Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 2

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• The Chip Industry Consolidates - In The Third Big Chip Merger of the Year, Intel Agrees to Buy Altera for $16.7 Billion. Recent months have seen a flurry of deals in the semiconductor sector, a business that has become prohibitively expensive for all but the biggest players. On Monday, Intel, the world’s largest maker of chips, said it would pay $16.7 billion for chip company Altera. Last week, Avago Technologies agreed to pay $37 billion for Broadcom. And in March, a company called NXP Semiconductors paid $11.8 billion for Freescale Semiconductor, which began life as part of Motorola and specializes in chips for sensors and cars. “Ten years ago the cost from designing a new chip to making it a product was $10 million to $50 million,” said Mark Hung, an analyst with Gartner. “Today it’s $100 million to $200 million. Solving weird and challenging physics problems at this small size requires a lot of expensive equipment. That’s why there’s all this M.&A.” Besides gaining so-called economies of scale, Intel hopes Altera puts it in better shape for two of the biggest emerging markets, large data centers and the so-called Internet of Things, or computer-enriched machines that work with other devices. Altera’s primary chips help Intel target that market. The San Jose, Calif., company’s chips can be reprogrammed once they leave the foundry, altering some of their functions. Intel’s semiconductors are more powerful, but lack that flexibility. By combining the two types on a single chip, Intel thinks that by late next year it can start offering its big business customers ways of fine-tuning performance to suit specific needs. Also, Intel has fallen behind another big chip company, Qualcomm, in the market for low-powered chips that run mobile devices even as sales of chips for personal computers have slowed. For Intel, improving what it can do in newer, growing sectors is essential. Shares of Altera closed Monday up 5.8 percent. Intel shares were down about 1.6 percent.

• Intel’s $16.7 Billion Altera Deal Is Fueled by Data Centers: Intel Corp. agreed to buy Altera Corp. for $16.7 billion to defend its presence in data centers, forging a deal that will add to a record year for industry consolidation. The world’s largest chipmaker will pay $54 a share in cash for the maker of programmable logic semiconductors, Intel said in a statement Monday. That’s a premium of 11 percent over Altera’s closing share price on Friday and 56 percent from March 26, the day before the possibility of a transaction was first reported. Intel, like other chipmakers, is seeking to contend with growth and rising costs, while trying to defend its most profitable business. The largest deal ever in the $300 billion semiconductor business was announced last week when Avago Technologies Ltd. agreed to buy Broadcom Corp. for $37 billion. Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability. Sales at Intel’s data-center division rose 19 percent in the first quarter as Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. built out their server operations. As a part of Intel, Altera will continue to support designs that couple its chips with others designed on ARM Holdings Plc technology. Companies such as Qualcomm Inc. are preparing to use that to try to break Intel’s dominance in data-center chips, where it has more than 98 percent of the market.

• The history of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) - the long life of a quick fix: Internet protocol from 1989 leaves data vulnerable to hijackers: “Short-term solutions tend to stay with us for a very long time. And long-term solutions tend to never happen.” Such is the story of the “three-napkins protocol,” more formally known as Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. At its most basic level, BGP helps routers decide how to send giant flows of data across the vast mesh of connections that make up the Internet. With infinite numbers of possible paths — some slow and meandering, others quick and direct — BGP gives routers the information they need to pick one, even though there is no overall map of the Internet and no authority charged with directing its traffic. The creation of BGP, which relies on individual networks continuously sharing information about available data links, helped the Internet continue its growth into a worldwide network. But BGP also allows huge swaths of data to be “hijacked” by almost anyone with the necessary skills and access. The main reason is that BGP, like many key systems on the Internet, is built to automatically trust users — something that may work on smaller networks but leaves a global one ripe for attack. Hijackings have become routine events that even experts struggle to explain: What made traffic between two computers in Denver take a 7,000-mile detour through Iceland? How could a single Pakistani company crash YouTube? Why did potentially sensitive Pentagon data once flow through Beijing? To these questions, there are technical answers. But they all boil down to this fact: BGP runs on the honor system, allowing data to get pushed and pulled across the planet in curious ways, at the behest of mysterious masters. In 1989, when BGP was devised, the big issue of the day was the possibility that the Internet might break down. A halt in its furious expansion would have hurt the network’s users and the profits of companies supplying gear and services. Rekhter at the time worked for computing giant IBM; Lougheed was a founding employee of Cisco, maker of networking hardware. “We needed to sell routers. And we had a strong economic motive to make sure this party would continue,” Lougheed said. “When Yakov and I showed up with a solution and it seemed to work, people were quite willing to accept it because they didn’t have anything else.” There were other efforts underway to build routing protocols. BGP won out because it was simple, solved the problem at hand and proved versatile enough to keep data flowing as the Internet doubled in size, again and again and again. Networks across the world embraced the protocol, giving it an edge it has never relinquished. Once technologies are widely deployed, they become almost impossible to replace because many users — including paying customers of technology companies — rely on them and resist buying costly new hardware or software. The result can be a steady buildup of outdated technology, one layer on top of another. It’s as if today’s most important bank vaults sit on foundations of straw and mud.

