a report on the tech news siteGizmodo said Facebook editors had intentionally “suppressed” news topics from conservative publications trending across the network. The report also said editors were able to artificially inflate the importance of other topics by “injecting” them into the Trending section of users’ Facebook pages. Since those claims surfaced, Facebook has been questioned by news sites across the political spectrum and by legislators in Washington. On Thursday, critics urged the company to consider the biases of its editors. “As long as Facebook is hiring editors who lean left politically, those stories are going to get preferential treatment,” Erick Erickson, former editor in chief of the conservative website RedState and founder of another conservative site called The Resurgent, said in an email. “I’d hope that Facebook would take care to consider all views and all news.” The company has continued to deny accusations of political bias and pointed to editorial rules that discourage Trending Topics staff members from taking one viewpoint or another.

• Alibaba Bears Retreat as Sales Growth Endures China Slump: Chart: Bearish bets against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have dropped to the lowest level since January after the Chinese e-commerce leader’s quarterly revenue beat analysts’ forecasts even as the nation’s economy grows at the slowest pace in 25 years. Short interest fell to 7.1 percent this week after peaking at a two-year high of 8.5 percent two months ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit Ltd. The U.S.-traded stock has risen 4.4 percent since the company reported its quarterly results, while its main competitor JD.com Inc. tumbled 12 percent after reporting a slowdown in sales volume.

• Intel Sells $2.75 Billion of Bonds to Refinance 2016 Debt: Intel Corp. sold $2.75 billion of bonds on Thursday to refinance debt due this year and a portion of notes maturing in 2017. The world’s biggest chipmaker issued debt three parts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The longest portion was $1.25 billion of 30-year notes yielding 1.55 percentage points above comparable government debt. That’s down from an initial offer of 1.7 percentage points, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. managed the sale.S&P Global Ratings gave the bonds an A+ grade, according to a statement on Thursday. Intel is the latest U.S. blue-chip company to offer notes in what’s poised to be second-busiest week for issuance this year. In its last multibillion-dollar deal, Intel sold $7 billion of bonds in July to finance part of its $16.7 billion takeover of Altera Corp. The company plans to repay its $1.5 billion of 1.95 percent notes due in October and a portion of the $3 billion of 1.35 percent bonds due next year. Investment-grade companies have sold more than $49 billion worth of bonds so far this week as they take advantage of low borrowing costs after posting earnings for the quarter ended March 31. Companies are also front-loading issuance before the summer slowdown, according to Ben Emons, a money manager at Leader Capital Corp. in Los Angeles.

• Apple invests $1 billion in Chinese Uber rival ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing: Apple said on Thursday it has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market. The investment comes as Apple is trying to reinvigorate sales in China, its second-largest market. Apple recently has come under pressure from Chinese regulators, with its online book and film services shut down last month, and Cook is traveling to the country this month. The investment gives Apple, which has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year, a sizeable stake in Uber Technologies Inc's chief rival in China. Cook said in an interview that he sees opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.

• Strong demand for graphics chips to boost Nvidia's revenue: Nvidia Corp forecast better-than-expected revenue for the current quarter as it sees robust demand for its chips that power complex computer graphics. Shares of the company, which also reported profit and revenue above analysts' estimates, were up 7.5 percent in extended trading. The chipmaker last week unveiled its GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics processors based on its Pascal technology.Revenue from its gaming business, which designs graphics cards such as GeForce for PCs, rose 17 percent to $687 million. The company has weathered a shrinking personal computer industry by focusing on game enthusiasts, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for processors used in playing graphically demanding games.Revenue from its data center business, which includes its Tesla processors, rose 62.5 percent to $143 million.Nvidia's net income rose to $196 million, or 33 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 1 from $134 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 46 cents per share, handily beating analysts' expectations of 32 cents. Revenue rose 13.4 percent to $1.31 billion, while analysts were expecting $1.26 billion. The company also said it intends to return about $1 billion to shareholders in fiscal 2017 through quarterly dividends and share buybacks. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 6th

