Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 22

• Apple is reportedly in talks to buy automaker McLaren: The auto industry and the tech world may about to get a new power player: Apple is reportedly in talks to buy the high-performance car company McLaren, according to the Financial Times. The two firms have been talking for several months about plans to have Apple make a strategic investment in the McLaren Technology Group or buy it outright, the article said, citing "three people briefed on the negotiations." Many Apple watchers have advocated for Apple to buy Tesla, but Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has called such a deal "unlikely." Musk has also scorned Apple's car efforts, telling a German newspaper that he refers to Apple as "Tesla graveyard" because the tech firm hires so many engineers that Tesla has let go. But Apple could be very attractive for McLaren, which has struggled to reach profitability. The British carmaker may be best known for its very high-end luxury supercars and its Formula One team, though it also has made forays into wearable technology, health care and electronics. It took the name McLaren Technology Group in 2015 to reflect its diversification strategy. The focus on technology could represent a good culture alignment for Apple and McLaren, although  McLaren is a much smaller manufacturer than could serve Apple's massive customer base. The firm said at the time of its renaming that it produces just more than 1,600 cars per year.

• The Trade Desk finishes strong at $30.10 per share after its first day on NASDAQ: Things are looking up for adtech companies on Wall Street — or at least for one of them. The Trade Desk debuted on NASDAQ today at a price of $28.75 per share, up nearly 60 percent from its IPO price of $18. And while there wasn’t a dramatic pop, it continued to climb and closed the day at $30.10 per share. That’s a good start, particularly considering that adtech companies have struggled recently on the public markets, which has made venture capitalists wary of the industry, as well. Ventura, Calif.-headquartered The Trade Desk, which offers tools for ad buyers, was probably helped by its financials — the company is profitable, with 2015 revenue more than doubling year-over-year, to $113.8 million.Chief Client Officer Brian Stempeck also argued that The Trade Desk stands out because it has built real self-serve technology: “A lot of our people are engineers, building products, and when someone works in client services, they aren’t managing ad campaigns — they’re teaching others how to run the software.” Looking ahead, Stempeck said The Trade Desk will continue to expand internationally while also building more products for programmatic buying of TV ads. After all, he noted that while most ad dollars are going to TV, most TV advertisers don’t have a way to learn how many times they’ve shown someone the same ad. “Advertisers can actually show fewer ads, they can be better targeted, the publisher or content owner gets a higher rate because it’s so targeted, and it’s a better experience for the consumer” because they aren’t bombarded repeatedly with the same ad, Stempeck said.

• Google Shows Up Late in Crowded AI-Based Digital-Assistant Field: Google unleashed its digital assistant for the first time, arriving late to the intensifying race among the largest technology companies to create a more personal and lucrative way for computers to interact with humans. The Google Assistant uses artificial intelligence tools, such as voice recognition and natural-language processing, to answer questions and satisfy other requests delivered verbally and in formats such as text messages. The first incarnation is as a digital buddy inside Google’s new Allo messaging app, which the Alphabet Inc. unit unveiled Wednesday. The assistant will also appear inside Google’s Home internet-connected speaker -- expected next month -- in new Android smartphones and in devices such as cars and watches made by other companies, Google executive Nick Fox said. Google’s Assistant also performs tasks that get it into e-commerce territory, taking on Amazon’s Alexa. Users will be able to book a restaurant through the assistant and buy tickets to a game or event. Anything that involves getting things done more easily will be addressed over time, Fox said. Google has nothing planned on the advertising side yet, he added.Google didn’t give the system a name -- a contrast to Siri, Alexa and Cortana. That’s in part because Google designed its assistant to learn and evolve to be a different helper depending on the user. You can say, "My favorite sports team is the San Francisco Giants," and it will reply, "OK I will remember that." Later, when you ask, "What’s the latest score for my team?" it will send the score of the latest Giants baseball game, Fox said. Google is aware of the limits of its AI and is trying not to promise too much from the Assistant, at least early on. It won’t automatically insert information into chats between friends on Allo, but will occasionally appear to say it has suggestions and wait to be summoned. It will also stay away from value judgments or sensitive subjects such as violent and adult material. In those cases, it will apologize and say it can’t answer, or send web results from Google’s search engine.Google’s Assistant already knows its rivals. When asked if it is better than Alexa, the system responded diplomatically. "I like Alexa’s blue light. Her voice is nice too."