• Just Dial’s Q4 revenue up 26%: mulls buy-back of shares: Online local business search engine company Just Dial Ltd reported earnings: Annual operating revenue increased by 28 per cent to Rs 589.80 crore over FY14 for the full year ended March 31, 2015. The firm’s operating income rose 25.8 per cent at Rs 156.28 crore during the quarter against Rs 124.21 crore in Q4 FY14. Founded by Mani in 1994, Just Dial is a local search firm that provides listings of small and medium businesses across the country. Lately it has been expanding its business by adding transaction services for its merchants allowing consumers to buy products and services from third-party vendors like a marketplace. With the most recent addition of products, it has become the first significant listed firm involved in product e-commerce marketplace. Last month, one of the early investors of the company, Tiger Global exited from the firm. Meanwhile, the company said that a meeting of the board of directors will be held on June 4, to consider the proposal to buy-back the fully paid-up equity shares of the firm.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 1

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• Snapchat Said to Be Valued at $16 Billion in New Fundraising: Snapchat raised $537.6 million in a sale of common stock, with the funding round valuing the messaging startup at about $16 billion. The company may raise as much as $650 million in the round, according to a filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That would bring Snapchat’s total financing to more than $1.2 billion, according to Crunchbase, as the company builds its business in pursuit of an eventual initial public offering. By raising the latest funding in common stock, Snapchat is bucking convention for later-stage venture deals, which tend to include preferred-stock provisions that allow investors to decrease their risk. “Investing in common stock, especially at a $16 billion valuation, is not normal,” said Anand Sanwal, chief executive officer of venture-capital data firm CB Insights. “It highlights the leverage that Snapchat had in these negotiations because the investors aren’t getting the protections they normally ask for.”

• Intel is close to clinching a takeover of fellow chip maker Altera for more than $15 billion, the latest sign of consolidation in the semiconductor industry. Intel is expected to pay about $54 a share for Altera, whose specialized chip designs would help Intel expand beyond chips for personal computers. An agreement could be announced as early next week, though sources cautioned that talks are continuing and might still collapse. The two sides had been in talks already this year, though the discussions were eventually delayed when Altera rejected an offer in the ballpark of $54 a share. But after the talks ended, Altera reported quarterly earnings that fell below expectations. Meanwhile, one investor, TIG Advisors, began to publicly campaign for a resumption of talks with Intel. If completed, a takeover would be the latest among chip makers as companies seek larger scale and more diversified offerings. Growing and having more products can give those manufacturers greater savings and negotiating leverage with customers. On Thursday, Avago Technologies struck a roughly $37 billion acquisition of Broadcom to break into the top tier of semiconductor companies. Intel and Altera both make semiconductors, but vastly different types. Intel is known primarily for the standard chips that go into personal computers and computer servers. They consist of millions of transistors, and once created, their performance can be adjusted only slightly by changing the software that works with them. Altera’s chips — known as field programmable gate arrays, or F.P.G.A.s — are lower in power and performance but can be altered after manufacturing to carry out different functions. That gives them far greater flexibility. Intel may be seeking Altera to create computers that combine the power of a standard semiconductor with the flexibility of an F.P.G.A., by means of a board with both types of chip. This could potentially give Intel the ability to build, for example, a computer server that can add functions so it lasts longer inside a corporate data center. This move would reflect several recent trends in the industry. Giant cloud computing centers have become an increasingly large part of Intel’s business, made even more significant as smartphones have lowered the demand for “Intel Inside” personal computers. Intel now has dedicated sales teams working with big chip consumers, like Amazon.com, that tell the company its specific computing needs for its giant cloud systems. In addition, Intel is now concentrating on at least 200 companies that are building significant computing clouds. Adding F.P.G.A.s might be a good way to help companies customize those data centers.