• Alibaba's revenue soars, but new ventures hit profit: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China's biggest e-commerce company, said fourth-quarter sales rose 39 percent after its core online shopping business grew, but profit fell for the first time as it spent on ventures like food delivery. Net income excluding extraordinary items, Alibaba's preferred measure for earnings, shrank 1.4 percent to 7.6 billion yuan from the previous year, as the company continued to invest heavily in new but shakier businesses. Investors welcomed the higher-than-expected revenue, sending the firm's American Depository shares up 3.7 percent. But, not all of Alibaba's businesses looked rosy. Its online finance affiliate Ant Financial Services Group, one of founder Jack Ma's crown jewels in his e-commerce empire, recorded a net loss in the quarter. That business has spent heavily on its intense competition with WeChat Payment, one of the world's largest payments systems and owned by Alibaba arch-rival Tencent Holdings. Ant, which houses the massive Alipay online payment platform, is now valued at $60 billion and is gearing up for an IPO, despite the fact it is now losing money. Alibaba did not disclose how much Ant lost. Alibaba's revenues rose to 24.2 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in the quarter ended March 31 from 17.4 billion yuan a year earlier. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or the total value of goods transacted on its platforms on China retail marketplaces, rose 24 percent to 742 billion yuan. The previous quarter it had risen 22.5 percent - the slowest pace on record.

• Dorsey's Square posts bigger-than-expected loss as costs surge: Square Inc, the mobile payments company run by Twitter Inc Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, reported a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss on Thursday as costs surged, sending its shares sharply lower in after-hours trading. Slowing growth at formerly fast-growing Square Capital, which lends to small merchants, also aroused concerns. The company said Square Capital lent $153 million in the first quarter, up just 4 percent from the preceding quarter, largely due to "more challenging credit market conditions." The business acts as a middleman to offer funds to customers who can't otherwise borrow easily. Most funds are arranged by Square through third parties, who commit to buy the future receivables. "Lenders are no longer wanting to finance alternative lending," said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. Square loses $2 for every $1 of hardware sales, Luria said. "The growth is coming from the wrong places." Square, which went public in November, facilitates payments between businesses and customers with a credit card reader that turns any mobile phone into a payment terminal. The company also makes point-of-sale registers and chip-enabled card readers. Square's shares were down 12.3 percent at $11.44 in after-hours trading despite several bright spots in the results. The company's net revenue jumped 51.4 percent and gross payment volume - the total dollar amount of all card payments processed by sellers - jumped 45 percent to $10.3 billion. Square also raised its annual adjusted revenue projection to $615 million-$635 million from $600 million-$620 million. But its net loss attributable to common stockholders widened to $96.8 million from $48 million in the same period a year ago as operating expenses jumped 72 percent to $207 million.

• SAP announces new partnership with Apple to expand iOS in the enterprise:  SAP announced a broad partnership with Apple today to bring iOS to SAP’s enterprise customer base. The announcement comes almost two years after Apple made a similar deal with IBM. Steve Lucas, president for SAP’s Digital Enterprise Platform says while it’s natural to see similarities between the two deals — two large enterprise companies making a deal with Apple — he says there are major differences. For starters, he says SAP is firmly an enterprise software company and it has built a cloud platform to access all of the software it has developed, whether its core ERP product, SuccessFactors or Concur. He says having that core certainly is a differentiating factor in his view. Still there are similarities too. As with IBM, SAP has been working closely with Apple to bring its profound design sense to this endeavor. The objective of this partnership is no less than to revolutionize work on the iPad and iPhone, Lucas says. It’s no secret that Apple wants a bigger piece of the enterprise market and these kinds of agreements help solidify their enterprise position and drive Apple hardware sales inside companies that were traditionally PC shops — and hence more often considered Microsoft territory. Finally, much like IBM it wouldn’t be a deal without an educational component to round it out, so SAP is also offering SAP Academy for iOS as a training ground for SAP programmers to learn to use the HANA iOS SDK. Lucas says the company is absolutely committed to this educational effort and it’s not something they will announce and go away in a few months, but a program that he sees lasting well into the future. While you might not see a natural fit between SAP and Apple, when the IBM partnership was launched in 2014, it certainly raised some eyebrows too, but by the end of last year the partnership had created 100 apps — and that number has surely increased since then. In fact, SAP is also planning on building 100 apps. The apps and the SDK are not yet available, but they say they should start to trickle out in Beta later this year. Many of the apps are in progress, according to Lucas, but they are not ready to ship yet. Apple also signed a partnership with Cisco last summer.