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, 17 July

• Uber Rival’s $28 Billion Valuation Shows Size of China’s Ride-Sharing Market: The Chinese car-hailing app Didi Chuxing said on Thursday that it had brought in $7.3 billion in its latest round of fund-raising, which included Apple, Alibaba, and SoftBank as investors. The new funds give the company a total of $10.5 billion in disposable funds, and put its valuation at $28 billion, according to a person familiar with the fund-raising. That Didi’s valuation is now almost half that of the $62.5 billion valuation of its main rival in China, Uber, shows how much potential investors see in China. Yet the size of the cash infusions also underscores the market’s difficulties. In part because of China’s widespread blocking of foreign websites, the competition between Uber and Didi marks the first time in recent history a major foreign tech company has vied so intensely with a local Chinese business. In other markets the contest over ride-sharing has focused on regulation and technology, but in China it has been much more about cash, with the two companies spending billions. The most recent round has also pulled in Apple, pitting America’s biggest tech company against America’s best-known start-up, Uber, in a tricky Chinese market. Both see China as critical to growth. The fund-raising comes as executives from Didi and Uber have signaled that they are focusing on profitability in China. Since then both companies have been locked in a spending war. Though it has primarily taken the form of subsidies, both companies have also tried to develop technology specific to China, and have actively wooed both local and national government officials. Didi has focused on technology that better predicts car arrival times, given China’s unruly traffic, while Uber has developed a commute function that links drivers with riders based on where they live and work.

• Why back-up cameras haven’t stopped drivers from backing into stuff: With or without eyes in the back of their heads, drivers keep hitting things. Despite the growing prevalence of back-up cameras, federal data shows that this technology hasn't significantly cut down on cars backing into people and causing them harm. That research on so-called "back-over incidents" comes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration moves to make back-up cameras standard and presses automakers to add a bevy of new technologies -- from automatic braking to lane collision warnings -- to even entry-level cars to reduce accidents on the road.As car companies and even regulators increasingly lean on technology to make roads safer, the tepid success of the back-up camera is a red flag. Sure, drivers can see more of what's behind them -- the cameras reduce blind zones while in reverse by 90 percent, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety -- but they keep hitting things.Even with back-up cameras, drivers still don’t look around their vehicles enough when in reverse and sometimes get distracted by any number of things as their cars roll backward. Back-up cameras also often beam images to display screens in the front of the car, and drivers can become too reliant on them. Instead of looking backward and through their rearview window or checking mirrors, their eyes are glued to a screen.

• LG Electronics sells mosquito-repelling TV in India: The Indian arm of South Korea's LG Electronics Inc has begun selling a TV with a feature that it says repels mosquitoes, which can spread diseases such as malaria, Zika and dengue. The TV's "Mosquito Away Technology" uses ultrasonic waves that are inaudible to humans but cause mosquitoes to fly away, according to the company. It was released in the country on Thursday, LG said. The same technology, which was certified as effective by an independent laboratory near Chennai, India, has been used by LG in air conditioners and washing machines, the company said. The technology, which also functions when the TV is switched off, is available in two models, priced at 26,500 rupees and 47,500 rupees ($394 and $706). The TV is targeted at lower-income consumers living in conditions that would make them vulnerable to mosquitoes. It will go on sale next month in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Kim Sang-yeol, an LG Electronics official, said there are no plans for now to market it elsewhere.

• Oracle's cloud strength boosts quarterly revenue: Business software maker Oracle Corp reported a higher-than-expected quarterly revenue as sales in its cloud business surged due to more customers. Shares of the Redwood City, California-based company rose as much as 3.8 percent to $40.10 in extended trading on Thursday. Like its rivals such as SAP SE, IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp, Oracle has focused on moving its business toward the cloud-computing model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Total revenue from the company's cloud-computing software and platform service rose 49.1 percent to $859 million in the fourth quarter ended May 31. It contributed 8 percent of Oracle's total revenue during thequarter. The company's total revenue fell 1 percent to $10.59 billion, beating analysts' average estimate of $10.47 billion. Oracle's net income rose to $2.81 billion, or 66 cents per share, in the quarter ended May 31, from $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, it earned 81 cents per share, meeting average analysts' estimate. Up to Thursday's close, Oracle's stock had risen 5.8 percent this year.

• Salesforce also made a bid for LinkedIn, CEO Benioff confirms: Salesforce was also a serious bidder for LinkedIn, the business networking site that sold to Microsoft for $26 billion this week, said CEO Marc Benioff. While he would not give details of the effort, sources said Salesforce was primarily interested in LinkedIn's recruiting business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue. Sources said LinkedIn was already deep into negotiations with Microsoft when Salesforce made its approach, which would have required both debt and stock financing. Microsoft was able to buy LinkedIn in cash and also promised to let it operate independently. Interestingly, sources confirmed numerous reports that Microsoft had tried to buy Salesforce earlier this year, and both price and the way it would be operated within the company were among the issues that resulted in it not happening. Indeed. Salesforce recently bought Demandware for $2.8 billion.