• Social Networking App Path Sells Itself To Korean Messaging Heavyweight Daum Kakao. It isn’t often that a company in Asia acquires a U.S. rival, particularly one that has surfed a wave of hype in Silicon Valley. But that’s exactly what happened this week after Path announced the sale of its flagship app to Korea’s Daum Kakao. The deal is undisclosed, but, as a real acquisition involving two consumer messaging apps, it is notable, particularly as the mobile messaging space transitions from a period of hyper growth to one of consolidation and services. Most people interested in tech are familiar with Path. The five-year-old service burst onto the scene as a beautifully designed, mobile-first alternative to Facebook with a number of features to set it apart from the social network. Ultimately, Path didn’t break out of Silicon Valley and go mainstream in the U.S., but it did make inroads in Asia — particularly in Indonesia. The company is said to have 23 million registered users, four million of whom are in the Southeast Asia country, as of October last year. Path began to focus more intently on Asia with its redesign in 2013, while it took money from Indonesia’s Bakrie Global Group as part of a $25 million Series C last year. Daum Kakao is less known, particularly in the U.S.. The organization was formed when Korean internet firm Daum merged with domestic messaging app company Kakao in a $2.9 billion deal last year. The company’s Kakao Talk app is perhaps the best example of how a messaging app has impacted media and internet distribution — which is where the trend is moving in the U.S. and other countries. Though it has a small global presence — its 160 million registered userbase is far lower than key rivals — the app is installed on over 95 percent of smartphones in its native Korea, where it offers free texts and calls, games, a payment service, taxi-hailing and more. The 2015 Mary Meeker internet trends report, released this week, ranked Kakao Talk as the top messaging app worldwide based on user engagement. Another indicator of its stickiness is that its games business utterly dominates Korea’s iOS and Android app stores, according to data from App Annie. Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia with a population of over 250 million. It was well-known for being the last major market where BlackBerry had any kind of mainstream presence but that’s changed now. The rise of affordable Android smartphones — particularly glamorous sub-$300 devices from the likes of Xiaomi — sent BlackBerry’s sales plummeting. But, the result of BlackBerry’s years of dominance is that there is no single messaging app that dominates Indonesia. That’s unlike other parts of Asia — China (WeChat), India, Singapore and Malaysia (WhatsApp), Japan, Thailand and Taiwan (Line), Philippines (Viber) — where the leadership has been established. With a large population up for grabs and the sizable following that Path enjoys in the country, Daum Kakao is buying itself a larger chunk of the market with this deal. It may also bolster its presence in other parts of Asia, where Daum Kakao claimed Path has 10 million registered users.

• Netflix now accounts for almost 37 percent of American Internet traffic: Netflix's share of Internet traffic is exploding. The streaming service now accounts for 36.5 percent of all bandwidth consumed by North American Web users during primetime, according to the Canada-based network firm Sandvine. That's way up from even last November, when Sandvine estimated Netflix's bandwidth footprint at 34.9 percent of Internet traffic. Sandvine's regular reports on Internet usage — based on traffic as it passes through its systems — have become a reliable indicator of which services are taking up the most bandwidth. Both the season five premiere of "Game of Thrones" and the most recent "Call of Duty" downloadable content led to massive spikes in data consumption, the latest report also finds.