• Tesla Falls on Cash Concerns, Doubt About Manufacturing Goals: Tesla Motors Inc. fell Thursday after the company, aiming to dramatically boost production, withdrew its projection to generate more cash than it uses this year and said it will probably need to raise capital. Shares in the electric-car maker fell 4.9 percent to $211.71 at 1:28 p.m. New York time. The shares had surged late Wednesday and early Thursday after Tesla moved ahead by two years its target date for reaching annual production of 500,000 vehicles before sinking on skepticism about the ambitious assembly goals and concerns about cash. Tesla said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday that to meet the new production target, capital expenditures this year will probably be about $750 million more than the $1.5 billion originally planned. A capital raise of about $2 billion would dilute current owners by about 7 percent, UBS analyst Colin Langan wrote in a note.

• Netflix reveals what images hook viewers on new shows: Netflix has found that its viewers spend only 1.8 seconds considering whether to watch a show or movie that is presented to them. With so little time to make a successful pitch to potential viewers, the company has become obsessed with making it easy for members to make a quick decision about whether a show is interesting. For Netflix that means perfecting the promotional artwork — imagery that runs alongside an explanation of the show. Members spend 82 percent of their time focusing on artwork while browsing Netflix, according to the company. This week Netflix released new findings about the power of the images its presents to viewers while introducing them to shows, and what traits in an image can encourage a viewer to watch a show. Netflix finds that images with expressive facial emotion that convey the tone of the show do well. Artwork featuring recognizable or polarizing characters also succeed. Even if a show has an ensemble cast, when it comes to promotional purposes — someone needs to hog the spotlight. “While ensemble casts are fantastic for a huge billboard on the side of a highway, they are too complex at small sizes and ultimately not as effective at helping our members decide if the title is right for them on smaller screens,” explained Netflix’s Nick Nelson in the blog post. While the Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black” featured eight cast members in its Season 1 image, Netflix scaled back to a single character for seasons 2 and 3. Netflix reached these conclusions through what’s called A/B testing, in which audiences are split into groups and shown different images. Analysts then gauge how audiences respond to the different options.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 27

• Apple's nine-year iPhone juggernaut stops with first sales decline since 2003: Apple on Tuesday posted its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years as the company credited with inventing the smartphone struggles with an increasingly saturated market. The company's sales dropped by more than a quarter in China, its most important market after the United States, and it also forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues. Its shares fell about 8 percent, dropping below $100 for the first time since February. A hike in Apple's share buyback and dividend as well as bumper revenue from services failed to mollify investors. While Apple executives had predicted iPhone sales would decline this quarter, they must reassure investors that the drop represents a momentary roadblock, rather than a permanent shift for the product that fueled its meteoric rise. After years of blockbuster sales, many investors fear the iPhone has reached saturation, spelling the end for Apple's exponential growth. Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told Reuters that the success of the iPhone 6 a year earlier had set a difficult bar to beat in the second quarter. "The iPhone 6 is an anomaly," he said. He pointed to the services division, which includes Apple Music and the App Store, as a bright spot. Its revenue grew 20 percent to $6 billion and surpassed iMac and iPad sales. Apple forecast third-quarter revenue of $41 billion to $43 billion, short of the Wall Street consensus of $47.3 billion. The drop in after-hours shares wipes out roughly $46 billion in market capitalization, roughly the value of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar. In reaction to Apple's results, shares of its suppliers Skyworks Solutions, Qorvo, Broadcom  and NXP Semiconductors all fell 2 percent or more on Tuesday.

• Twitter stock plunges as earnings miss estimates: Twitter disappointed investors yet again with first-quarter results that showed stagnant revenue growth as the microblogging service struggles to grab new users amid efforts to improve its complicated interface with several new features. Twitter shares plunged 13.6 percent to $15.34 in late trade on Tuesday after reporting lower-than-expected revenue, hurt by weaker than expected spending by big advertisers, and providing a current-quarter revenue forecast well below analysts' expectations. Twitter's user base grew modestly to 310 million monthly active users in the quarter ended March 31 from 305 million in the fourth quarter, above analysts' expectations. But investors were let down by the revenue miss since outlining a turnaround plan. First-quarter revenue rose 36 percent from a year earlier to $594.5 million, but widely missed the average analyst estimate of $607.8 million. Its net loss narrowed to $79.7.million, or 12 cents per share, from $162.4 million, or 25 cents per share, a year earlier. "It's obvious Twitter is having trouble," said Arvind Bhatia, analyst with CRT Capital. "It's not growing anywhere close to where people expected a while back."