• InMobi Technologies to discontinue use of mascot function on Miip platform:  InMobi on Thursday said it has shuttered the animated-discovery commerce part of Miip for now, a product it launched amid much fanfare in July last year. Instead, the firm will look to help e-commerce companies reach inactive customers using more traditional ad formats, using the underlying technology it built for the platform. In July, InMobi launched a beta version of Miip, which took the form of an animated monkey, that tracked users’ browsing habits across various mobile apps and showed ads in the forms of bubbles and animations instead of traditional display ads. It allowed consumers to interact with the mascot and tell it what they liked, and how they felt about the products and ads they saw. The promise of such a technology was that first, it enabled personalised discovery of products, and second, the completion of purchases within the ad itself as InMobi had tied up with payments providers like Stripe, AliPay and Paytm. This hasn’t worked out. “The larger vision behind Miip is to enable consumers to buy products and complete transactions through ads. The mascot was conceptualized simply as a ‘face’ to the Miip platform. Over the course of testing, users responded better to an advertiser’s brand as against the Miip branding on an ad unit,” said Arun Pattabhiraman, vice president and global head of marketing, InMobi

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: Tuesday, May 31

• The military’s stealth motorcycles are as quiet as an electric toothbrush: The military is funding stealth motorcycles, which would allow riders to quickly sneak up on unsuspecting enemies. The motorcycles operate at 55 decibels — about the level of an electric toothbrush or typical conversation — yet still can reach 80 mph in speed. The extreme quiet is due to the use of electric motors. The motorcycles also feature two-wheel drive to improve traction on gravel, sand or any challenging terrain. The narrow dimensions of the motorcycles allow them to be driven in forests or other places some military vehicles can’t go.The electric motors have limited range — the SilentHawk lasts two hours and the other bike, NightMare, has 60 miles of power. So the motorcycles are modified with hybrid engines that can burn almost any type of fuel, such as gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene or diesel. The thinking is these hybrid engines, which are about as loud as a vacuum cleaner, can be used on the part of a mission where being quiet isn’t essential. Using the back-up engine increases the SilentHawk’s range to 170 miles.

• VR Experience From McDonald's Lets You Watch Life-Size Angry Birds Take Over a Restaurant: McDonald's ald's has partnered with Sony and Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds, to create a 360-degree video promoting the upcoming feature film The Angry Birds Movie. The 60-second spot puts the viewer in the center of a McDonald's restaurant, as the film's feathered flying stars zip in the air from table to table, dance in the aisles and take selfies with dining families. The film was created in partnership with DDB Chicago and has racked up more than 4.5 million views in less than a week. According to John Maxham, chief creative officer at DDB Chicago, it's the first 360-degree video for McDonald's (unless you count the VR Happy Meal painting activation during SXSW). Maxham said it's also the first time a 360-degree film has been shot for any quick service restaurant. To combine animation with reality, DDB Chicago worked with Rovio for the animations using pre-existing bird assets and with Optimist to stitch everything together. According to Shelby Georgis, DDB's creative director, the trick was choreographing animations ahead of time so that the actors were set to work on a specific cadence that makes it look like they're interacting with the animals.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 12

• Flipkart, Amazon’s India Rival, Changes CEOs: In a move that has been rumored for some time, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal has stepped down as CEO of the Indian e-commerce company, the company announced today. He will be replaced by his co-founder, Binny Bansal (no relation). Sachin Bansal will become executive chairman and “mentor the senior leadership of the company and look for new investment opportunities,” the company said in the announcement. Binny Bansal, formerly chief operating officer, will now run the business day to day. The move comes as competition for market share in India’s burgeoning online shopping industry has ramped up between Amazon, Flipkart and fellow Indian upstart Snapdeal. Amazon has promised to invest billions into its India business, which is run by Amit Agarwal, who spent two years earlier in his career working as Jeff Bezos’s right-hand man.

