Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 9

• The app boom is over: The mobile app boom kicked off in July 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store. Now it is over.  People are still making plenty of apps, of course. And many people are still downloading them. But the go-go growth days are gone. If you are an independent app developer or publisher, you have probably known this for a while, because you have found it very difficult to get people to download your app — the average American smartphone user downloads zero apps per month. But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones. Last month, the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20 percent in the U.S., according to research from Nomura, which relies on data from app tracker SensorTower. So you can still break through the saturated app market, if you are very very very lucky, and good. But the odds are stacked against you.

• Why everyone should worry about this scary glitch that affected rich drivers: Carmaker Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus rushed to fix a software bug Wednesday that had caused a malfunction in vehicles’ GPS, climate control and “infotainment,” or front console radio systems. It disabled the backup camera and hands-free phone functions as well. Errant data broadcast Tuesday by the company’s traffic and weather service confounded vehicles' "Enform" infotainment system installed in 2014, 2015 and 2016 Lexus vehicles and the 2016 Toyota Land Cruiser, the company said. The data made the subscription-based “Enform” system continuously reboot itself, rendering it unusable and drawing the ire and  of many a driver. Lexus’s social media accounts were flooded with complaints through Wednesday morning and by 9 a.m., the company told customers to stand by for a momentary fix. Owners should force a reset of their vehicle’s computer by disconnecting its 12-volt battery for at least 5 minutes, the company said. Owners can also bring their vehicles to a Lexus dealer to reset their system. The company halted the offending data stream overnight, but did not anticipate lingering problems in its vehicles. Lexus said it is still determining how many vehicles the bug impacted. The same way smartphone or software companies remotely update their products, car companies are increasingly doing the same to fix operating system glitches and even update road maps and car-friendly mobile applications. That’s because cars are increasingly becoming giant rolling computers, capable of doing an untold number of tasks while getting from Point A to Point B. Consider the“Enform” service, which includes smartphone and app connectivity, SiriusXM satellite radio, traffic and weather updates and Bluetooth connectivity. A new car might have 100 million lines of code, according to a report by research and accounting firm Stout Risius Ross. The more luxurious the car, the more interconnected its technological components may be.

• What to Do With Apple Cash? Irish Dilemma as EU Ruling Looms: As Ireland braces itself for a possible European Union order to claw back Apple Inc.’s unpaid taxes, government officials warned Finance Minister Michael Noonan that he would face two crucial questions upon delivery of a ruling that could come “soon.” The first is whether to appeal at the EU’s top court. The second, is what to do with the “large recovery amounts” pending the outcome. Ireland could be sitting on the cash for “several years,” according to a briefing note from last month published Wednesday. Amid growing speculation that Apple could be forced to pay back billions of euros of tax breaks, officials said they are preparing for the worst and that an adverse ruling “could have significant negative implications for Ireland, in terms of reputation and the creation of uncertainty around our tax system.”

• Apple Pay competitor CurrentC is the disaster everyone thought it would be: Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. When Walmart and other big retailers said in 2012 that they were creating a consortium called MCX to build a payments app, a lot of people laughed. The idea of a bunch of retailers collaborating effectively on a joint venture seemed far-fetched, let alone one where technology would play a critical role. Then there was the motivation for the venture, which seemed shortsighted: Get customers to pay with anything but traditional credit cards, since they cost Walmart and other retailers higher transaction fees than other forms of payment. There were plenty of other signs along the way spelling out trouble. Just a sampling: Customers who signed up for the app had their email addresses leaked in a hack in 2014, and the new CEO who arrived in 2015 said the launch likely wouldn't happen until 2016. In the meantime, some big MCX partners like Best Buy said they would start accepting Apple Pay. Finally, Walmart — perhaps MCX's biggest initial backer — announced its own app, Walmart Pay. Some Walmart insiders were obviously tired of waiting for CurrentC to become a reality.Turns out there was good reason for these red flags. On Tuesday, the company notified beta users of its payments app, CurrentC, that the test was ending and their accounts were being deleted. This news followed MCX layoffs in May. It finally looks like game over for CurrentC.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 2

• Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion: In its quest to build a global empire, Uber has turned to the Middle East for its biggest infusion of cash from a single investor. Uber said on Wednesday that it had raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s main investment fund. The money was part of the ride-hailing giant’s most recent financing round and continued to value the company at $62.5 billion. The investment does not cash out any of Uber’s existing investors.Uber, which has viewed the Middle East as an important area in its expansion, said the investment further aligned the company with Saudi Arabia as the kingdom planned to transform its economy, reducing its dependence on oil and improving employment. The investment from Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest single investments collected by the technology world’s top privately held companies. Uber, whose valuation makes it Silicon Valley’s most valuable private business, has collected billions at a rapid clip over the last three years. Uber has drawn from a wide variety of investors, including traditional venture capital firms, mutual fund giants like BlackRock and wealthy clients of firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Other sovereign wealth funds like that of Qatar have also invested. Other smaller tech companies have not fared as well in raising money over the last several months. Some so-called unicorns, the term used to refer to businesses valued at more than $1 billion, have struggled to collect new investments, and some, like Jawbone, have had to raise money at lower valuations. Uber is racing to defend its territory — which covers 460 cities in more than 69 countries — against incumbents in other regions like Southeast Asia and Europe. China, in particular, is a difficult battleground, as Uber is spending millions in a subsidy war with Didi Chuxing, the dominant ride-hailing start-up in the country. Both companies have made no indications that they will back down. Though Uber dominates the American market for ride-hailing, it has increasingly seen overseas markets as crucial to its growth. Among Uber’s increasingly important overseas markets is the Middle East, where the company has already said it plans to invest $250 million. The service operates in 15 cities and nine countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia.

• No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted: The business world is filled with starry-eyed entrepreneurs who hope that the blessings of angel investors and venture capitalists will transform their start-up dreams into companies with billion-dollar valuations. But some successful start-ups have been bucking the trend by growing and expanding without taking a dime from major outside equity investors.Those who buck the odds by “bootstrapping” their own enterprises are rare, experts say. “It’s a huge anomaly,” said Mark Walsh, head of innovation and investment at the Small Business Administration He estimated that as few as one in 50 brick-and-mortar companies and one in 10 online companies could build their businesses into $50 million or $100 million enterprises on their own. But taking venture capital can be risky. In their haste to get financing, start-up founders often fail to read the fine print and later discover that they have signed away huge shares of the profits. In some cases, founders may be removed by the board of their own companies by the time the businesses are rapidly growing or plan to go public. For these reasons, some founders opt to take debt capital from banks and investors instead of giving away equity.

• Internet Boom Times Are Over, Says Mary Meeker’s Influential Report: Global internet and smartphone user growth are slowing dramatically, but at least things are looking up in India.  Growth of internet users worldwide is essentially flat, and smartphone growth is slowing, too. Those sobering insights were among the hundreds packed into the much-awaited Internet Trends report, an annual tech industry ritual led by Mary Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Developing countries have proven harder to capture than expected because internet access remains inaccessible or unaffordable for many, the report said. Here are some other highlights from the report: India is the one country where internet usage is growing, up 40 percent compared with 33 percent a year ago. India passed the U.S. to become the No. 2 global market behind China in 2015. The Asia Pacific region represented 52 percent of smartphone users globally in 2015. The rapid growth in recent years has begun to slow, dropping to 23 percent in 2015 from 35 percent in 2014. North America, Europe, and Japan represented 63 percent of global GDP in 1985. By 2015, their contribution dropped to 29 percent. China and emerging markets in Asia represented 63 percent of global GDP last year. Online advertising is still not very effective. Advertisers are spending an outsize amount on legacy media. Global birth rates are down 39 percent since 1960. So where will technology growth come from? Who knows, but at least there's this: Global life expectancy is up 36 percent since 1960.