• Alibaba Financial Affiliate Raises $4.5 Billion: The Alibaba Group of China has become a colossus in the global Internet world, with a market value of nearly $200 billion. Now its online payment affiliate is aiming for  similarly lofty financial goal: becoming one of the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world. The affiliate, known as the Ant Financial Services Group, said on Tuesday that it had raised $4.5 billion from investors. The private financing round suggests that the company is now valued at about $60 billion — or more than $10 billion over the market value of PayPal Holdings, its closest analogue. Ant Financial may not be as well known in the West as Silicon Valley darlings like Uber Technologies, which was most recently valued at about $62.5 billion. But Ant Financial — whose controlling shareholder isAlibaba’s billionaire founder, Jack Ma — has become an online power in its own right. It is one of the biggest electronic payment companies in the world by virtue of Alipay, a payment service that is commonly used in China. It is also one of the most prominent symbols of strength in China’s private sector, particularly in the field of online payments. Slow-moving state-run banks and an initial absence of regulation have allowed privately run companies to weave themselves into everyday life. Ant Financial now encompasses not only online payments, but also low-risk money market funds and a wallet app that enables easy payment from smartphones around China. Chinese consumers use Alipay to shop online, transfer money to one another, hail taxis, buy movie tickets and even invest their spare change. A money-market fund affiliated with Ant Financial was once one of the world’s largest. According to the announcement on Tuesday, Alipay has more than 450 million users, or more than double the number PayPal has. Such is the power of the company that its latest financing was led by some of China’s biggest state-controlled banks, including arms of the China Construction Bank and China Life Insurance. That indicates the level of government support that the company enjoys in a country where much of the economy is still state-directed. Ant Financial’s previous fund-raising round, which was held last year, included China’s national social security fund and an arm of the China Development Bank. In a move that could further endear the company to Chinese officials, Mr. Ma has said he hopes to take Ant Financial public in China. Still, if Ant Financial follows through on the plan, it would be one of the biggest initial public offerings since that of Alibaba itself, which raisednearly $22 billion in 2014 in the biggest public offering on record.

• EBay Forecast Beats Estimates as Traffic Efforts Pay Off: EBay projected sales on its marketplace for the second quarter and full year that will meet or exceed analysts’ estimates, suggesting efforts to boost traffic, such as using barcode scanning and a more searchable catalog, are gaining traction. Since separating from PayPal last year, Chief Executive Officer Devin Wenig has been under pressure to reverse sluggish growth at EBay in the face of competition from Amazon.com Inc., which continues to woo shoppers with fast delivery, and after Google changed its search algorithm in a way that hurt EBay traffic. The shares rose 2.1 percent to $24.98 in extended trading after the results were announced. They ended the day at $24.49, up 1.1 percent, and are down 11 percent so far this year. Revenue in the second quarter will be $2.14 billion to $2.19 billion EBay said in a statement Tuesday. The average analyst estimate was for $2.14 billion. For the full year, EBay said it expects revenue of $8.6 billion to $8.8 billion, compared with analysts’ estimates of $8.73 billion. Profit, excluding certain items, will be 40 cents to 42 cents a share in the current quarter, EBay said Tuesday, compared with analysts’ estimates of 44 cents. EBay’s Gross Merchandise Volume -- the total value of goods sold on the marketplace -- of $20.5 billion in the quarter was up 1 percent from a year earlier.

• As tide turns against chip industry, Samsung forges ahead of rivals: Gloom may be settling over much of the world's semiconductor industry but Samsung is expected to cope better than most due to its strong technological edge, enabling it to boost market share for some key products and possibly even lift revenue. A plunge in PC sales and slower growth for smartphones globally has hit the sector hard, prompting Intel Corp to say this month it would cut up to 12,000 jobs. Qualcomm has said fiscal third-quarter chip shipments could fall as much as 22 percent, while SK Hynix Inc on Tuesday reported a 65 percent slide in quarterly operating income - its weakest result in three years. Samsung, which reports its first-quarter earnings on Thursday, is also hurting. Chip profits - which accounted for just under half of its overall 2015 operating income - are widely expected to fall, with some analysts predicting a drop of more than 10 percent in January-March from a year earlier. But if its rivals are getting pummeled, the South Korean tech giant is merely bruised and is in many ways benefiting as clients shift towards premium power-conserving DRAM chips for smartphones, as well as solid-state drives for data storage using 3D NAND chips. "The technological gap between Samsung and its competitors in fields such as DRAM and NAND has been widening lately, which helps the company avoid the rate of profit decline seen at other firms," said Song Myung-sub, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities. Even with a first-quarter drop of around 10 percent, Samsung's chip operating profit is expected to be nearly five times that of SK Hynix. The world's No. 2 chipmaker also happens to run the world's biggest smartphone business, giving it a captive customer for its chips that none of its rivals have.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 8th