• Uber China Raises Financing at $7 Billion Valuation: Uber said its China division has raised financing that values that part of the ride-hailing company's operation at $7 billion. Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive officer, discussed the new funds at a press conference in Beijing on Monday. Uber is bumping up against local competitors around the world. Nowhere is the competition more fierce than in China, where Uber faces Didi Kuaidi. The company is backed by Alibaba and Tencent, the country’s two most valuable technology companies. Uber and Didi Kuaidi are each spending aggressively to expand, partly by subsidizing the costs of rides. In a letter to investors in 2015, Kalanick committed to spending $1 billion that year in China. It may have surpassed that figure. Didi Kuaidi said on Monday that it completed 1.43 billion trips in 2015. Uber said it increased its share of the private car market in China to 30 percent or 35 percent as of the end of 2015, from 1 percent in January 2015. (The Information reported a similar figure earlier on Monday.) Didi Kuaidi said it holds 87.2 percent of China's private car-hailing market, attributing the figure to a Chinese research firm. A recent round of financing gave Didi Kuaidi a valuation of $16.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said in September. Uber, which owns a controlling stake in Uber China, was last valued at $62.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said in December. Uber China’s $7 billion valuation does not include the new cash. 

• Digital Display Ads to Overtake Search, Bringing a Reckoning for Google: As advertising keeps flooding over from television to digital screens, this year will mark a first: More online ad dollars will go to ads that aren’t for search results than to those that are. That’s per eMarketer, which measures this sort of stuff. A Monday report claims that spending on display ads — banners, videos, sponsored content and in-stream mobile promotions — will outpace search ads in 2016. The research firm estimates that U.S. spending on display will hit $32.2 billion this year (a 47 percent annual growth), overtaking spending on search (estimated at $29.2 billion, a 10 percent growth). That trend does not bode well for Google, which reaps the lion’s share of search ad revenue. Of course, the search giant also reaps other ad money — from its massive banner business and YouTube, primarily. But in this category of digital ads, Facebook is a far greater foe. Figures from eMarketer show that Facebook claimed just under 30 percent of U.S. display ads in 2015, more than twice Google’s share. Plus, many in the industry see Facebook’s nascent automated ad platforms as a potential threat to Google. Google knows this — that the tremendous profitability of its search business will peter out eventually. Hence the importance of Alphabet: It is scouring for some business after search.

• Israel brings tech expertise to protecting connected cars: Most cars today are equipped with some level of connectivity and self-driving vehicles are being developed. Given this level of sophistication, protecting cars from contamination with malicious software has become big business. Building on its expertise in technology, Israel is emerging as a leader in the race to keep cars secure and prevent the nightmare scenario of a hacker commandeering your vehicle. The threat appears real enough. Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles to install new software last year after cybersecurity researchers showed they could turn off a Jeep Cherokee's engine as it drove. Software manipulation, albeit intentional, was also behind Volkswagen's emissions scandal. From its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Check Point, one of the world's largest cyber security firms, pioneered the computer firewall two decades ago. It hopes to repeat that success with a security capsule for vehicles. Connected cars need a two-pronged defense. First, they must make sure nothing bad gets in, like a virus sneaking through a navigation system. Then they have to keep internal communications secure to allow functions like side-view mirrors which angle down when vehicles are put into reverse.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 5

• Augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: Understand the Difference: The Battle Is Real: Although virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have existed in some form for decades, only recently have they garnered mainstream attention. VR is blowing up right now, and its content and hardware advances have been exciting to watch. In a short amount of time, content creators have made some mind-blowing advances in storytelling with this new technology. Brands, movie studios, gaming companies and news organizations are all tinkering with this tool and channel. VR will gain ascendancy throughout 2016, but my money’s on AR becoming the dominant technology in our daily lives. The New York Times recently distributed more than one million Google cardboards to its digital-edition subscribers. YouTube and Facebook are enabling VR online through digital video players. Everything is aligning to have VR hit critical mass next year. VR is the only medium that guarantees the user’s complete focus on the content. There is no looking away, no checking email or text messages and no updating social-media statuses. VR is the most immersive way to tell a story because what happens inside that headset makes you feel something in your head, heart and gut. But VR’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. The immersive nature of VR hinders users from interacting with their surroundings. It takes them out of the moment. They can’t walk around and see what is right next to them, look people in the eye or read someone’s body language. VR is a powerful way to experience content, but is not practical for interacting in the real world. And therein lies the major problem with VR. Content is king, no doubt, and providing immersive experiences is the holy grail in advertising. But VR will never become an innocuous part of our daily lives. AR adds contextual layers of information to our experiences in real time. We have seen this future foretold in Hollywood films, such as Avatar, Minority Report, Iron Man and Wall-E, among others. Soon these depictions will become real. However, AR has issues with execution, which tends to feel gimmicky. Remember pointing your smartphone to a print ad to get some poorly made content? Google Glass showed some innovative AR applications, but they were ultimately a failure because the hardware and technology were too broad and lacked focus on the consumer problem they were trying to solve. These examples have shown the promise of AR, but have failed to deliver on contextual utility. Still, the future is bright for AR with several tech companies working on their AR offerings. Microsoft is working on HoloLens AR headset glasses. Developer kits are scheduled to hit the market in early 2016. Google invested in a company called Magic Leap, whose technology beams lasers into the viewer’s iris to activate AR. That future will become a reality in another year’s time. Both VR and AR tinker with our reality — but AR enhances it, while VR diverts us from it, which is why the latter will come to the fore in 2017, with its promise of contextual data for marketers and utility for consumers.