• Netflix, for better or worse, has become the symbol for net neutrality, which has become a key issue in how regulators analyze proposed cable and telecom mergers. To many in the cable and broadband businesses, the invisible hand of Netflix has been apparent in the failed Comcast-Time Warner Cable combination; in likely restrictions on the merger between AT&T and DirecTV; and in the Obama administration’s embrace of net neutrality, to cite just three prominent examples. A pivotal moment in the net neutrality struggle came last year when Netflix agreed to pay Comcast so-called interconnection fees, a deal that Netflix’s Mr. Hastings last month called a “deal with the devil.” (While Comcast has drawn the brunt of Mr. Hastings’s ire, Netflix also reached similar interconnection deals with every other major Internet service provider.) But securing payment from Netflix for fast and more reliable access may have been a Pyrrhic victory for Comcast and the other the broadband providers. Until then the notion of net neutrality had been something of an abstraction. But when Netflix subscribers found their programs constantly interrupted for “buffering” (an interruption to download more data), the ability of Internet providers to play favorites seemed all too real. Once Netflix started paying fees to Comcast, its customers suddenly found their service improved substantially. Netflix’s experience with Comcast became Exhibit A with the F.C.C. when Netflix opposed the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. “The combined company would possess even more anti-competitive leverage to charge arbitrary interconnection tolls for access to their customers,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders opposing the merger. It probably didn’t hurt Netflix’s case that just about everyone in Washington watches the hit Netflix series “House of Cards,” and Comcast is the dominant Internet provider there. Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, said he, too, had suffered buffering problems, which he called “exasperating.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, March 30

• To Grow in the Data Center Market, Intel Is Said to Be in Talks to Acquire Chipmaker Altera: Intel Corp. is in talks to acquire Altera Corp., people with knowledge of the matter said, as the world’s largest chipmaker searches for growth beyond a moribund personal-computer market. The people asked not to be identified discussing private information. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the discussions. Altera shares jumped 28 percent to $44.39 at the close in New York, giving the company a valuation of about $13.4 billion. Intel rose 6.4 percent to $32. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Santa Clara, California-based Intel, and Sue Martenson, a spokeswoman for San Jose, California-based Altera, declined to comment. Intel is on the hunt for growth as it faces a slowdown in the market for PCs that forced a $1 billion cut in its first-quarter sales forecast earlier this month. Sales in the worldwide PC market will shrink 4.9 percent this year, IDC said, as consumers around the world spend more on mobile devices typically based on processors using designs from Intel rivals such as Qualcomm Inc. That decline comes on top of heavy losses in Intel’s mobile division. The group reported an operating loss of $4.21 billion for 2014. A bright spot for Intel is the data-center group, where profits soared to $7.28 billion on sales of $14.4 billion in 2014. The company benefited from a boom in the amount of data being generated and held in computing centers around the world. Altera makes a broad range of low-power programmable semiconductors, which are used in small embedded devices and computer servers for big data centers. In buying Altera, Intel could expand into markets for automotive, industrial and communication applications, while cementing its lead in data centers, said Betsy Van Hees, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. Hees has a neutral rating on the stock. “This would be a significant move for Intel, it would be a significant change in strategy,” she said. “They need diversification beyond the PC market. Data center has been a tremendous source of strength. Mobile has been a tremendous financial drain. Intel and Altera announced a manufacturing partnership in February 2013, agreeing that Altera chips would be made in Intel’s cutting-edge plants. That deal was extended in March last year when the companies agreed to do more detailed work together on chip packaging and design. An acquisition of Altera would help Intel make further inroads into corporate data centers and reduce its dependence on a PC market pressured by the rise of mobile computing, according to Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who has the equivalent of a sell rating on Intel’s stock. “It makes sense that they would potentially be looking for other opportunities to grow the other part of the business,” Rasgon said. “There are synergies, say, in Intel’s data-center business.” Intel could use Altera’s technology to create new processors that pair its traditional products with low-power communications chips, wrote Jefferies Group LLC in a note circulated after the market close on Friday. That would let the company “offer cloud-service providers like Google, Amazon and Facebook the ability to pull communication processing from expensive networking equipment into much lower-cost server blades, effectively enabling Intel to take share in the data-center networking-equipment market,” Jefferies wrote. Altera reported operating income of $543.4 million on sales of $1.93 billion in 2014, compared with Intel’s full-year revenue of $55.9 billion.