• Amazon May Violate India’s New Rules on Foreign E-Commerce: For Amazon, no country is more important to its global growth ambitions than India, the second-most-populous nation in the world behind China, where online shopping is in its infancy and growing explosively. But Amazon’s India plans just ran into a hitch. Late last month, the Indian government issued additional rules governing foreign ownership of e-commerce companies operating in the country. The government added regulations related to pricing and the sourcing of sales on sites that Amazon and several rivals appear to violate. What is more, the new policy was effective immediately, giving Amazon and others no time to comply.India essentially bars companies with substantial foreign ownership from operating retail outlets that sell from their own inventories of goods. Although American multinationals like Amazon, Walmart and Apple have sought to overturn or soften those restrictions, the government has made few changes. To work around the restrictions, Amazon and competitors billed themselves as e-commerce marketplaces, eBay-like websites that matched buyers with independent sellers. Amazon owns no inventory of its own in India, though it handles the warehousing and delivery of goods for many of its independent sellers, a model it also employs in the United States. Last week, Indian regulators confirmed that online marketplaces, which had operated in a gray era, are legal. But they added a rule saying that no single seller can account for more than 25 percent of sales on such an e-commerce marketplace. It also limited the influence that online marketplaces can exert over the prices set by their sellers. The new regulations appear to make Amazon’s dependence on one large seller on its site, Cloudtail, illegal, according to industry officials and analysts. While Amazon says it has more than 80,000 sellers on its India site, Cloudtail is estimated to account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the site’s sales, according to Mr. Meena of Forrester. The parent company of Cloudtail is a partnership between Catamaran Ventures, the investment firm of the Indian business magnate, N.R. Narayana Murthy, and Amazon, which owns 49 percent. India’s leading e-commerce company, Flipkart, also works closely with an affiliated large seller and faces a similar problem.

• US Startup Funding Deals Fall to Lowest Level in Four Years - Different Story in India and China: Venture capitalists made fewer bets in the U.S. last quarter, while putting a larger proportion of their money into the most mature private companies, according to research firm PitchBook Data. The findings show that venture investors are trying to play it safe by backing proven businesses, making it more difficult for newer startups to find capital. Last quarter had the fewest number of venture deals in four years. Funding rounds dropped 12 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2015, when startup funding began to slow. Investments totaled $17.7 billion in the first quarter of 2016, about flat with the prior period. More than half of that went to late-stage companies. Private investors are expressing skepticism as startup valuations have skyrocketed. Mutual fund companies have written down the value of their stakes in numerous technology companies since last year. Startups are staying private longer, leaving fewer options for shareholders to cash out. No tech company went public last quarter, and many of those that did in 2015 have gotten off to a rocky start. In other countries, there's plenty of money to go around. Venture capital investments in China and India surged in the first quarter, jumping about 50 percent.

• Alibaba Gives Shelter in Debt Storm as China Internet Bonds Gain: China’s Internet giants are providing a haven for bond investors fleeing mounting default risks among the nation’s state-owned enterprises. Investors are snapping up bonds from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., a bright spot in an economy growing at the slowest pace in a quarter-century. The rising demand also reflects a broader shift in China’s economy away from smokestack industries toward private-sector services such as e-commerce, online finance and entertainment. Creditors have grown wary of state-backed firms after Moody’s Investors Service cut its outlook on 38 of them along with the government in March. Dollar bonds from Internet firms have returned 4.2 percent this year, the nation’s best-performing sector, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. Alibaba’s securities due 2034 have gained 9 percent since Dec. 31, while 2025 notes of Baidu and Tencent both returned more than 6 percent. Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, has cashed in by raising $4 billion from loan bankers and Tencent, operator of China’s most popular messaging services, borrowed $2.45 billion in December.

• Morgan Stanley Paints Bleak Outlook for Twitter on Few New Users: Morgan Stanley analysts came down hard on Twitter Inc., lowering their forecasts for the social media company’s stock price, on projected slower growth in new users, revenue and earnings. “Engagement and new user trends remain troubling,” the analysts, led by Brian Nowak, said in a note to clients Thursday. Morgan Stanley cut its price target on Twitter to $16 from $18 and reduced its projection for 2017 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization by 13 percent to $769 million. The firm reduced its 2017 revenue forecast by 6 percent to to $3.23 billion.