• Elizabeth Holmes, Founder of Theranos, Falls From Highest Perch Off Forbes List: Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing company Theranos, was a rare breed, something more rare than even the Silicon Valley unicorn she created: a self-made female billionaire. Forbes, the business publication that has made a franchise of cataloging the rich, had put Ms. Holmes on the top of its list last year of America’s richest self-made women.The magazine’s new estimated tally of her wealth? It went from $4.5 billion to $0. Ms. Holmes’s unusual status, as a young woman who created and controlled a company seemingly valued at about $9 billion, captivated the media: She graced countless magazine covers, including T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Theranos, she said, would revolutionize the lab industry by offering blood tests from a single finger prick at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing. But over the last year, Theranos became the subject of a series of hard-hitting Wall Street Journal articles and intense regulatory scrutiny from an array of federal agencies. The media is now mesmerized by Ms. Holmes’s fall. Truth be told, the half of the $9 billion valuation ascribed to Theranos and previously listed as Ms. Holmes’s wealth was nothing more than an estimate based on investors’ best guesses. Taking into account all the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the value of the company’s top-secret technology, Forbes is now guessing that the company is worth more like $800 million. While Ms. Holmes still owns at least half of the company, much of that value would be tied up with outside investors.Not surprisingly, Theranos refused to shed any light on the matter, except to dispute Forbes’s analysis.

• Early days, but Apple Pay struggles outside U.S.: More than 18 months after Apple Pay took the United States by storm, the smartphone giant has made only a small dent in the global payments market, snagged by technical challenges, low consumer take-up and resistance from banks. The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; Australia and New Zealand Banking Group in Australia; and Canada's five big banks. Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion last year, the vast majority of that in the United States. That is less than the annual volume of transactions in Kenya, a mobile payments pioneer, according to research firm Timetric. And its global turnover is a drop in the bucket in China, where Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent dominate the world's biggest mobile payments market - with an estimated $1 trillion worth of mobile transactions last year, according to iResearch data. Anecdotal evidence from Britain, China and Australia suggests Apple Pay is popular with core Apple followers, but the quality of service, and interest in it, varies significantly. To use Apple Pay, consumers tap their iPhone over payment terminals to buy coffee, train tickets and other services. It can be also used at vending machines that accept contactless payments. Apple Pay transactions were a fraction of the $84.5 billion in iPhone sales for the six months to March, which accounted for two-thirds of Apple's total revenue.

• Singapore buys $1 billion in Alibaba stock in SoftBank sale: Singapore sovereign wealth funds bought $1 billion of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's shares as part of an $8.9 billion sale by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp, Alibaba's biggest shareholder, the company said on Wednesday. Singapore's GIC Private, Ltd and Temasek Holdings each purchased $500 million of Alibaba shares at $74.00 apiece through subsidiaries, Alibaba said, offering details of the SoftBank sale announced on Tuesday. Alibaba purchased $2 billion of its own stock at the same price, in a move which would add to earnings, Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai told analysts on a call. Members of the Alibaba Partnership of senior executives and founders purchased another $400 million, as expected, at the $74 per share price, he added. SoftBank also offered $5.5 billion in debt securities, which can be exchanged for Alibaba stock in three years, Tsai said. SoftBank Group said on Tuesday it would sell at least $7.9 billion of shares in Alibaba to cut the Japanese company's debt. It said it would remain Alibaba's largest shareholder after the sale. Shares of Alibaba fell about 6.5 percent to close at $76.69.

• Salesforce takes aim at e-commerce with $2.8 billion Demandware buy: Cloud-based software maker Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) said on Wednesday it would buy Demandware Inc (DWRE.N), whose software is used by businesses to run e-commerce websites, for about $2.8 billion. The deal would help Salesforce open a new front as it seeks to take more market share from traditional software providers such as Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) and SAP AG (SAPG.DE), both of which already offer cloud-based e-commerce services. The e-commerce market has been growing at a blistering pace as retailers expand their online presence, boosting demand for software that helps manage functions such as payment processing and inventory management. Salesforce's cash offer of $75.00 per share represents a 56.3 percent premium to Demandware's Tuesday closing. The lofty premium indicates that multiple bidders were likely at the table for Demandware, Stifel Nicolaus & Co analyst Thomas Roderick said, naming Adobe Systems Inc ABDE.O and Oracle as the other possible contenders. Demandware's shares, which have fallen about 21 percent in the past year, rose 55.9 percent to $74.81 on Wednesday. Shares of Salesforce, considered a barometer for the cloud-computing industry, edged down 0.3 percent.

• Amazon sues sellers for buying fake reviews: Seller beware — if you buy reviews for your products on Amazon, the company might sue you. As part of its effort to combat fake reviews on its platform, Amazon sued three of its sellers today for using sock puppet accounts to post fake reviews about their products. Amazon has been aggressively pursuing reviewers it does not consider genuine over the last year, often using lawsuits to discourage the buying and selling of reviews, but this is the first time it has sued the sellers themselves. Today’s suits are against sellers who Amazon claims used fake accounts to leave positive reviews on their own products. The fake reviews spanned from 30 to 45 percent of the sellers’ total reviews. The defendants are Michael Abbara of California, Kurt Bauer of Pennsylvania, and a Chinese company called CCBetter Direct. Amazon is asking for the defendants to be banned from selling products on any of its sites or accessing its services. The suits also ask for the profits the sellers made on Amazon, attorneys’ fees, and damages exceeding $25,000. Amazon says that, since early 2015, it has sued over 1,000 people who posted fake reviews for cash. Now, the company is going after the retailers themselves. Amazon said that it intends to eliminate incentives for sellers to buy fake reviews for their products. “Our goal is to eliminate the incentives for sellers to engage in review abuse and shut down this ecosystem around fraudulent reviews in exchange for compensation,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 27

• Reuters Exclusive: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery, pickup: Wal-Mart applied Monday to U.S. regulators for permission to test drones for home delivery, curbside pickup and checking warehouse inventories, a sign it plans to go head-to-head with Amazon in using drones to fill and deliver online orders. The world's largest retailer by revenue has for several months been conducting indoor tests of small unmanned aircraft systems – the term regulators use for drones - and is now seeking for the first time to test the machines outdoors. It plans to use drones manufactured by China's SZ DJI. In addition to having drones take inventory of trailers outside its warehouses and perform other tasks aimed at making its distribution system more efficient, Wal-Mart is asking the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to research drone use in "deliveries to customers at Walmart facilities, as well as to consumer homes," according to a copy of the application reviewed by Reuters. The move comes as Amazon.com, Google and other companies test drones in the expectation that the FAA will soon establish rules for their widespread commercial use. FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said in June that the agency expected to finalize regulations within the next 12 months, faster than previously planned. Commercial drone use is currently illegal, though companies can apply for exemptions.

• 'Bottomed Out' Alibaba Set for Best Month After Post-IPO Crash: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. looks like it may be bottoming out after suffering the worst post-IPO crash ever. Shares are heading for their best month ever, and analysts have raised their sales projections in the past four weeks. Results due Tuesday are expected to show revenue growth of 27 percent in the September quarter, while in the background China’s leaders draft plans for stimulating the economy during the next five years. Chairman Jack Ma pulled off a record initial public offering as investors backed his bet on e-commerce and Alibaba catapulted to the top of the market in China. Then the domestic economy slowed to its weakest growth in 25 years, prompting the billionaire to calm investor fears that at one point erased $150 billion from its market value -- the equivalent of an International Business Machines Corp. The stock fell to a record low of $57.20 on Sept. 29, or 16 percent below its IPO price. Since then it has surged 33 percent, closing Monday at $76.35, up 1 percent for the day. That has come as at least four analysts covering Alibaba raised estimates. Sales in the September quarter are expected to be 21.4 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), with adjusted earnings-per-share of 3.44 yuan, according to estimates. New cloud-based services for merchants to reach consumers and an expansion of entertainment and local-services businesses are central tenets of Ma’s growth strategy. Increased promotions on Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace are driving e-commerce ahead of next month’s Singles’ Day, the country’s biggest shopping event. The company also offered $4.6 billion for the rest of Youku Tudou Inc., a YouTube-like website, to add content it can stream to Internet users and to bolster revenue beyond e-commerce. Alibaba is expanding its London office to serve as its European hub and opening up in France and Germany.