• Oculus to take preorders for Virtual Reality headset Rift from Wednesday:  Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook Inc, said on Monday it would take preorders for its much-awaited virtual reality headset, Rift, from Wednesday. The Rift would come bundled with the game, Lucky's Tale, and a multiplayer space combat game, EVE: Valkyrie, Oculus said in a blog post. The blog post did not contain any further information such as pricing of the headset. Rift "remains on schedule to ship in Q1," Oculus had said in a blog post last week. However, the touch controller, a pair of motion controllers, would be delayed and shipped only in the second half of 2016, the company had said. In September, Oculus and Samsung unveiled a new version of Gear VR virtual reality headset for $99.

• G.M., Expecting Rapid Change, Invests $500 Million in Lyft: The founders of Lyft, the ride-hailing service, have long imagined that the future of transportation would involve fewer cars on the road. Now General Motors is helping the start-up reach that goal. Lyft announced on Monday that G.M. had invested $500 million in the company, or half of its latest $1 billion venture financing round. The funding, which recently closed, values Lyft at $4.5 billion, not including the new capital. G.M.’s $500 million interest in Lyft is the single largest direct investment by an auto manufacturer into a ride-hailing company in the United States, according to data from PitchBook, an alliance that pairs an auto stalwart with the kind of start-up trying to disrupt it. The investment reflects how much consumer automotive habits have been changed by technology over the last decade. With the rise of ride-sharing companies, car manufacturers have raced to adapt to how people can now use each other’s vehicles for rides, which could potentially lead to a decline in car ownership.

• Toyota Snubs Tech Companies With Ford Dashboard Deal: Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to use a car-phone connectivity system championed by Ford Motor Co. in a front to keep Apple Inc. and Google from dominating control of dashboards. Toyota will introduce a telematics system with Ford’s SmartDeviceLink, an open platform that the automakers are inviting their peers to adopt for in-car applications, it said in a statement. Toyota has resisted offering Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, citing safety and security concerns, while Ford is offering them as apps within its Sync connectivity system this year. The deal shows two of the world’s largest automakers remain wary about giving Apple and Google too much control over displays that IHS Automotive estimates will generate $18.6 billion in sales by 2021. For Toyota, which is involved in another system called MirrorLink that competes with the two tech giants, the collaboration with Ford suggest the company is spreading its bets on car connectivity options. Ahead of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota also said it will equip U.S. vehicles with data communication modules next year that connect cars with cellular networks. The modules will enable a system that notifies authorities when air bags deploy due to traffic accidents.

• Alibaba's Finance Arm Said to Seek at Least $1.5 Billion: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate is seeking at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in a second round of fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said. Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co., controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire chairman Jack Ma, plans to issue stock to existing and new investors, according to the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private. The firm, known as Ant Financial, is speaking to potential investors including insurers and other financial institutions, as well as private equity funds and venture capital firms, the person said. Challenging bricks-and-mortar banks, the Internet-based Ant Financial runs China’s biggest online payment service, Alipay, and controls the company which manages Yu’E Bao, the nation’s largest money-market fund with more than 600 billion yuan of assets. It also holds a stake in MYBank, a private online lender. Ant Financial was valued at about $45 billion after completing an initial round of fundraising in June 2015, the person said. The company may sell shares in an IPO as early as this year and hasn’t decided yet whether to conduct a third round of financing ahead of that, according to the person. Ant Financial may use money from the current fundraising for acquisitions, the person said, without identifying potential targets. Ant Financial has already invested in companies including India’s One97 Communications Ltd. and Postal Savings Bank of China.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, November 16