• GitHub has been battling a DoS attack for days - alleged source of attack: China: U.S. coding site GitHub said on Sunday that it was deflecting most of the traffic from a days-long cyber attack that had caused intermittent outages for the social coding site, with the Wall Street Journal citing China as the source of the attack. "Eighty-seven hours in, our mitigation is deflecting most attack traffic. We're aware of intermittent issues and continue to adapt our response," a tweet from the GitHub Status account said. The attack took the form of a flood of traffic, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack. Those kinds of attacks are among the most common on the Internet. The Wall Street Journal reported that the flood of Internet traffic to GitHub came from Chinese search engine Baidu Inc, targeting two GitHub pages that linked to copies of sites that are banned in China. On its blog, GitHub said that the attack began early on Thursday "and involves a wide combination of attack vectors." "These include every vector we've seen in previous attacks as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic," the blog post continued. "Based on reports we've received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content." GitHub supplies social coding tools for developers and calls itself the world's largest code host. A Beijing-based Baidu spokesman said the company had conducted a thorough investigation and found that it was neither a security problem on Baidu's side nor a hacking attack. "We have notified other security organizations and are working to get to the bottom of this," the spokesman said.

• India's capital markets regulator Sebi on listing norms for start-ups: SEBI is likely to put out a discussion paper on the listing norms for start-ups next week. Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) Chairman U K Sinha today met an eight-member team from start-up think-tank iSpirt Foundation here to discuss the way forward for start-ups to raise funds from the primary markets. “Sebi would put out a discussion paper next week suggesting a series of improvements. The first draft guidelines are expected by the end of June,” iSpirt Foundation co-founder and governing council member Sharad Sharma told PTI. The think-tank has been in touch with Sebi since mid-December to facilitate the rapidly burgeoning start-up space to go public and raise funds. “This will stop the exodus of start-ups that choose to list on international markets currently,” Sharma said. He, however, declined to comment on the contents of the discussion paper. At the last meeting with Sebi on December 19 last year, the industry had sought regulatory intervention in easing the existing regulations and guidelines which make it difficult for companies to get right investors and advisors. Another suggestion was to make the listing process faster and easier so that investors could exit. Minutes of the past meeting with Sebi posted on the thinktank’s website say the Sebi chairman had indicated that the regulator was exploring putting in place a framework for crowd-funding which will provide a much-needed new mode of financing for start-ups and SME sector and increase flow of credit to SMEs and other users in the real economy. In this mode, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups will be able to raise funds at a lower cost of capital without going through rigorous procedures.

• BlackBerry Reports $28 Million Profit in 4th Quarter - business no longer on brink of collapse, but future still unclear: John S. Chen, executive chairman of the ailing smartphone maker BlackBerry, was again asking for patience on Friday after the company produced a surprise, but slim, profit while also posting an unexpected drop in revenue. The $28 million profit in BlackBerry’s fourth quarter was mainly thanks to a patent sale and tax recovery. The company lost $106 million on an operating basis. For the entire year, the company lost $304 million on revenue of $3.3 billion. Despite the introduction of two new phones and a push by the company to sell software that allows businesses and governments to manage all of their employees’ mobile phones regardless of their brand, fourth-quarter revenue was $660 million, down from $793 million in the previous quarter. Analysts had expected revenue of about $792 million. The revenue drop suggests that the company has yet to revive its phone business, said Brian Colello, an analyst at the firm Morningstar. During the period, BlackBerry offered two new phones: the Classic, which restored features found on older BlackBerrys, and the Passport, which has an unusual square screen. They were aimed at BlackBerry’s traditional customers, like people in the financial industry. Neither has sold well. There was one bright spot. ITG Investment Research reported that retail data it collected in BlackBerry’s home market in Canada showed that BlackBerry sales at Rogers Communications, the country’s largest wireless carrier, rose by 27 percent in the final quarter of last year compared with the third quarter. Sales at Bell Canada were up 12 percent, but BlackBerry sales fell by 13 percent at Telus, the other large carrier in Canada. ITG added that “the solid quarterly trends seen at Canadian carriers may not be representative of global sales trends.” BlackBerry’s software business rose by 24 percent over the previous quarter and 20 percent over the same period a year earlier. But Mr. Chen told analysts that an older version of the company’s mobile device management software, which is more oriented toward BlackBerrys, was outselling the new version, which the company is promoting heavily. Although BlackBerry no longer appears to be on the brink of collapse, Mr. Colello said it was still unclear if Mr. Chen could now make his company grow while maintaining profitability. “The entire business is very uncertain at this point,” he said.