• JPMorgan Chase says it is building a rival to Apple Pay: JPMorgan Chase said on Monday it will soon launch its own competitor to Apple Pay that will allow consumers to pay retailers using their smartphones in stores, and it has already won the endorsement of a major group of merchants. The largest U.S. bank is the latest company to try to profit from the prevalence of smartphones, which many financial executives believe will one day be consumers' preferred way to pay for everything from milk and eggs at the supermarket to a rental car at an airport. The companies that figure out how to convince consumers to stop pulling credit cards out of their wallets and start paying with their phones stand to earn vast sums by taking a percentage of the trillions of dollars that consumers spend annually. No clear front-runner has emerged in the business yet. Chase believes its smart phone application, known as Chase Pay, has one key advantage: the caliber of retailers it has brought on board, Gordon Smith, chief executive of the bank's consumer business, told Reuters. Chase has signed a deal with the Merchant Customer Exchange, a group of major retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc, (WMT.N) the largest U.S. retailer, and Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) to accept payments through the bank's technology. Retailers included in the Merchant Customer Exchange ring up more than $1 trillion of sales per year and have over 100,000 outlets. Rivals like Apply Pay have struggled to sign up retailers to accept their payments. In June, Reuters interviewed the top 100 U.S. retailers and found that two-thirds said they did not plan to accept Apple Pay this year. Apple Pay's website lists Best Buy in its "Coming Soon" section but has no mention of Wal-Mart. Chase signed up the Merchant Customer Exchange mainly by promising to cut retailers' costs, Smith said. Whenever a consumer pays for something with plastic, the retailer pays fees to banks and credit card networks to process the transaction. Chase is willing to accept a lower fee for Chase Pay transactions than for other transactions, and hopes to make up the difference by getting more volume over its network, Smith said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 8

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• Warning: Some Unicorns May Be Smaller Than They Appear.Protections for Late Investors Can Inflate Start-Up Valuations. The recent proliferation of so-called unicorns — start-up technology companies valued at more than $1 billion — has been greeted variously as a sign of healthy innovation or an indication that valuations have become dangerously overheated. Led by the likes of the car-hailing service Uber at $41 billion and the home-rental website Airbnb at $10 billion, the global ranks of unicorns have more than doubled, to 102, over the last 15 months, according to PitchBook Data, which tracks private financial markets. Less noticed is that the reported valuations of many unicorns have been inflated by the terms of the private investments that set those valuations before any initial public offerings of stock — often with little or no disclosure of those terms. Increasingly, venture investors say, late-stage financing terms include extra protections, like a discount to the price of any eventual initial offering, a minimum return on investment or extra shares if the company later raises money at a lower valuation. Such protections are controversial among start-up investors. Early-stage investors warn they can jeopardize a company’s financial stability, diluting the value of their original stakes and worsening a company’s prospects in a downturn. But the protections appeal to company founders because they provide new cash at the highest nominal valuation, reducing dilution if all goes well. And later-stage investors argue that they provide valuable insurance. The protections, known among investors as structuring or ratcheting, can inflate a unicorn’s indicated valuation 10 percent to 25 percent and the phenomenon has been part of a general “frothiness” in late-stage valuations. Since the start of 2014, 11 technology companies have priced their initial offerings below the investment price of the last financing rounds before the offerings. In addition to Box, they include the software providers Apigee and Globant and the big-data manager Hortonworks. In addition, it was estimated that that more than two-fifths of venture-backed technology companies had fallen below their initial offering price in the same period.

• Managing Developers: Just Because You’re In Charge Doesn’t Mean You’re In Control. The great irony of management is that the higher up you go, the less actual control you have. When you are but a humble coder, you make the computer do exactly what you want; when you’re a manager, you only hope that people understand what you want, and then trust/pray that they do it both correctly and in a timely manner. The Shit Work Is Your Work. Basically a manager’s job is to make other people more productive. What’s one really good way to do that? Do the work that is getting in their way. Which means: find out what kind of important work your developers dislike the most, and do it for them. Don't BS. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people suck. People flake, screw up, ignore you, pester you, disappear, quit, and/or lose faith in you, frequently for no good reason. But you know how people — surprisingly — often don’t suck? Not to get all wifty and woo on you, but this was the most surprising lesson of my professional career: once people learn that they can trust you, then you can usually trust them back. So don’t bullshit anyone, ever.

• Remittances at the Click of a Smartphone Button are disrupting traditional players like Western Union: A growing shift is taking place in how people send money to each other around the world. While the likes of Western Union have offered international money transfers for decades, new tech start-ups and traditional telecom operators are taking advantage of the rapid rise of smartphones in many emerging economies to reduce the barriers — and costs — of sending cash overseas. Analysts say the changes are shaking up the global remittance market, which will be valued at almost $600 billion this year, according to the World Bank. New technology, for example, has helped cut the price of sending traditional remittances in half, to an average of $4 for sending $100, according to the GSMA, a telecom trade body. Sending money can take just a few minutes. Individuals log into the companies’ online services either through a computer or — increasingly — a smartphone. They enter the recipients’ details and their own bank details, and submit the request. Transactions typically take less than a few hours, compared with several days for traditional remittance companies. Recipients receive a text message when the money is available for pickup or has been credited to their mobile money account. Because the operations are automated and don’t rely on outdated systems, operators can offer international remittances at cheaper rates. To send the money, people only need to type in another person’s cellphone number into their phone’s mobile money service, enter a password and confirm the transaction. These sort of mobile payments have not caught on in many Western countries. But mobile money is now a fixture across large parts of the developing world. With limited access to traditional bank accounts, people have often turned to services like M-Pesa — a mobile money offering from Vodafone, the European telecom giant — as the de facto method to pay for goods and send money to friends and family.

• Property listing site 99acres sees sharply declining growth, increasing losses. Property listing site 99acres hits Rs 100Cr revenue mark, sinks deeper into losses in FY15. Net revenue growth, which has been sliding slowly over the previous three years but remained around the 50 per cent mark, saw a sharp deceleration to 32 per cent last year. It hit a milestone of crossing Rs 100 crore in net sales, though. The firm's operating EBITDA loss increased almost eight fold over last year. While losses are not unusual in a fast growing internet segment, 99acres was generating marginal profits till FY12. 99acres competes with MagicBricks, IndiaProperty, Housing, CommonFloor and PropTiger among others.  Meanwhile, 99acres’ growth in paid listings on its site mirrored the performance on its net sales (the company also generates revenue from other channels). It lost one-third of growth momentum last year with paid listings rising 19.2 per cent to 2.46 million against a growth rate of 30 per cent the previous year and a still faster rise in the years before that.

• HTC Drops to Decade Low After Cutting Quarterly Sales Forecast. HTC Corporation fell to the lowest in a decade in Taipei after the smartphone maker cut its sales forecast as much as 35 percent and announced plans to write off $94 million of impaired assets. Shares fell by 9.9 percent, the daily limit, to the lowest since May 2005. Slower demand for high-end smartphones and weaker sales in China prompted the Taiwanese company to forecast second-quarter revenue of as low as NT$ 33 billion, compared with an April 28 forecast for NT$46 billion to NT$51 billion. The lower sales and writedown mean HTC will post a loss for the current quarter, it said.

• Apple is set to introduce Apple Pay in Britain, The Telegraph reports. Apple is planning to introduce its mobile payment system, Apple Pay, to Britain this summer, The Telegraph reported on Saturday, citing industry sources. Apple is expected to make the announcement on Monday in San Francisco at its annual conference for developers, the paper said. The Telegraph said the iPhone already contains a wireless microchip similar to those found in contactless payment cards, which will allow Apple Pay users to pay by waving the handset over a terminal to pay. Transport for London, the paper said, was already accepting Apple Pay from American tourists.