• For Indian tech startups, 'Winter is here… and why this is a great time to invest':  The horizontal e-commerce Unicorns in India – Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, and adding ShopClues and even a more diversified Paytm – are in a dogfight with no end in sight. It doesn’t help that Amazon keeps on growing from strength to strength and getting more aggressive. The online classified players have even bigger issues. Unlike the e-commerce Unicorns, Quikr, OLX, the real estate and car classified firms and other listing-related ones like Zomato have yet to see a serious revenue jump that matches their astounding valuation surge. They all have a serious dogfight coming with no one being particularly dominant in their segment (well Zomato is, but is revenue growth justifying valuation?). Ola and Uber? Ditto, serious dogfight with no end in sight. Ad-tech? Tough for InMobi and Pubmatic to claim resilience and justify high valuations when Facebook and Google want to eat it all. Payments? Paytm has an extraordinary franchise but is it too distracted with other possibilities? Probably the only secure privately-held Unicorn in India is MuSigma – no surprise there as it has real profits and real cash generation. All the rest of the Unicorns are work in process. For early-stage startups, good news and very bad news. The good news is that several Series A funds have lots of dry powder – Accel, Kalaari, Matrix, Nexus, SAIF, Sequoia, etc. will all continue to invest and there will be some fantastic opportunities as the extraordinary customer adoption, benefits of a hyper-connected world and improvements in broadband infrastructure will continue. This is a great time to invest, much like 2008-2011 when many Unicorns of today were created. Many investors have seen such down cycles before and they will not retreat. We also plan to continue investing at our regular rate of one to two deals per quarter. However, Series A investors have to be prepared to fund fewer deals and fund the winners more as Series B/C will not be easy to come by as the ‘hedgies’ boosting up this market and valuations are more or less gone. Indian startups are not a good ‘trade’ anymore! The really bad news is that funding will be available to only a small number of players, as investors get overly conservative. There will be mass closures or scale downs and heavy bleeding for many angel, seed and Series A investors. Capital will vanish for not only the vague and fluffy ideas but even for some good ones as they will get washed away with the tide and sink.

• The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital: According to a recent study of 27 schools [in the United States], about one-quarter of female undergraduates and students who identified as queer or transgender said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Some felt the incidents weren’t serious enough. Others said they did not think anyone would believe them or they feared negative social consequences. Some felt it would be too emotionally difficult. Now, in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. Students at participating colleges can use its site, called Callisto, to record details of an assault anonymously. The site saves and time-stamps those records. That allows students to decide later whether they want to formally file reports with their schools — identifying themselves by their school-issued email addresses — or download their information and take it directly to the police. The site also offers a matching system in which a user can elect to file a report with the school electronically only if someone else names the same assailant. Callisto’s hypothesis is that some college students — who already socialize, study and shop online — will be more likely initially to document a sexual assault on a third-party site than to report it to school officials on the phone or in person.

• As Bubble Deflates, A Cottage Industry Emerges Around Startup Investors Trying to Cash Out: With Silicon Valley startups staying private longer these days, investors, company executives and rank-and-file employees are increasingly eager to cash out early. In recent weeks, growing fears of a bubble have given insiders even more incentive to sell their shares. Typically company founders try to limit such transactions, but a cottage industry has sprung up to help facilitate the sales on the quiet. Selling shares early isn’t entirely new. Before Facebook Inc. went public in 2012, a secondary market emerged that helped early employees and investors cash out to buy houses, cars or build a nest egg. A network of brokers helped facilitate the private deals, and firms such as DST Global Ltd., run by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, were eager to amass positions in the growing social network. Many of the current crop of promising startups -- among them Palintir, Dropbox, Flipboard -- have reached or surpassed their fifth year of existence. That’s when early employees increasingly need the cash, said Mark Dempster, a partner at Founders Circle, which buys officially sanctioned secondary shares. Adding to the anxiousness among those with equity in startups is a drop in valuations for some high-profile companies. Fidelity cut the valuation of Snapchat Inc. by about 25 percent in the third quarter, BlackRock Inc. trimmed the value of storage-company Dropbox Inc. and payments company Square Inc. is seeking an IPO market capitalization that’s significantly lower than its valuation as a privately held company. There’s no shortage of eager buyers attempting to buy a stake in a hot startup. Some aspiring investors even cold call insiders asking to buy shares. organized sales clearly aren’t meeting all the demand to cash out. Many employees and investors are finding other ways to sell shares on their own. Several companies have sprouted up to help find buyers for their shares. EquityZen, based in New York, offers “forward contracts,” where an employee trades the rights to their stock in exchange for cash now. The company sends out regular e-mails offering stock in companies such as Spotify, AppDyanmics and Chartboost. The sellers “get the cash they are looking for,” said Chief Executive Officer Atish Davda said in an interview. More traditional financial institutions also are participating in the secondary market, with mutual funds, hedge funds and asset managers like BlackRock Inc. occasionally buying shares this way. Last month, Nasdaq bought Secondmarket Solutions Inc., the operator of a software platform that helps facilitate the sales of shares in private companies.