• Mashable Fires News Staff, Replaces Executives as Part of Pivot to Video Infotainment: Last week, the digital publication Mashable said that it had raised $15 million in a funding round led by Turner and that it would be using the money to “co-develop” content for TBS and TNT. Today, the other shoe dropped. The company announced that it is replacing its chief content and revenue officers — Jim Roberts and Seth Rogin — and firing a large portion of its editorial staff. Additionally, Mashable is pivoting from hard news coverage; it will focus on producing lots more video about “digital culture.” According to Politico and a Mashable editor, 30 people were laid off.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 18, 2016

• Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google and Toyota declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. The deals were spearheaded by Andy Rubin, former chief of the Android division, and brought about 300 robotics engineers into Google. Rubin left the company in October 2014. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. At the heart of Replicant’s trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term. Tensions between Boston Dynamics and the rest of the Replicant group spilled into open view within Google, when written minutes of a Nov. 11 meeting and several subsequent e-mails were inadvertently published to an online forum that was accessible to other Google workers. These documents were made available to Bloomberg News by a Google employee who spotted them. The November meeting was run by Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, who was temporarily in charge of the Replicant group. In the meeting, Rosenberg said, “we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there’s some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years."

• Alibaba is working to bring virtual reality into its e-commerce services: Alibaba has formally thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring after the Chinese e-commerce giant announced its own VR research lab, dubbed GnomeMagic Lab. The company invested in red hot augmented reality company Magic Leap earlier this year, in a deal that put Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai on the board, and it has tinkered with 360 degree panoramic video for Youku Tudou — the Chinese video site it invested in and is in the process of acquiring for $3.5 billion — but this is its official entry into the space. Alibaba, which claims 400 million users across its services, said that GnomeMagic Lab will work with its shopping businesses with a view to integrating VR into the shopping experience while exploring other applications, such as video with Youku Tudou and entertainment via Alibaba Pictures. In a press announcement, former Facebook engineer Zhao Haiping, who is on the Alibaba’s GnomeMagic Lab team, said VR could enable customers to shop virtually on New York’s Fifth Avenue from the comfort of their own home. On a more practical level, Alibaba wants to help merchants use VR to sell on its sites, it said it has already created VR visuals for hundreds of products. That’s the plan for where Alibaba believes that VR is going, or could go, in the longer term. For now, the company is setting up a store dedicated to VR hardware to help companies tap into its vast audience.VR is the hot topic of the moment, and it’s more a case of which tech companies aren’t getting into it. Samsung has already shipped a headset. Facebook bought Occulus, which is about to launch its Rift VR and an initial 30 games. HTC’s is arriving imminently and Sony’s effort is also on its way. On the content side, Facebook, YouTube and — today — even British broadcaster Sky are opening themselves up to the virtual future.

• Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won’t give them a college degree: One of the biggest booms in the job market right now: an influx of coders graduating from three- to six-month coding crunch programs in lieu of traditional four-year Computer Science degree programs. These for-profit programs, non-accredited and operating without much regulation, have been cropping up in response to a swelling market demand for STEM workers. They vary in quality, but most bootcamps promise steady, high-paying work upon graduation, prompting aspiring coders to invest anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 of personal money to enroll. Now, colleges and universities are teaming up with these private schools, or rolling out their own bootcamp-style programs to offer accelerated coding workshops to their students. Northeastern, UPenn, and Rutgers have announced in-house bootcamps in the couple of months, while Lynn University and Concordia University have paired with programs like General Assembly and The Software Craftsmanship Guild. It’s a response to thetremendous growth in bootcamp enrollment, which increased by 138 percent from 2014 to 2015, compared to more modest growth in traditional Computer Science degrees (14 percent from 2013 to 2014). The demand is clear. But should universities be borrowing bootcamp tactics? O’Neill, who is Principal Architect at Monetate, agrees. He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said. A typical four-year CS degree will require students to study theoretical principles of programming on top of straight coding skills. Bootcamps, on the other hand, focus on programming alone, with an emphasis on in-demand languages in popular sectors like app development, functioning more like vocational school. But Anupam Joshi sees the immediate benefits of these programs. He’s Chair of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which doesn’t currently have plans to incorporate bootcamp style programs into its CS department (though the university does have a “training center” that offers vocational services, including coding). But he appreciates the bootcamps' quick adaptability to industry fads and the wider scope of needs they fill amidst the student body. “Bootcamps are good for someone who wants to get an entry level job,” he said of the promotion of coding over theory. “It’s like every other trade.”