• The confessions of a reformed technology evangelist - He was sure technology would save the world. Then he went to India. For a long time Kentaro Toyama was a believer in technological utopianism. He studied physics at Harvard and earned a PhD in computer science at Yale. Toyama went on to do research at Microsoft. The work was demanding, but something was missing. In 2004, when his boss asked if he was interested in opening a research center in India, Toyama accepted on the spot. He’d never even been to India. But he was hungry to make more of a direct contribution to society. Here was the chance to sprinkle tech fairy dust on a developing nation and watch success after success. Except it didn’t play out like that. The humans mattered a lot more than the technology, he found. Toyama settled on a new view of technology. It’s an amplifier of human intentions, not a cure-all for human problems. For technology to be a part of positive change, the environment it enters must already be moving in the right direction. Toyama believes it’s foolish to think education is about having content available to study. “The fundamental problem of education is not content, it’s motivation. You have to find a way to help productively direct the motivation of the student,” Toyama said. “The idea that they can do this just because we have fed it to them online possibly through some fancy interactive graphic I think is just a crazy notion.” He notes how Thomas Edison thought the motion picture would revolutionize our education system. “Television was supposed to uplift millions,” Toyama writes. “Instead, millions sit in thrall to the Kardashians.” 

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 29

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• Amazon offers limited free shipping on same-day delivery orders; a study shows same-day delivery, free returns get shoppers online: Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it will offer limited free same-day delivery under its Prime shipping service as retailers try to outdo each other on delivery deals, and expanded the service to San Diego and the Tampa Bay Area. Amazon offers same-day delivery to Prime members for $5.99 per order and non-members for $8.99, plus 99 cents per unit. The online retailer will allow Prime members free same-day shipping on orders over $35, Greg Greeley, head of Prime, told Reuters. "We know same-day delivery volumes will grow dramatically now that we are making it free," he said. Amazon's announcement comes within days of rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc saying it plans to test a new unlimited online shipping service this summer for $50 per year, a move that may hurt Amazon, which has an annual $99 Prime shipping service. Prime has become the cornerstone of Amazon's growth - and a testing ground for new services ranging from television programs and movies to delivery-by-drone. In 2014, Amazon spent billions of dollars on Prime shipping and has invested $1.3 billion in its Prime video service. Earlier this year Amazon said U.S. Prime membership increased 50 percent in 2014. In December, it said customers ordered more than 10 times as many items via same-day delivery this holiday season, compared to a year earlier. A recent study of 1,400 online shoppers by Walker Sands Communications found that free shipping was the feature most likely to get people to shop online, followed by free returns and one-day shipping.

• As usual, a slew of announcements at Google I/O: Google introduced technologies ranging from a brand new mobile-payments system to a virtual-reality camera rig in front of more than 6,000 software engineers at the Web company's I/O developer's conference in San Francisco. A security makeover for Android: Android M: The next iteration of Google's operating system, which runs on 79 percent of smartphones around the globe, is getting a security makeover, with more robust privacy controls and restrictions on apps' data access. Fingerprint scanning will also become a more integral part of Android, adding another layer of security. Google plays catch-up in virtual reality with Cardboard: Of all the gadgets Google unveiled at last year’s event, Google Cardboard was a surprise hit, putting virtual reality into the hands of everyday users without the high costs that come with specialized devices, such the Oculus Rift. Now, Google is taking the gadget more seriously, seeing it as a way to catch up to Facebook and Microsoft in virtual reality. It's also a way to get affordable, wow-factor technology into more peoples' hands, drawing them closer to Google's Web-based services. Unlimited free storage on Google Photos: While it might seem like a minor upgrade, Google just solved a major problem for mobile users in one fell swoop by enabling unlimited free storage for photos and videos. Google Take Maps Offline: With all the talk of cloud services and streaming media, it's easy to forget that for many people around the world, a mobile data connection is a scarce, expensive resource. To make such existing products as Maps better suited to these customers, Google is adding both search and turn-by-turn directions to the app's offline mode. An OS for the Internet of Things in Project Brillo: Google unveiled Project Brillo, a set of technologies to connect more household items to the Web. The platform aims to make it simpler for developers to build applications for everyday devices.

• Google's announcements on Android Pay and Google Wallet pit it squarely against Apple once again: Google lays out its ambitions for your phone, your home, your car and your wallet: Google made clear Thursday that it's still fighting a multifront war against its old rival, Apple -- and that the battles are as heated as ever. Google on Thursday confirmed the arrival of Android Pay and a revamped Google Wallet, an overhaul of the company’s mobile payments products. Both products are a shift from the company’s past mobile commerce efforts, which largely flopped. The new services, like the world of payments in general, are not simple. Here is how they work. Android Pay is essentially a digital payments system that consumers can use to buy things online or in stores from retailers and others who also use the service. It works almost the same way that Apple Pay, Apple’s mobile payments product, functions both in online and offline transactions. To use Android Pay, smartphone users with up-to-date versions of the Android operating system will be able to load Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover cards onto their phones. From there, they will be able to wave the phone over the terminals in more than 700,000 stores around the United States to pay for items. Android Pay will also work inside mobile apps from participating developers. Google will use a technology called tokenization to provide merchants with a customer’s payment information without having to hand over their actual credit card number. As with Apple Pay, Google will let customers verify their identity using their fingerprint, a technique which will be built into the next version of Android. Android Pay will also integrate with loyalty programs from a handful of retail partners, which will mean that any points or credits earned at —the point of sale will automatically be added to any loyalty card a customer enters. To date, Apple Pay does not offer this service, an issue that many merchants have asked for privately. Apple plans to discuss its loyalty integration plans at the company’s developer conference next month. Google Wallet, the company’s unsuccessful attempt at a mobile wallet, is not going away. It is just going to serve another purpose. Google Wallet is being reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app, which is a way for customers to quickly and easily transfer money to each other’s debit or bank accounts. That once again pits Google against PayPal, which offers its own popular peer-to-peer payments app called Venmo. It also clashes with Square Cash, yet another peer-to-peer payments app offered by Square. Such services have become popular with younger users. Now all Google, Apple and PayPal have to do is persuade consumers that these new payment methods are better than paying the same way they have always done — smartphone-free.

• Avago to buy Broadcom for $37 billion in biggest-ever chip deal: Avago Technologies agreed on Thursday to buy Broadcom Corp for $37 billion in the largest merger of chipmakers ever, turning a lesser known company run by a ferocious dealmaker into one of the biggest industry players. Avago, which serves the wireless and industrial markets, is offering Broadcom shareholders $17 billion in cash and Avago shares valued at $20 billion. Broadcom is best known for its connectivity chips, which are used widely in smartphones made by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics. The deal is the biggest so far by Avago Chief Executive Hock Tan, who has developed a small chipmaker into a $36 billion company through acquisitions since taking the helm nine years ago. Tan, a serial deal-maker, has trimmed Avago's portfolio by divesting units while bulking up in faster-growing areas. The combined company, to be based in Singapore and known as Broadcom, will be the third-largest U.S. semiconductor maker by revenue, behind Intel Corp and Qualcomm. The merger is the industry's second megadeal this year and is unlikely to be the last, analysts said. The merger will help the companies improve their bargaining position with manufacturers. Irvine, California-based Broadcom has been struggling to grow as competition in the mobile chip business intensifies. The company's revenue increased by just 1.5 percent last year. The new Broadcom would have annual revenue of $15 billion and an enterprise value of $77 billion, the companies said in a statement. Broadcom shareholders will own about 32 percent of the combined company. They would also have the option to choose between various combinations of cash and stock. Avago, which is incorporated in Singapore and also has headquarters in San Jose, California, said it intended to fund the cash portion of the deal by using funds from the combined company and new debt of $9 billion.

