- Yahoo shares spike 6% on reports board to weigh selling core business, Marissa Mayer's future role: WSJ. The board of Web giant Yahoo is set to discuss the company's future, and that of high-profile Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, when it meets this week, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Tuesday. People familiar with the matter told the newspaper the board was expected to discuss during meetings from Wednesday through Friday whether to proceed with a plan to spin off more than $30 billion in shares of Alibaba or find a buyer for its core business of web properties, or both. Yahoo's core business, which includes popular services like Yahoo Mail and its news and sports sites, could attract private equity firms, media and telecom companies or firms like Softbank analysts have said in the past. The news comes as Mayer faces growing pressure over the company's performance. Mayer came to Yahoo after a long stint at Google. The company's shares were up more than 6 percent in extended trading.
- Forget China — Google Has to Fight Off Alibaba on Mobile in India: Should Google return some services in mainland China, as many expect it to do soon, it will have to go head to head with China’s Internet giants. In the meantime, Google is squaring off against one of them, Alibaba, in India, Google’s largest growth market. The Information published a solid look at mobile habits across India, courtesy of data from mobile startup Quettra. Some of the figures aren’t surprising. Facebook dominates: Indians love the social site and really love Facebook’s WhatsApp — it has 55 million users monthly hours spent, blowing away other messaging apps. Google, though, has a solid lead in utilities and video apps, thanks to YouTube. A potentially troubling sign for the search giant is the race on mobile browsers. The UC browser, which Alibaba acquired last year, is beating Google’s Chrome in India, with over five million more monthly hours of use. Alibaba’s stripped-down browser takes fourth place. Android dominates India. But Google is still concerned with getting the millions there coming online with smartphones to take their first steps on Google’s service, particularly since Facebook is making a similar push. A mobile browser is, for now, one key thing Google has that its U.S. rival does not. But getting mobile users to use services isn’t the hard problem in India. It’s covering their data costs, which are often prohibitively high. Hence Google’s recent push on building lighter, even offline versions of its products. On Monday, Google unveiled an update to the data-saving mode for mobile Chrome that will roll out first in Indonesia and India.
- Zuckerberg Vows to Daughter He’ll Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares: Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth more than $45 billion — to charitable purposes. The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago. Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money, through an unusual limited liability corporate structure. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they wrote. Mr. Zuckerberg’s charitable plans are the latest indication of a growing interest in philanthropy among Silicon Valley’s young billionaires, who unlike previous generations of business tycoons, appear eager to spread their wealth while they are still young. Mr. Zuckerberg is 31, and Dr. Chan is 30. Yet they are entering largely uncharted waters with a charity effort of such scale. They have not yet detailed how the money will be spent and the pace in which the money will be given out indicates they plan to take their time.
- Amazon gadget sales more than triple over Thanksgiving weekend: Amazon.com Inc said sales of its electronic gadgets more than tripled over the Thanksgiving weekend from last year, with the Fire tablet the top-selling product. Sales of the 7-inch tablet more than tripled, while the Fire TV set-top box sold six times more than last year, the company said, without providing the number of units sold.
Uber’s Popularity in India Has Led to a Mini Vehicle Boom: Uber has posed a threat to auto sales by enticing car owners to ditch their keys. In India, its popularity has sparked a vehicle boom instead. Maruti Suzuki has seen a surge in demand for its DZire Tour sedan because of the rising popularity of car-booking apps, said R.S. Kalsi, executive director at India’s largest carmaker. Toyota Motor is offering special deals to woo drivers and fleet operators that are boosting orders for its Etios sedan, which starts at 611,000 rupees ($9,400). Uber and other booking apps have announced plans to expand to smaller cities in India, where public transportation is often inadequate. The services have created a boom in demand from for-hire car companies expanding their fleets and from individual operators buying new cars to drive for the apps. “The plans of all these companies are big,” said N. Raja, director and senior vice president for sales and marketing at Toyota’s India unit. “We’re happy to see them talking about expanding the number of cars in the next 12 months.” In the four months through July, Maruti Suzuki’s DZire Tour, sold only as a taxi, surged 152 percent while Toyota’s Etios compact sedan gained 28 percent. Industrywide passenger-vehicle sales expanded 7.5 percent in the same period. The surge in demand for these cheaper models is helping to drive a recovery in vehicle sales in India. Automakers like Maruti Suzuki get about a third of their sales volume from rural areas, where incomes are correlated to rainfall during the monsoon season and a good harvest.