• Blackstone nears $940 million deal to buy HP Enterprise stake in India's MphasiS: sources Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is nearing a deal to acquire Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) (HPE.N) controlling stake worth about $940 million in Indian IT outsourcing services provider MphasiS Ltd (MBFL.NS), according to three sources directly involved in the deal. HPE owns roughly 60.5 percent stake in MphasiS, and the U.S.-based parent had been looking to exit from the Indian venture to shore up its capital. Bids for buying the MphasiS stake were submitted earlier this month and the U.S. private equity firm has emerged as the front-runner for taking majority ownership of the mid-sized Indian IT services exporter, the sources said. Financial details of the possible deal were not immediately known. Based on MphasiS' stock price on Thursday, the HPE stake in the Bengaluru-headquartered company is valued at about $940 million. The company's total market value is about $1.6 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 08

• Snapchat Thinks It Will Generate at Least $300 Million in Revenue This Year: Investors are buying into Snapchat’s massive $16 billion valuation because its business is growing significantly. Or at least expected to grow significantly in 2016. Snapchat is targeting between $300 million and $350 million in revenue in 2016, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. That’s six or seven times the $50 million in revenue Snapchat projected last year. Snapchat’s business is still new and evolving, and advertiser interest is still very experimental. Essentially that means it can be tough to predict incoming revenue with much accuracy, as most advertisers don’t have Snapchat as a staple of their advertising plans. The company hit a $100 million revenue run rate in Q4, according to one source. Advertising is cyclical, and Q4 is usually a strong advertising quarter, but it’s worth noting because the run rate metric gives us a glimpse at how the business is growing. Still, boosting projected revenue like that must mean the businesses is growing at a nice clip. We don’t know if the $16 billion valuation is pegged to this year’s expected revenue, but if it were, that would amount to more than 50 times this year’s sales. Facebook, by comparison, trades at a value of about 17 times its annual revenue.

• Alibaba's Ant Financial could be valued at nearly $60 billion: source Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba arm, Ant Financial Services Group, is seeking a valuation of nearly $60 billion in its current round of funding, a person familiar with the matter said. Ant Financial, which operates the "Alipay" online payment platform, is in talks to raise funds from existing and new investors, which could include CCB International, the person said on Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Monday that Ant Financial planned to raise up to 20 billion yuan ($3.07 billion), pegging its valuation at nearly $50 billion. Ant Financial declined comment on the Journal's story. The latest round of funding is expected to be completed by mid-April, the Journal reported. 

• Tech Companies, New and Old, Clamor to Entice Cloud Computing Experts: The hunt for the hard-to-find talent that can build and run the massive data centers behind cloud computing is pitting three generations of companies against one another. Old-guard companies like Oracle, tech’s current giants like Amazon and its peers, as well as Bay Area start-ups are offering big salaries and big perks for cloud computing experts. On the social media site LinkedIn, for example, there are over 130 engineering positions available at Oracle Seattle. Many of them are the kind of jobs that now pay $300,000 to $1 million a year, according to Shannon Anderson, who has been recruiting engineers in Seattle and the Bay Area for 25 years. Seattle and its surrounding towns are a hot spot for this kind of tech talent because they are home to A.W.S., which runs the biggest cloud computing service, and Microsoft, which has a large cloud business called Azure.Google also has a cloud computing office in the area. So does Facebook.“Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day,” Ms. Anderson said. “Compensation has doubled in five years.” For a recruiter, who is typically paid a percentage of a star engineer’s compensation, “this is a very good time,” she said. Cloud computing, which powers an increasing number of our devices and services, allows a vast collection of computers — often spread around the world — to operate like one giant machine. As other tech sectors show signs of slowing, cloud services have created unprecedented demand for highly educated engineers and mathematicians who can build and operate these flywheels of data. Instead of asking about the latest computer coding languages or how to make a web page load faster, the most important question in tech hiring has become: Can you handle petabytes? That is the data in about 13 billion images, or roughly the amount of printed information that would fit in 20 million file cabinets. In the Bay Area, $125,000 a year is not an uncommon salary for someone newly out of graduate school with the expertise to do cloud computing work. With five years of experience, $300,000 along with a range of stock or job opportunities that greatly inflate the value of those paychecks have become the norm. “It’s an aggressive market,” said Corey Sanders, director of program management at Microsoft Azure. “We are all data engineers now, and we can convince people that this is the best place to learn that.”