• Avago's $37 billion deal to buy chipmaker Broadcom Corp may force Qualcomm, the world's largest mobile chip maker to radically rethink its own strategy: Qualcomm, which has dominated the market for connectivity chips on smartphones, has been looking to extend its reach into data centers and network infrastructure, but may find its way blocked by an enlarged competitor combining Avago's strength in storage and Broadcom's power in networking. "Qualcomm has aspirations of moving into Intel's data center processor incumbency that the Avago storage and now enterprise networking (from Broadcom) capability directly overlays," said Drexel Hamilton analyst Richard Whittington. That could result in Qualcomm creating some sort of partnership with Intel Corpx he said, to combat the reach of the new company. Wall Street analysts generally cheered the deal on Thursday, despite some fretting about price, saying Broadcom's strength in wireless networking, WiFi and Bluetooth chips is a good complement to Avago's presence in industrial and wired devices. That presents a challenge to Qualcomm, which finds itself in a tough spot in the maturing microprocessor business, as smartphone makers such as Samsung, Apple and Huawei put more effort into producing their own chips. Now a Avago/Broadcom tie-up - which will take the name of Broadcom - potentially gives handset makers another viable supplier, giving them more leverage and putting even more pressure on Qualcomm, said IDC analyst Mario Morales.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 6

• Ahead of Earnings, Alibaba's Shares are at Post-IPO Low, Even as Rivals JD, Tencent have Surged: After Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. raised a record $25 billion last year, founder Jack Ma said the Chinese e-commerce company faced the danger of high expectations. He might be right. About $70 billion of market value has evaporated since Ma made that statement in November as investors worry about slowing growth. Alibaba’s dominance at home as a marketplace for buyers and sellers of goods is being undermined by a Chinese economy projected to grow at the slowest pace since 1990 and a consumer shift to mobile shopping that crimps advertising revenue. While investors have punished Alibaba, an index of U.S.- traded Chinese companies has jumped by 17 percent this year. Rival e-commerce operators have also surged with JD.com Inc. rising 46 percent in New York and Tencent Holdings Ltd. gaining 40 percent in Hong Kong through Tuesday. The two companies have joined forces to compete against Alibaba. Tencent is trying to drive the 1 billion users of its WeChat and QQ chat apps to JD.com, which recently started a service to speed imports to Chinese buyers. As JD.com, China’s second-biggest e-commerce company, “ups its game,” said Mark Tanner, founder of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based research and marketing agency, Alibaba’s previous growth “seems unsustainable in the medium term.” Ma’s push outside China also has yet to gain traction -- its presence in the U.S. and much of Europe remains negligible. Results due Thursday are expected to show that the pace of Alibaba’s revenue expansion fell below the average of the previous seven quarters. Shares of Alibaba closed Tuesday at $79.54 in New York, 33 percent below their November peak and the lowest since the Hangzhou-based company sold stock at $68 apiece in its initial public offering in September. Alibaba currently gets less than 5 percent of its revenue from outside China, Ma said in March on a company Twitter account. Alibaba’s sales probably rose 41 percent in the fourth quarter to 16.9 billion yuan ($2.7 billion), according to the average of 23 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with an average of about 50 percent during the past seven quarters. The company’s strategy of expanding in under-served regions of China and overseas is driving up marketing costs as more consumers shop on mobile devices, where ads typically generate less revenue than those on desktop computers. Operating income will probably shrink 18 percent to 4.5 billion yuan, according to the estimates.

• Brand Safety and Twitter's Porn Problem: Twitter Scrambles for an Ad Fix as Nielsen's Promoted Tweets Show Up in Porn Feeds TV company pulled its campaign today. Twitter has a porn problem, and it caused one brand to temporarily halt a campaign today. Nielsen, the television and digital data company, pulled the plug on its Promoted Tweets after they appeared near adult content on the site. Nielsen's promos showed up on Twitter profile pages called "Daily Dick Pictures" and "Homemade Porn." Ads are not supposed to appear on a profile page if X-rated content is posted there, and a bug was to blame, a source familiar with Twitter's technology said. "As Twitter works to resolve this issue, we have temporarily suspended our campaign," a Nielsen spokesman told Adweek. Nielsen was not alone, either. Marketers' promos from Duane Reade, NBCUniversal and Gatorade also showed up in feeds of pornographic photos and videos. Brand safety is an issue across the digital advertising ecosystem, where it is difficult to police every website and social media post. Twitter rivals like YouTube and Facebook also have dealt with racy or offensive content that concerned advertisers. Twitter is in a particularly tough position—it has to monitor 300 million active accounts filled with user-generated content—and its troubles with not-safe-for-work material have been raised before. The San Francisco tech company has been trying to clean up its site—not just accounts that share NSFW pictures, but also those that support terrorism or harass other users. It recently introduced a quality filter that removes abusive or offensive tweets from a user's timeline. But just last week, Robert Peck, a SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst, wrote a report warning that Twitter ads were appearing near pornography and that brands would pull back on spending if the problem became more widely known. Peck estimated there could be as many as 10 million Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing pornography and that Twitter needs to do a better job of blocking them.

• Aftermath of Secret's Shutdown: Google Ventures Managing Partner Criticizes Founders for 'Taking Money Off the Table': For many in Silicon Valley, the rapid rise and precipitous fall of Secret, the prominent start-up that recently closed its doors, will most likely serve as a cautionary tale of how not to run a company. For Google Ventures, one of Secret’s earliest backers, it will also be a reminder of the type of company not to invest in. The product of two former Google employees, David Byttow and Chrys Bader, Secret attracted intense media interest early in its life. The app let users anonymously share “secrets” to their network of close friends and friends of friends, an activity that quickly caught on among founders, investors and the media of Silicon Valley. It also helped that Secret took some early rounds of funding from Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, two big venture capital firms. After the flurry of attention and just a few months later, Secret opted to raise another round of financing, this time seeking $25 million. Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures, did not think it was a good idea and the company did not participate. “We advised them against it,” Mr. Maris said in an interview, referring to Secret’s leaders. “We told them they didn’t need the money. And raising that much money that soon, it was going to be impossible to meet the expectations in the future.” The discussion could be considered a case of life imitating art, or perhaps vice versa: In a recent episode of Silicon Valley, the satirical HBO series, a young start-up founder is offered millions of dollars from multiple venture capital firms at high valuations. Ultimately, the founder is advised to instead accept a lower offer, in order to make future funding rounds more achievable and growth targets reasonable. That is not what the founders of Secret chose to do. The company completed its $25 million financing led by Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, along with a variety of individual angel investors. In that round, the two founders each wanted to take $3 million off the table for themselves, a practice that is commonplace for more mature companies, but less so for very young start-ups. Not joining the $25 million round proved to be a wise choice for Google Ventures. Downloads of Secret declined over 2014, according to App Annie, an app analytics service. Secret redesigned its entire app to look like a near-perfect clone of Yik Yak, a competing service, but traffic did not improve. Many employees, including Mr. Bader, left the company. Last week, Mr. Byttow said he was shutting down his company, and would return the remainder of the money to the venture capital firms. Neither Mr. Byttow nor Mr. Bader have said if that includes the $6 million the two of them took off the table and deposited into their bank accounts.

• In 2014 Jabong’s GMV grew 2.5x to Rs1320Cr; Ended Year with INR 289 Crore Cash; Lost INR 454 Crore on EBITDA Basis: Rocket Internet-incubated lifestyle e-tailer Jabong.com more than doubled its gross merchandise value (GMV) to Rs 1,320.6 crore during the calender year ended December 31, 2014. The firm’s GMV captures value of total transactions, excluding taxes and shipping costs but including value of paid vouchers and coupons. The firm had ended 2013 with GMV of Rs 511.4 crore, data pulled from its latest annual statistics show. The data is net of returns and cancellations. Jabong shipped 8.7 million orders last year of which 5.9 million transactions represented products sold by Jabong while another 2.8 million orders or close to one in three orders were through its marketplace. This means the firm handled on an average 23,835 orders a day last year as compared to 16,164 in 2013. The company’s net revenues (which captures the sales by the firm as against GMV which includes sales by third party vendors too, for which the company just gets a listing fee) grew 2.3x to Rs 811.4 crore last year. Meanwhile, its loss at an operating level as captured by EBITDA (adjusted for share based compensation) rose to Rs 454 crore as against Rs 236 crore in 2013. This means, for every Re 1 worth of sales it books directly (not covering third party vendors), it is losing around 56 paisa. This is still an improvement over the previous year when it was booking operating loss of over two thirds (68.5 per cent) of whatever it sold. The firm did see its cash position dwindle as a result ending 2014 with Rs 289.4 crore as against Rs 853.2 crore the previous year.