• After Outcry, Ireland Adjusts Its Corporate Tax Draw: While lawmakers often play down its importance, Ireland’s 12.5 percent tax rate (versus 35 percent, before deductions, in the United States) has been a mainstay in the country’s decades-long strategy to attract the world’s largest companies. With few natural and manufacturing resources, Ireland and its politicians instead have turned to one of the world’s lowest corporate tax rates as the country’s primary competitive advantage in the global economy. In recent years, other European countries have accused Ireland of acting like an unfair low-tax haven. The European Commission, for example, is investigating whether Ireland gave Apple a preferential tax deal that broke the region’s tough state-aid rules. While lawmakers and the company have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, the country is already phasing out the most controversial loopholes. Ireland has since turned to a new inducement: a low tax rate on revenue generated from patents and other intellectual property held in Ireland. Such an incentive — announced last month to be 6.25 percent, or half of the country’s corporate tax rate — could be most attractive to patent-heavy industries like technology and pharmaceuticals. But many tax experts say the benefits will be significantly smaller than many had expected, particularly for global tech giants. Because of recent changes to global agreements, Ireland must limit what type of intellectual property can be included in these low-tax structures, known locally as a “knowledge development box.” Such restrictions have been demanded by several European countries, particularly Germany, which raised concerns that Ireland and other countries would turn to such structures to unfairly bring down corporate tax rates. Under international law, Ireland and other countries like Britain and potentially the United States can offer the tax breaks only on intellectual property derived from research carried out in their national borders. Much of the research and development for technology companies is done outside Ireland. So revenue from global patents like those linked to Google’s search algorithm, many of which were developed in the United States, will not be eligible for the reduced tax. Still, for regulators who have tried to limit Ireland’s tax advantage, the restrictions placed on the country’s knowledge development box represent a victory in the global push to close unfair tax loopholes. Some companies in Ireland had lobbied for a wider definition of what type of intellectual property, especially linked to online advertising and search patents moved from other countries to Ireland, could be included in the tax mechanism. Those efforts, though, failed.

• Sensor and Chip Makers stand to win as automakers battle for high-tech dominance: Automakers hope semi-autonomous features will, over time, help drivers and regulators get over fears of riding in vehicles that accelerate, steer and stop themselves, making potentially life-or-death judgments. Shorter term, car companies want these features to make driving more convenient - and cars more profitable. Ford's Active Speed Limiter comes at 560 euros ($602.78), and it's too soon to tell how popular it will be. Among the biggest winners for now are the companies that produce electronic sensors, cameras and software that make self-driving features possible. The growing list includes the high-tech units of traditional automotive suppliers such as Germany's Continental AG, Israel's Mobileye Vision Technologies, and consumer-technology giants Google, Apple, Samsung Electronics Co, Sony Corp and more. At Silicon Valley's Nvidia Corp, for example, video games remain the biggest market, but automotive revenue is the fastest-growing segment.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, October 28

• Apple Profit Is Up 31%, Revenue Up 22% as iPhones Sell Briskly, but Its Forecast Is Muted: Apple on Tuesday turned in another quarter of enviable revenue and profit growth, fueled by sales of the iPhone. But the results raised a perennial question for the world’s most valuable company: How can it keep its growth streak alive? The issue was stoked by Apple’s muted forecast for its all-important holiday quarter, as well as the unwillingness of Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, to go into detail in an earnings conference call about how Apple plans to rev up sales next year. Over all, Apple posted a profit of $11.1 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, up 31 percent from a year ago. Revenue was $51.5 billion, up 22 percent from last year. The results exceeded Wall Street estimates. Yet while the performance was bolstered by sales of the iPhone — Apple said that it sold 48 million iPhones in the quarter, up from 39 million in the same period last year — the company was more cautious about sales for the key holiday sales period. Apple projected revenue of $75.5 billion to $77.5 billion for the end-of-year quarter. While the sheer numbers are huge, the low end of the forecast fell below Wall Street estimates and would amount to anemic growth of less than 4 percent from a year ago. The last time Apple’s quarterly sales fell below 4 percent was in mid-2013. New Products: Apple is going into 2016 with a full slate of refreshed products. In late September, the company introduced its newest iPhone models, the 6s and 6s Plus. It also announced a larger iPad, the iPad Pro, and will begin shipping a new Apple TV this week. IPad Struggles: While the iPhone continues to grow, the iPad has been facing declines. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Apple said iPad sales dropped 20 percent from a year ago, making it the seventh consecutive quarter that sales of the tablet have slipped. The company is increasingly positioning the iPad as a business device. Apple Watch: The company did not break out sales of the Apple Watch, which debuted in April. But the category called “other products” — which includes the watch — posted $3 billion in revenue in the quarter, up from $2.6 billion in the previous quarter, which was the first quarter that included sales of the device. Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that the numbers for the “other” category were in line with his expectations, and implied somewhere between 3.5 million and four million watches were sold over the quarter. China: One of Apple’s fastest-growing markets — China — continued to grow. Sales in the region that Apple calls Greater China jumped 99 percent in the quarter to $12.5 billion. The region remained the company’s second-largest market after the Americas, accounting for 24 percent of sales in the quarter, compared with 13.7 percent a year ago. Investors have been scrutinizing the China business given that the country has been cutting interest rates to shore up a slowing economy. Apple Pay: Apple said it has partnered with American Express to bring its Apple Pay mobile payments service to global markets. Chief Executive Tim Cook said the credit card company will bring the service to customers in Australia and Canada, then expand to Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2016.