A Gushing Review for Windows 10: "I used to doubt Microsoft. Then I installed Windows 10": I don’t know if I broke a law of computing or committed heresy. But I installed Windows 10 on my Macbook Pro. I had feared that this would condemn me to purgatory in the gates of computing hell. But it has been an incredibly positive experience: my favorite Microsoft Office applications — Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint — work faster than ever before, and I can still use Apple peripherals — a Thunderbolt Display and Thunderbolt external hard drives. The best part is Windows 10 itself: it is a beautifully designed operating system that gives me the best of the past and present — maintaining the usability and familiarity of the old Windows operating system, and letting me download slick apps designed for tablets. Another Microsoft product that I had written off years ago is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The jury is still out, but Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, seems faster than Google’s Chrome. I may end up switching browsers as well. What is clear is that Microsoft is back — in full force. This is a good thing; Apple and Google desperately need the competition that Microsoft will once again provide.
Android Has a New Name, ‘Marshmallow,’ but the Same Old Security Problem: Android’s latest version now has its own culinary sobriquet: Marshmallow. But the release of the operating system, announced in May and arriving this fall, doesn’t address one of the biggest issues facing Android — its security model. Last month, a security researcher discovered a software bug, called Stagefright, that could potentially threaten millions of Android devices. Google acknowledge the bug and sent out a patch to manufacturers and carriers to fix. Then last week, a different security firm found another vulnerability; this one was in Google’s patch. Google said it has since released a fix for that hole, which affects Nexus devices. Still, both findings underscore the nagging headache Google has built with an OS so reliant on hardware partners, many of whom are struggling to maintain profits. And it shows that Google will continue to wrestle with the issues as Android moves onto other devices, like cars, wearables and home automation. “The whole Android ecosystem is a mess,” said Aaron Portnoy, vice president of Exodus Intelligence, the firm that spotted the second hole. The primary issue is that Google is not fully in control of its own destiny, with updates typically needing the okay of device makers and carriers before making their way to consumers, who also have to update their devices. Contrast that with Apple, which is largely able to push updates on its own. The security issues facing Google are reminiscent of those that faced Windows back in the day. The operating system, dominant in the PC world, found itself the increasing center of attacks. Adding to the issue was the fact that businesses were reticent to update their servers and PCs without doing independent testing.
4 Major Publishers Can Now Put Ads in Their Online Comment Sections: It was only a matter of time before marketers started squeezing native ads into every nook of a publisher's site, and now Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News can sell promos that pop up in story comments. Today, Livefyre—a tech company that powers online discussions—is unveiling sponsored comments for big-name media brands like the ones mentioned above. While the idea of in-feed ads isn't new (competitor Disqus launched similar promos last year), Livefyre's ads are sold directly by publishers, opening up a potentially interesting revenue stream for them. "You can distribute more ads into the page, especially if there are 100 comments on the page," said Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre's founder and CEO. "Typically, by the time the user is down there reading the comments, there's no ads around it—all the ads are up above the fold." In addition to selling the ads, publishers will also control how often they pop up. For example, a media company may only want to serve a promo in one out of every six comments. Of course, plugging ads right next to trolls and negative discussions is a risky move for brands. To control the environment as much as possible, Kretchmer said the majority of his company's clients already use automated moderation tools that weed out spammy posts such as those from rogue e-commerce marketers. "The risk is far less today than it would have been a couple of years ago," he said. Kretchmer also explained the ads are targeted based on editorial content. For example, Nike can set up a campaign that only runs on sports articles. "Users who are reading and leaving comments are the most engaged users on a site," Kretchmer explained. "With customers who have a good, active community, comments are where they spend most of their time, and in a lot of times, [they spend] more time reading the comments than the article itself."