• Home Depot Aiming to Put Apple Pay in Its 2,000 Stores: Home Depot Inc. has the goal of offering Apple Inc.’s mobile-payment platform at its more than 2,000 stores, which would make it the largest retailer yet to accept Apple Pay. Customers already were able to use Apple Pay at some of Home Depot’s stores despite there not being an agreement. The world’s largest home-improvement retailer could accept mobile payments at those locations because its checkout terminals have near-field communication readers. Those devices have now been turned off for the past few weeks during an upgrade of its point-of-sale system, Holmes said. That led to some inaccurate reports that Home Depot had dropped Apple Pay. If it pushes ahead with the plan, Home Depot would join chains like Macy’s Inc. and Whole Foods Market Inc. in embracing Apple Pay at stores. Many other retailers are betting on a mobile-payment option from the Merchant Customer Exchange, which was founded in 2012 by companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. That offering, CurrentC, is still being developed.

• 3-D Printing Is Saving the Italian Artisan: Italy’s craftsmen turn to a new tool in their competition with cheap products from China. Northeast Italy’s industrial heartland stretches roughly from Milan to Venice, along the floodplains of the Po River all the way to the Adriatic. Like much of the rest of the country, however, the region has fallen on hard times. Italy’s craftsmen have been undermined by competition from China and other parts of Asia. Since the beginning of the global economic crisis, the northeast’s industrial sector has shed about 135,000 jobs—some 17 percent of its total workforce. Techniques such as the 3D printing used by Pomini and Armani have helped turn northeastern Italy into an unlikely hothouse of innovation. Last year growth in the region was positive for the first time since 2007, at 0.5 percent. Exports rose by 3.5 percent in 2014 and are expected to keep climbing. In the province of Trento, for instance, the public and private sectors together invest some 2 percent of gross domestic product in research and development. At the Centro Moda Canossa—a trade school in Trento for children age 14 to 18 specializing in fashion design and tailoring—the faculty recently added a class in which students incorporate 3D printing, laser cutting, and microcontroller chips into their designs. “You can’t offer a job from the past. Nobody will come,” says Michele Bommassar, 36, the school’s vice director. “You have to offer the jobs of the future.” He points to a student project, a purse with a laser-cut pattern on its flap and an interior that lights up when it’s opened: “It’s beautiful, but we believe it is also necessary. The alternative is to be eaten by others.” At their best, these technologies inject elements of the digital economy into the physical world, allowing a galaxy of small companies to compete with multinationals, in much the same way homemade YouTube videos hold their own against traditional video production. The advent of rapid prototyping and other innovations means “you can compensate for your disadvantages with variety, customization, and a rapid response to what the market is demanding,” says Paolo Collini, a business professor and the dean of the University of Trento. Or, as Armani puts it: “If something doesn’t work, you simply stop producing. You haven’t filled a warehouse. For a designer, it’s a dream. You can take more risks.”

• Salesforce shares spike on report of Microsoft evaluating bid: Shares of Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) jumped as much as 6.4 percent on Tuesday after a Bloomberg report that Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) was evaluating a bid for the cloud software provider. Salesforce shares rose from $71.4 to $75.82 in about a minute late Tuesday afternoon, after which trading was temporarily halted. The stock closed 1.6 percent higher at $72.75. Microsoft shares closed down 1.3 percent at $47.60. Microsoft is evaluating a bid after Salesforce was approached by another potential buyer, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Microsoft is not in talks with Salesforce, and no deal is imminent, the report said. Bloomberg had reported last week that Salesforce was working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential buyer. The news sent the company's shares up as much as 17.3 percent to an all-time high of $78.46 last Wednesday.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 1

• Amazon unveiled a WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. Coverage here, here, here, here, and here: Amazon.com on Tuesday unveiled its latest effort to bring more speed and convenience to online shopping: A WiFi-connected gadget called the Amazon Dash Button that allows shoppers to refill orders of household staples with the press of a button. The adhesive buttons are meant to be hung in convenient places around the home — so, for example, you might stick the Tide-branded button on the washing machine or the Huggies button in the nursery. When it's time to restock that item, you push the button, and Amazon will soon ship it to your doorstep. At launch, the Dash button is only available for a limited number of household staples, such as Cottonelle toilet paper, Bounty paper towels and Glad trash bags. Using the Amazon smartphone app, consumers will configure the button to order exactly what they want — such as a four-pack of Gillette razors or a 12-pack. Dash buttons are free and are available now to Amazon Prime customers on an invitation-only basis. Amazon has been packing more and more perks into its Prime memberships, including same-day or even one-hour delivery and the ability to stream its exclusive TV programming. All of these efforts are aimed at more deeply entwining Amazon with its customers’ everyday lives, and in turn, boosting Amazon’s sales. Amazon has set up the Dash Button system so that it’s difficult to, say, end up with a shipment of 20 bottles of laundry detergent if your toddler discovers the bright orange Tide button and finds it really fun to press. Once a Dash Button is pressed one time, it won’t be able to accept another order until the first one has been delivered. You can also opt to receive notifications of Dash Button orders on your phone and can quickly cancel them, if necessary. The Dash button is a powered by the same technology as Amazon's new Dash Replenishment Service. Appliance and device manufacturers can incorporate DRS technology into their products so that an Internet-connected coffee maker is able to order more beans, or a water filtration pitcher can order more filters. Gadget-makers can use DRS in two different ways: They can make it so that their products include a button that allows the consumer to choose when to place an order, or they can set it up so that orders are filled automatically when something is running low. The first DRS-powered devices will hit stores this fall.

• Jack Ma is in India again and met the Indian PM: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s Chairman Jack Ma today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as he came on a visit to India for the second time in just about four months. In his meeting with Modi here today, Ma discussed how Alibaba can help empower small businesses in India, the ecommerce major said without elaborating further. “Had a very good meeting with Jack Ma,” Modi tweeted.

• Snapdeal buys RupeePower, a financial services marketplace, for an undisclosed sum: Snapdeal.com, has acquired a majority stake in Gurgaon-based digital financial products distribution startup RupeePower for an undisclosed amount, the company said in a statement. Post the acquisition, Snapdeal will offer its customers a financial services marketplace. The marketplace will include a wide range of financial services like personal loans, educational loans, credit cards, auto loans, home loans and extended warranties, etc. Financial services companies will be able to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach across more than 5,000 towns and cities. Founded in 2011, RupeePower matches borrowers and lenders in the retail loans space for products like credit cards, personal loans, home loans, auto loans, and consumer loans. Customers are shown the best loan and card offers for comparison and matched with the bank’s criteria. The service is free for customers and the company gets paid by the financial institution upon loan disbursal. The company claims to have enabled Rs 1,500 crore of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial year. Snapdeal.com is on a buying spree. Earlier this month, the company bought a minority stake in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the GoJavas brand. GoJavas was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet. Before that, it had acquired Indian designer wear and accessories e-tailer Exclusively.com (formerly Exclusively.in) for an undisclosed amount. In January 2015, Snapdeal picked up a stake in Smartprix Web Pvt Ltd, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix. The e-commerce firm is also expected to close the acquisition of online mobile recharge platform Freecharge for $450 million (Rs 2,800 crore). This is being regarded as the biggest deal in India’s consumer internet industry.