• Prompt debuts “a command line for the real world”: In a world suffering from app overload, the Y Combinator-backed startup Prompt introduces a different way to interact with services, make purchases or even control “Internet of Things” devices — all by way of text-based interface. The application, which can be used via SMS, Slack or the web, lets you text to do things like request an Uber, change the temperature on a Nest thermostat, get directions, track flights or packages and a lot more. 

• How Amazon Shames Warehouse Workers for Alleged Theft: While waiting to clock in each morning, workers at some Amazon.com warehouses get a steady stream of company-provided reading: the stories of co-workers fired for theft. In an effort to discourage stealing, Amazon has put up flatscreen TVs that display examples of alleged on-the-job theft, say 11 of the company’s current and former warehouse workers and antitheft staff. The alleged offenders aren’t identified by name. Each is represented by a black silhouette stamped with the word “terminated” and accompanied by details such as when they stole, what they stole, how much it was worth, and how they got caught—changing an outbound package’s address, for example, or stuffing merchandise in their socks. Some of the silhouettes are marked “arrested.” Theft is a persistent concern for Amazon, with warehouses full of small but valuable items and a workforce with high turnover and low pay. Workers interviewed for this story say the range of thefts posted on the screens is as varied as the company’s sprawling catalog: DVDs, an iPad, jewelry, a lighter, makeup, a microwave, phone cases, Pop Rocks, video games. Several recall a post about an employee fired for stealing a co-worker’s lunch. The digital bulletin boards also occasionally display information about firings related to workplace violence. There are cheerier announcements, too, such as updates on incentive bonuses or a message about Black History Month. In some warehouses that don’t have flatscreens, workers say, tales of firings are posted on sheets of paper tacked to bulletin boards or taped to the wall. Many of the workers say the screens aren’t a top concern compared with wages or workload. “Only people that would have something to say about it is people that’s doing wrong,” says Maurice Jones, a warehouse worker who left Amazon in February. “It’s just letting people know that you’re being watched.”  

• Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign: Apple customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware, researchers with Palo Alto Networks told Reuters on Sunday. Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data. Palo Alto Threat Intelligence Director Ryan Olson said the "KeRanger" malware, which appeared on Friday, was the first functioning ransomware attacking Apple's Mac computers. "This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom," Olson said in a telephone interview. Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon. 

• FCC cracks down on Verizon Wireless for using ‘supercookies’: The Federal Communications Commission is cracking down on Verizon Wireless for using a powerful type of code to track its customers around the Internet, as the agency pushes to increase its role in protecting online privacy. The code, dubbed a "supercookie" by privacy advocates, is almost impossible to disable and could allow almost anyone to follow users around the Web. Under the terms of a settlement agreement announced Monday, Verizon must pay a $1.35 million fine and will only be able to use the tracking mechanism when users connect to Verizon's corporate family of services unless the company gets customers' opt-in consent. Broader use could leave customers' Web habits visible to outsiders. Verizon began putting a unique string of characters into customers' web browsing in 2012 to help target its advertising program. The practice came to the public's attention in late 2014, when it received criticism from privacy advocates who called the code a "supercookie" because the it was almost impossible for users to avoid. The privacy advocates warned then that other companies, or even intelligence agencies, could leverage the super cookies to track wherever people went online. Verizon downplayed that concern at the time, with a spokesperson saying that the code "wouldn’t be able to be used for that." But last January, researcher Jonathan Mayer revealed evidence that others could hijack the supercookie for their own purposes: An online advertising company called Turn was using the codes to help follow people around online, he said. Turn used the supercookie to "respawn" its traditional cookies -- even if users took steps to protect their privacy by removing the cookies. Turn said it would stop and Verizon started offering a way for customers to opt-out of having the supercookie attached to their web traffic. But the FCC had already launched an investigation of Verizon's use of supercookies in December of 2014  -- and later brought Mayer on board as the chief technologist for the agency's enforcement arm. While the Federal Trade Commission is often thought of as the government's primary privacy watch dog, the FCC's power to police online privacy got a major boost last year. As a quirk of how the agency moved to enforce network neutrality rules, broadband providers will be subject to new privacy scrutiny. The FCC is in the process of coming up with a version of its privacy rules that apply to broadband Internet providers, which are expected soon.