Amazon’s $5 Dash Button Already Hacked To Do Other Stuff Beyond Giving Amazon Money: Need something to spark a bit of creativity this week? How about a super clever hack for Amazon’s $5, single-purpose Dash buttons? The Dash buttons were originally meant to serve as a quick way to reorder household goods you order often (Order a lot of laundry detergent? Stick a Dash button on your washing machine, press it when you’re running low. Bam. Ordered.), but Cloudstitch CTO Ted Benson has found a way to make them do pretty much anything he wants. You can read Benson’s full breakdown right over here, but here’s the gist: Benson noticed that the Dash sends out a unique signal each and every time it’s pressed. Rather than opening up the Dash and modifying the hardware itself (which would probably require all sorts of painful/tedious chip flashing), Benson sniffs the network for that signal. When it’s detected, he can fire a script to do just about whatever he wants. In his demo use case, he’s using it to record when his baby’s diaper gets changed into a Google Spreadsheet, while a second button records when his baby wakes from a nap. To keep the Dash from ordering any products when you press it, you just… don’t configure it to order a product during the inital setup. If you never enter a SKU, it won’t have anything to order. One catch: whereas the factory Dash can act on its own, a modified Dash will need something — a computer, generally — awake and running on your network to sniff out the button presses and respond accordingly. It complicates the equation a bit, but it’s still a fun hack.
Jeff Bezos responds to New York Times article on Amazon's Culture: Amabots and Amholes; employees sobbing at their desks; colleagues spamming the internal employee-review tool in an attempt to eject their managers from the company; cancer survivors returning to work, only to be put on “performance improvement plans.” These and other rich anecdotes made the New York Times broadside against Amazon an entertaining and brutal read, which drew a rebuke from the company’s top dog. Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to his employees last night contesting the Times article and asking anyone who witnesses such displays of corporate callousness to report it to human resources or e-mail the CEO. “I don’t recognize this Amazon, and I very much hope you don’t, either,” Bezos wrote. “I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.” But there’s now plenty of fodder to support the narrative that the secretive beast is not always a pleasant place to work. While 82 percent of respondents on the job-search site Glassdoor say they approve of the CEO, only 62 percent would recommend a job there to a friend. That’s much lower than Amazon’s peers.
- Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet. Experimental.
- Nielsen to measure digital ads in partnership with Tencent: Nielsen announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Tencent Holdings to measure its digital audience in a move that could direct more ad dollars from companies in the United States to China's biggest social network. Nielsen said it is launching its Digital Ad Ratings, which tracks unique users, reach and frequency of a digital ad across computers, tablets and smartphones for the first time in China. Comscore, which offers a similar service and competes with Nielsen, said it is already available in China. The online gaming company Tencent, which also operates the popular mobile messaging app WeChat with 500 million monthly active users, has been making a big push to increase its advertising revenue especially through mobile. Nielsen will measure an ad campaign in a combination of surveys, consisting of 46,000 Chinese consumers, and aggregated, anonymous data from Tencent's hundreds of millions of active users. Tencent, which has a market value of $190 billion and reported first-quarter online advertising revenue of $438.4 million competes with Alibaba and Baidu.
- Its a Small World: Ola-owned TaxiForSure integrates Alibaba-investee Paytm wallet as cashless payment option, joining its arch-rival Uber: TaxiForSure, has tied up with Alibaba-backed online payments platform Paytm. The move will allow users of TaxiForSure to go cashless and pay through Paytm’s pre-paid wallet, the company said in a statement. Customers can link their debit card or bank account via a Paytm wallet or recharge their Paytm wallet and use it to pay for their rides. In March, cab hiring startup Ola had acquired TaxiForSure in what largely a stock transaction. Interestingly, Ola also has a prepaid wallet called Ola Money. Last November, on-demand car service Uber, Ola's arch-rival in India's ride-hailing space had joined hands with Paytm.