• After a spectacular start, Apple Pay is beset with problems; survey finds 2/3 of users reported problems: Apple Inc.’s new mobile-payment system is failing to capture all of its potential business, according to a survey, with two-thirds of users reporting problems using the service at the checkout counter.While 66 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners surveyed had signed up for Apple Pay, repeat usage is being hurt, the study by Phoenix Marketing International said. Almost half of users visited a store listed as an Apple Pay merchant only to find they couldn’t use the service because the location wasn’t actually accepting the system or wasn’t ready to do so, according to the survey, which drew about 3,000 respondents. “They’ve created demand, but it can’t be fulfilled,” Greg Weed, Phoenix’s director of card research, said in an interview. “To make it more difficult to use or to create any uncertainty in your customer base as to whether it’s going to work is just going to slow it down.” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is relying on the new system to help expand Apple’s reach by offering new services for iPhone users. The biggest U.S. banks and credit-card networks are using Apple Pay to help accelerate U.S. adoption of mobile payments and keep in control of their transactions. At stake is a market that’s likely to process $67 billion worth of sales this year, according to Forrester Research. Apple declined to comment on the survey, which was conducted at the end of February, four months after Apple Pay was introduced. Apple Pay, which uses short-range wireless signals known as near-field communication, essentially turns an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus into a digital wallet. The system works only at stores that have upgraded their cash registers to accept chip-embedded credit cards. It’s now supported by 2,500 banks in the U.S. and about 700,000 locations accept it, Cook said this month. “It’s gotten off to the most amazing start,” Cook said at an event to unveil features of the company’s Apple Watch. Samsung Electronics Co. earlier this month unveiled its own mobile-transaction system, Samsung Pay, which will be available in the third quarter in the U.S. and South Korea. The technology works at checkout terminals that use older, magnetic-stripe technology, as well as NFC. Google Inc., which already has a mobile wallet, has also said it plans to expand in the business and is working on a new service called Android Pay. The average Apple Pay user made 2.6 in-store transactions using the system in its first four months, the survey by Rhinebeck, New York-based Phoenix found. Almost half used it to purchase something inside an Apple store, while almost a third used it at Macy’s Inc. Thirty-six percent of Apple Pay customers used it at McDonald’s Corp. The majority of people who used Apple Pay said they did so because it was faster than a traditional credit card. Almost 60 percent they were using it because “it’s new, stylish or cool,” while 58 percent said they thought it was safer than a normal credit card. About half of users said it was good for medium-sized purchases. Of the problems that occurred at merchants, 48 percent of those surveyed said it took too long to record the transaction, while 42 percent said the cashier was unfamiliar with Apple Pay and unable to help. Other complaints included transactions that incorrectly posted, or were counted twice. The complaints are just some of the challenges Apple faces as it brings out a new payment system. Apple Pay has also been hit by fraud. Some banks have made changes in how they activate customers’ credit-card accounts after reports that criminals were typing stolen credit-card numbers into Apple Pay and trying to make purchases with their iPhones. Some issuers have found that up to 8 percent of Apple Pay transactions were fraudulent, compared with 0.1 percent on traditional payments cards, said Julie Conroy, an analyst at Aite Group.

• Ubiquity of Malware: Google Says 5% Of Visitors To Its Sites Have Ad Injectors Installed: According to a study Google conducted with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 5 percent of people visiting Google’s sites and services now have at least one ad injector installed. When it comes to malware, ad injectors may seem relatively benevolent at first. They put an ad on your Google Search page that didn’t belong there, for example. That’s annoying, but doesn’t seem dangerous. But ad injection was pretty much what Lenovo’s Superfish was doing and that created plenty of security issues for users. Indeed, the research, which is based on the analysis of 100 million pageviews across Google’s sites from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, classified about a third of these injectors as “outright malware.” Given that these kinds of ad injectors are often bundles with legitimate software — and desktop developers and download sites often see them as a relatively easy way to make a bit of extra money with their installers and download wrappers — it’s easy enough to install one of them inadvertently. Google and the Berkeley researchers found that ad injectors are now available on all major platforms and browsers. Out of those 5 percent of users that have at least one installed, one-third actually had four of them running simultaneously and half were running two. Clearly, there is a group of users that is a bit more prone to catching one of these than others Google says it has already banned 192 Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users based on this research and it is now using the same techniques the researchers used to scan all new and updated extensions in the Chrome Web Store. Google’s advertising and browser extension policies pretty much ban deceptive ad injectors — as do most other ad networks — but most of the companies that build them aren’t exactly about following the rules. It’s also worth noting that ad networks often also don’t know that their ads are being used in this way. Unless Google and other browser and advertising vendors find a technical solution to this problem, chances are it’ll never fully go away.

• GoDaddy Said to Price I.P.O. Above Expected Range: Nearly four years ago, GoDaddy was an Internet registration company with a history of risqué advertising. Now, as it prepares for new life on the public stock markets, the company is eager to let everyone know that it does a lot more than register website addresses — and doesn’t rely on racy commercials with scantily clad spokeswomen, either. That new vision of GoDaddy appeared to resonate with investors. The company raised $440 million after pricing its initial public offering at $20 a share late Tuesday, above its expected range of $17 to $19 a share, according to a person close to the transaction. At that price, the company has a market value of just more than $3 billion. Under the ownership of the investment firms that bought the company in 2011 for about $2.25 billion — Silver Lake, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Technology Crossover Ventures — GoDaddy has sought to transcend its long-established roots and promote itself as the guide to the Internet for small business. That is a much bigger vision than the one the company had when it was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons as a way for customers to register domain names and host websites. Eventually, it became the biggest Internet registrar, thanks in large part to Mr. Parsons’s unabashedly attention-seeking advertising, which frequently revolved around spokeswomen like the racecar driver Danica Patrick. Among GoDaddy’s most familiar tactics was creating versions of Super Bowl commercials that would never be shown on broadcast television. After the company’s new owners took over, the business tried to change its tone along with its business model. The private equity firms brought in Blake Irving, a former chief product officer at Yahoo, to help transform GoDaddy into what it described in its I.P.O. prospectus as “a leading technology provider to small businesses.” Internet site registration remains GoDaddy’s biggest source of revenue, accounting for just more than half of its sales last year. According to the prospectus, the company now oversees 59 million domains, or about 21 percent of those worldwide. Website hosting services and tools, a natural complement to the domain business, made up 39 percent of its bookings last year. The company believes it still has room to grow in its main market. A study it commissioned found that more than 50 percent of American small businesses did not have a website as of early 2013. But GoDaddy has also become one of the biggest resellers of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity and email services, with that operation making up about 10 percent of its sales last year. GoDaddy has also expanded abroad, going from one English-language website to an array of offerings in 37 countries and 17 languages. About one-quarter of its revenue now comes from international business. Over all, the company’s sales have climbed consistently in the last three years, up to nearly $1.4 billion in 2014. It lost $143.3 million during that period, according to generally accepted accounting principles, though the company points to what it calls adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, which strips out certain accounting charges. Using that measurement, GoDaddy earned $271.5 million.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 24

• Uber Sells $24M Stake to India’s Times Group in Marketing Deal: Uber Technologies Inc. said the publisher of India’s most-read English newspaper has taken a small stake in the ride-hailing application company as part of a strategic partnership to support its expansion. The investment made by Times Internet is worth about 1.5 billion rupees ($24 million), the Indian company said in an e-mailed reply to a question. The Economic Times newspaper, also published by Bennett, Coleman, had first reported the value of the deal citing people familiar with the transaction. The deal with Times Internet Ltd. will help increase the marketing and distribution of Uber’s services to more than 200 million consumers in India, the San Francisco-based company said in a statement on its blog, without giving details of the investment. Times Internet is a fully owned unit of Bennett, Coleman & Co., the flagship company of the Times of India Group and publisher of The Times of India newspaper. Uber counts India as its biggest market outside the U.S. and the fastest growing globally. Baidu Inc., China’s largest Internet search engine, in December agreed to invest in Uber and said the company will connect its map and mobile-search features with the ride-hailing service. Uber’s service is available in 11 Indian cities and offers three types of cars, including hatchbacks for as little as 7 rupees (11 cents) a kilometer.