• Founder of mobile buying app Fetch: "Mobile Messaging Conjures A Commerce Platform" This week brought two announcements that reflect a seismic shift in the future of mobile messaging: 600 million users of Facebook Messenger will soon be able to order food, buy products and text directly with businesses; and meanwhile, Magic is raising an astonishing $12 million from Sequoia to allow you to order any on-demand service simply by sending a text message. America is finally discovering what Asia has known for years: mobile messaging is a commerce platform. These developments herald what Chris Messina recently described as a new trend towards “conversational commerce,” in which users will be able to shed the need for countless apps from different companies in favor a simple mobile messaging interface. “Conversational Commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare,” Messina says. Put more simply: we all text more than ever, so why not expand texting’s potential to sending payments, buying products, ordering on-demand services, paying bills, and more? Facebook and Sequoia are not alone in making a big bet that Conversational Commerce marks the next stage of texting’s evolution. We’re in the midst of a veritable messaging gold rush. Earlier this month, Alibaba poured $200 million into SnapChat, which now lets you send money to a friend or buy a product using their newly-launched SnapCash. This follows Alibaba’s $215 million investment in Tango last year. Rakuten recently snapped up Viber for $900 million with an eye towards integrating mobile commerce into the messaging app. Other start-ups in the “conversational commerce” space include Scratch and BRANDiD, which provide curated shopping recommendations; and Native, whose personal travel assistant service allows you to book flights and hotels by sending a text. Path Talk was the first messaging app to allow users to message directly with businesses, making restaurant reservations as easy as sending an SMS. The inevitable evolution of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and SnapChat into commerce platforms will change the way we think about mobile commerce. It won’t be long until you’ll be texting your food order to DoorDash, paying bills by SMS, or firing off a quick Facebook Message to send flowers to your loved one. Magic may not be able to be deliver on their promise of bringing a tiger to your front door, but it’s clear that mobile messaging is about to get a whole lot more powerful.

• For Hardware Makers, Sharing Their Secrets Is Now Part of the Business Plan: Facebook showed plans last week for drone aircraft that beam lasers conveying high-speed data to remote parts of the world. As powerful as that sounds, Facebook already has something that could be even more potent: a huge sharing of its once-proprietary information, the kind of thing that would bring a traditional Silicon Valley patent lawyer to tears. Facebook is not alone. Technology for big computers, electric cars and high-technology microcontrollers to operate things like power tools and engines is now given away. These ideas used to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. To the new generation of technologists, however, moving projects and data fast overrides the value of making everything in secret. “You now don’t need a lot of people or a lot of capital to manufacture a prototype,” said Jay Parikh, vice president for connectivity at Facebook. “The entire world is going to accelerate its technology development.” Facebook has already shared designs for data storage, computer servers and rack designs, among other hardware, Mr. Parikh said, and has seen rapid improvements as a result. Rather than just building and testing a handful of designs, Facebook gets to see dozens of variations that individuals and companies manufacture inexpensively. They often contract with prototype makers over marketplaces like the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, or they may even use three-dimensional printers. When companies do make hardware free, Mr. Dougherty said, it is not usually altruistic. “It can create competition for your enemy without spending money on a new product,” he said. He noted that IBM went into open-source software in the 1990s, and Microsoft suffered. Sometimes companies want to kick-start business. Facebook’s open designs have enabled commercial relationships that lower its supply costs as well as speed innovation.