- Google and Apple Adjust Their Strategies on Mobile Payments: The battle for mobile software dominance revolves around two companies: Apple and Google. Now both giants are also going head-to-head in mobile payments, as they prepare to push deeper into digital wallets. Google is set to unveil plans at its annual developer conference on Thursday for an overhaul of its mobile payment products. Changes include a service called Android Pay that will let merchants accept credit card payments from inside their mobile apps and can be integrated with loyalty programs at retailers, the people said. Google Wallet, a mobile commerce app, will also be reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app that consumers can use to send money to each other directly from their debit accounts, they said. Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its software conference next month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service. The moves are the latest advances in mobile payments as several players jockey for an edge. With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses. The stakes are also high for Apple and Google, which are entering mobile payments later than others in the industry. For Apple, mobile payments tie people more directly to its main product, the iPhone. For Google, payments are a hook to reel people into its ecosystem of services and another way to gain insight about consumers. The challenge for Apple and Google, along with rivals, is that the mobile wallet is generally a technology in search of a problem. Cash and credit cards are easy to use and accepted broadly worldwide. As a result, the mobile wallet is typically more of a supplementary service than a replacement. Nonetheless, mobile payments are growing quickly. Forrester Research predicts they will balloon to $142 billion by 2019 in the United States, almost tripling from $52 billion in 2014. Still, Google and Apple offer something that few others can: Hardware, software and an insatiable desire to win. “Google and Apple have deep pockets and the appetite to invest,” said Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. “They may create something that is a lasting disruption.”
- Despite Its Dominance, Analysts See A Murky Road Ahead for Android: Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than a billion Android devices were sold in 2014, a c cording to the research firm Gartner. That’s about five times the number of Apple iOS devices sold, and about three times the number of Windows machines sold. Yet all is not well on planet Android. On the eve of Google IO, the company’s annual developer conference that starts Thursday, where Android will once again be a primary topic of discussion, cracks are emerging in Google’s hold over the operating system. Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android. Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014, according to one estimate. Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business. The stark numbers prompted a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android? Google faces several major Android-related headaches. First, while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple’s iOS. iOS users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices. A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 percent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly. But how long Google can expect Play to keep paying remains an open question, thanks to the second Android-related headache. Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China. Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps. Android has always been a tricky strategy; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.
- Twitter Is Giving Advertisers More User Data In The Hope That They Spend More: Twitter is hoping to help marketers better understand their Twitter audience by adding a tool that will give them deeper user behavior around organic tweets. The audience insights dashboard tool adds some similar insights as the Facebook advertising platform with aggregate information on user demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior as well as what television shows users watch and their mobile usage. These new insights are expected to help advertisers identify a more relevant audience for upcoming campaigns on the platform. Will these new insights help boost advertising on Twitter? The company needs it right now. It had slower than expected growth in advertising sales this last quarter and even die-hard fans and early investors think the company needs some help. Early investor Chris Sacca recently scribed a blog post warning Twitter that he would soon be sharing a few thoughts on what the company needs to do now. Offering more profound insights about organic user behavior may be an answer to some of this frustration and may help to lure brands to spend more ad dollars on the platform. The audience insights tool is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Twitter-specific information can be accessed within the U.S., with plans to roll this out more broadly over the next few months.
- Cisco Predics that in 5 years, 80 percent of Internet Traffic will be online video: We already know that Netflix accounts for one-third of Internet traffic at peak hours. Toss in YouTube, and that figure rises to roughly half of all bandwidth consumed. But even that's small potatoes compared with what's coming. In five years, 80 percent of the entire world's Internet consumption will be dominated by video. That number will be even higher in the United States, approaching 85 percent. That's according to the latest projections from Cisco, which publishes an annual study peering into the near future of the Web. The newest report, out Wednesday, predicts that by 2019, the Internet will have become more or less a big video pipe. Part of the growth will come from adding new people to the Internet — for the first time, over half the world's population will be digitally connected. But individual Internet users are also expected to consume more video over time, and at a higher quality, which will put tremendous new burdens on the world's Internet infrastructure. When you see the Internet as a huge distribution channel for video, it puts virtually everything that tech and communications companies are doing into perspective. Telecom firms like Verizon are racing to expand their cellular networks so that they can deliver video over LTE. Cable companies are fleshing out their public WiFi hotspots so users can watch videos outside their homes. Content providers like HBO and CBS are putting their programming on the Internet so that customers don't have to be tethered to their television sets. Implicit in this idea is that mobile devices will be the primary way users will access all this video. And researchers agree on that point. Five years ago, Americans were spending less than an hour a day on mobile devices. Today, it's more like three hours a day, accounting for more than half of the time we spend consuming digital media in general, according to the latest in an annual report released Wednesday by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.