• Chinese city Hangzhou cracks down on Taobao seller-on-seller dirty tricks: China’s online ecommerce market is massive, but it’s also kind of a jungle. Especially in the C2C wilderness that is Taobao, shop owners use all kinds of shady tactics like brushing to make sure they get the sale, whether or not the consumer is actually getting what they want. Now Hangzhou, they city that plays host to Alibaba HQ, has passed a new set of regulations on ecommerce transactions that makes behavior like that illegal and punishable by local authorities. The new regulations will require Hangzhou sellers to register as businesses with the ecommerce platform they use, and levy fines of RMB 10,000 to RMB 30,000 (US$1,600-4,800) on platforms that don’t collect the proper information. Sellers can also be fined between RMB 10,000 to RMB 30,000 for doing any of the following: (1) Using the name or trademark of a famous company, product, brand, person, social organization, or government organization without permission (2) Leave negative reviews for, slander, or falsely report rival sellers and shops (3) Buying products in bulk and then returning all of them or refusing to accept delivery to harm rival shopkeepers’ profits (4) Falsifying internet transactions [like “brushing”] to get good reviews (5) Using technological measures to interfere with search rankings (6) Releasing fake products or false service information Harming national interests, public interests, or the lawful rights of others (6) Additionally, sellers can be fined between RMB 2,000 and RMB 20,000 (US$320-3,200) if they engage in any kind of customer harassment like calling customers who left negative reviews and berating or threatening them until they change their review score. Because these laws were passed by the city of Hangzhou and not China’s national government, they don’t apply to all online sellers yet. But they certainly provide a window into the kinds of dirty tricks that some Chinese C2C shopkeeps go in for, and the dangers consumers still face when shopping on C2C marketplaces like Taobao.

• Apple Pay’s pitch: Simpler is better. But some security experts disagree. When Apple introduced its pay-by-smartphone feature last fall, the company touted the simplicity of the setup. All shoppers needed to do was wave their iPhones in front of a special scanner at the cash register — no need to fumble through pockets and purses for plastic cards or identification. But a sharp rise in reports of fraudulent Apple Pay transactions is raising questions about the security of the first mobile payment system to find a measure of popular success. One payments analyst, Cherian Abraham, estimated that as many as 6 percent of Apple Pay purchases are completed with stolen credit cards, or 60 times the rate of the old-fashioned plastic swipe. The problem is that Apple Pay may be too simple to set up, security analysts said. Fraudsters have been loading stolen cards onto iPhones to buy things at stores. As it turns out, it might have been better if Apple Pay required users to do more to prove their identities when they sign up for the service, these experts said. The balance between security and ease of use has long bedeviled technologists, especially those pushing for a new payment system to replace the plastic cards that are highly vulnerable to thieves. That need has grown more urgent as credit card hacks — such as those that have afflicted Target and Home Depot in recent years — have risen in scope and frequency. Mobile payments offer a potential solution. They are considered much harder to hack than traditional payment systems. And they avoid the swipe — a critical advancement since a lot of credit card numbers are stolen by fake card readers. But consumers, banks and retailers have been slow to embrace the technology, partly because of its complexity. Launched in October, Apple Pay was billed as simple to use, and the universe of stores and banks accepting the service has been growing steadily over the past few months. Apple boasts that Apple Pay is now accepted at hundreds of thousands of store locations. Bank of America said customers added 1.1 million of its credit and debit cards to Apple devices in the first two months of Apple Pay. JPMorgan Chase cited a similar figure. But reports of fraud are now giving retailers and banks some pause. “The issuers were probably so eager to be involved that they kind of forgot best practices and sidestepped some procedures they normally would’ve had [in order] to accept Apple Pay,” said Michelle Evans, senior analyst for consumer finance at market research firm Euromonitor.

• Google Fiber Plans Experiment With Targeted Ads for Television: In a note to customers who subscribe to Google’s Google Fiber Internet and television service in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo., the search giant said it would soon begin a trial of local TV ads that will be aimed at a viewer’s locality and viewing habits. A spokeswoman who confirmed the service said Google expected it to roll out in the coming weeks. The move, if it were widely adopted by rival cable companies, could represent a sea change in how television ads are viewed and sold. For starters, it would mean that people in the same city might see different ads while watching the same show. It could also change how ads are sold by giving advertisers more leeway over when ads are shown, to whom and how often — the same kinds of control they have when advertising online. Google’s trial — which for now is aimed only at customers in the Kansas City area, who can opt out of having their viewing history used for advertising purposes — will use ads that are targeted by geography and what kinds of shows they view most often. “Fiber TV ads will be digitally delivered in real time and can be matched based on geography, the type of program being shown (like sports or news), or viewing history,” Google said in a online forum for Google Fiber. “If you’re a local business in Kansas City, just as with digital ads, you’ll only pay for ads that have been shown, and can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a given TV.” Analysts had been expecting Google to start experimenting with targeted television ads from the moment it announced its Google Fiber Internet service, which is about 100 times faster than the standard broadband connection. The company makes about $60 billion in annual revenue based largely on its ability to mine its user information to deliver highly targeted ads. Invidi Technologies, based in Princeton, N.J., makes software inside around 30 million United States cable boxes that can be used to target television ads based on age, gender, income, whether the viewer owns a dog or if their car lease is about to expire. Verizon, Dish, DirecTV and Comcast are all customers. “It is like direct mail for television,” said Michael Kubin, an executive vice president at Invidi.

• China's tax environment is tightening - regulator to reap Alibaba windfall as tightens up on tax: China could make billions of dollars from taxing gains made by employees of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group (BABA.N) who are free to sell their shares for the first time since its IPO, as the country tightens up its leaky mechanisms for tax collection. On Wednesday, a six-month lock-up period for the recently New York-listed stock expired, allowing insiders who bought 437 million shares prior to the IPO to sell their stock, though 100 million of them are subject to trading restrictions that apply to employees until the company reports results in May. The total lock-up represents roughly 18 percent of Alibaba's shares, which if sold would fetch just over $37 billion at Friday's closing price. Although Alibaba did not disclose the identity of the shareholders subject to the lock-up, many will be taxable in China, where most of its 22,000 people are employed, and its share scheme is subject to a number of controls that will help ensure China gets its tax. Current and former employees hold around 26.7 percent of the company, having built up holdings through stock options and other incentives since 1999, according to a Reuters report from June using IPO securities filings. Those subject to the expiring lock-up will have obtained their shares at different times and costs, so the gains figure is unknown, but the tax is expected to reach billions of dollars for China's State Administration of Taxation (SAT). While tax on employee compensation is withheld by employers, tax on share sales must be declared by employees, meaning it's typically harder for the authorities to track. It is not uncommon for employees participating in Chinese company stock incentive schemes to transfer their shares to offshore trusts in the Cayman or British Virgin Islands to avoid tax, according to a person who helps create such structures. But Alibaba's newly minted millionaires won't escape the gaze of the tax inspector, said a Beijing-based accountant. "Because it was such a large IPO, the tax bureau will for sure be monitoring that." While the potential tax windfall is tiny relative to China's total fiscal revenue of 14 trillion yuan ($2.26 trillion) last year, it reflects the government's more rigorous stance on tax.

• Facebook May Host News Sites’ Content: Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous. With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site. Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements. Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said. To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content. Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter. In addition to hosting content directly on Facebook, the company is talking with publishers about other technical ways to hasten delivery of their articles. Even marginal increases in the speed of a site, said Edward Kim, chief executive of the analytics and distribution company SimpleReach, generally mean big increases in user satisfaction and traffic. So it is likely, he said, that Facebook’s plan focuses on those small improvements, rather than on getting money from deals with media companies. “But there are a lot of implications for publishers,” he added. “It really comes down to how Facebook structures this, and how they can ensure this is a win on both sides.” The issue is also pressing, he said, because some media companies have seen a drop in traffic from Facebook that could be attributed to the company’s prioritizing of video — a much more lucrative medium for ad sales.