- Xiaomi Confirms It Has Suspended Sales In India, “open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably”: Hugo Barra revealed the temporary pause in India, which is triggered by a patent suit brought against the company by Ericsson, via an update on Google+. Initially, Xiaomi told media it had not received a notice from the high court, but that situation has changed now. Xiaomi told TechCrunch yesterday that it is “open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably” so this situation may yet be remedied quickly and without too much disruption to its sales in India. Indeed, Ericsson has struck recent patent deals with a number of India-based phone makers, and it may be holding out for a similar arrangement with Xiaomi.
- Snapdeal has acquired Wishpicker, a recommendations platform for gift purchases: Snapdeal says this is the fifth acquisition it has made so far. Back in April, the company, whose competitors include Amazon India and Flipkart, announced that it had purchased Doozton. Since folded into Snapdeal’s main site, Dootzon, a fashion products discovery site, was also geared toward matching shoppers with products they are likely to purchase. Other companies Snapdeal has acquired include group buying site Grabbon in 2010; sports retailer esportsbuy.com in 2012; and Shopo.in, a marketplace for handmade items, in 2013.More on the target: Founded in 2013 by IIT Delhi graduates Apurv Bansal and Prateek Rathore, Wishpicker offers users smart gifting options based on different parameters like relationship with the recipient, their age, personality, and various other parameters. Users can also find gift suggestions based on Facebook likes and interests of recipient.
- More India startup action: mobile app dev firm Apps Daily close to $15M in Series C funding, and big data firm Qubole raises $13M Series B funding: Qubole offers a platform to empower developers and non-developers to access Big Data generated by their companies to gain insights at a cost-effective rate. Its flagship product, QDS, runs on Hadoop infrastructure where users can analyse and collaborate with their company’s data. QDS helps IT organisations use cloud infrastructure (Google Compute, Amazon Web Services or Azure) to access data while eliminating expenditures associated with maintaining hardware. Qubole’s clients include Pinterest, Quora, MediaMath, TubeMogul, Answers.com, Videoplaza and Pubmatic; Mobile app development firm Apps Daily in advanced talks to raise $15M in Series C funding. Apps Daily develops and markets mobile apps across India and abroad. The company also focuses on developing and distributing software for mobile phones. Unlike traditional companies that simply launch apps on Google Play or iTunes app stores, Apps Daily follows a unique model of selling and distributing its own and third-party products through retail outlets across India. The products are sold under the brand name ‘daily’.
- Google launches offline viewing of YouTube videos in India, Indonesia, or the Philippines: This new feature will allow users to download a movie over wi-fi at home, and then watch it offline on a mobile device during the long commute to work, or watch their favorite videos over and over again for up to 48 hours after downloading them just once – without having to stream it repeatedly. They simply have to sign in, pick the video they want to watch later, and tap the offline button to download it. Besides India, the feature is available on Android devices in Indonesia and the Philippines too.
- Amazon and Google spare on app stores - brings to mind this post by Ben Evans on the future of Android: In October, we spotted that Amazon had quietly launched a hidden and functional app store within its main Android application which was available for download on Google Play. Now, according to new reports from varying sources, Amazon’s flagship application’s listing is no longer available via search from within Google Play, though its direct link is still live. Additionally, there’s now a newly launched application called Amazon Shopping which looks much like the original application, but no longer includes the Appstore section. The change was first spotted by German site Caschys Blog who also received a statement from Amazon which claims that this is related to a September update that brought Amazon’s Prime Instant Video to Android users. That update involved having users update to or install the newest version of the main Amazon app, then download the Amazon Instant Video Player app afterwards, in order to watch Prime Instant Video on their Android devices.