• Dismal Twitter Forecast and Flat User Growth Send Its Stock Lower: On Tuesday, Twitter gave a dismal forecast for its fourth-quarter revenue and profits. Shares in Twitter, a social media company, plunged as much as 13 percent in after-hours trading as Mr. Dorsey and his lieutenants offered little explanation for the gloom in a conference call with investors. In a similar call three months ago, Mr. Dorsey’s pointed critique of Twitter’s product failings sent the stock down 11 percent. Twitter also reported revenue of $569 million for the quarter, up 58 percent from $361 million a year ago. Its net loss was $132 million, or 20 cents a share, compared to a loss of $175 million, or 29 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. For the fourth quarter, usually the strongest thanks to holiday advertising, Twitter warned that revenue would be $695 million to $710 million, well below the $740 million that Wall Street had been expecting. The new projections, delivered as the company exceeded analysts’ expectations for its third-quarter results, provided fresh evidence that Twitter is failing to win over advertisers, the source of most of its revenue, as it confronts stiffening competition from Facebook, Instagram and Google. “The company is finding real challenges gaining traction with advertisers,” said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, citing the new forecasts and an advertiser survey his firm conducts twice a year. Mr. Mahaney, who has a neutral rating on Twitter’s stock, said he was struck by the contrast between the upbeat tone of Twitter’s executives on the call and the company’s deteriorating outlook. “Everything sounds so good, yet you reduced your forecast pretty materially. Why?” Mr. Dorsey didn’t answer that question, although Adam Bain, the company’s former ad chief and new chief operating officer, offered a clue: Ad prices plunged 39 percent in the third quarter, which he said was partly because of improved efficiency of video ads.

• Alibaba Revenue Up 32%, Sends Shares up 4%; Cloud Computing Revenue Doubles Y/Y; Overseas Sales at 8%; GMV growth sinks to lowest in 3 years: China's Alibaba is squeezing more money from online shopping than expected, beating analyst forecasts for revenue growth, as mobile shopping grows. The company wrung out higher-than-expected revenue growth of 32 percent year-on-year, even as gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of goods transacted across its platforms, sank to its slowest annual growth rate in more than three years. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares closed about 4 percent higher on Tuesday, after rising as much as 8.4 percent during market hours. Alibaba is trying to replace decelerating volume growth in online shopping with new kinds of online buying, mirrored in its latest investments. For instance, Alibaba invested $4.6 billion in Suning during the quarter. It also offered $3.5 billion to become sole owner of Youku Tudou, known as China's YouTube. Online video users in the country are beginning to cough up money for high-quality online streaming services. But the majority of Alibaba's revenue still comes from China's online shoppers buying from domestic businesses, a business driven by growth in GMV. For the latest quarter, growth came mostly from Tmall, an Amazon-like website allowing businesses to sell to customers, where GMV rose 56 percent. Gains at Taobao, more akin to eBay and by far the company's biggest contributor to GMV, showed signs of slowing at just 15 percent. Alibaba's revenue rose to $3.49 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30. Net income attributable to shareholders reached $3.58 billion, or $1.40 per share. International Expansion: The proportion of revenue Alibaba gets from abroad reached 8 percent, compared with 9 percent in the previous quarter. Co-founder Jack Ma has said he wants half of the company’s sales to originate outside China. The company named Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs  partner, as president in August to spearhead a global expansion into regions such as Russia and Brazil. The company is also looking to make forays into Italy, France, Australia and New Zealand, Evans said in October. Cloud Business: Revenue from cloud computing more than doubled from a year earlier. The e-commerce giant is betting on Internet-based computing and big data to boost growth for the next decade thanks to demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. AliCloud could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018

• IBM says SEC investigating company's books, shares fall: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) recognized revenue for certain deals in the United States, Britain and Ireland, IBM said on Tuesday, news that sent its shares down 4 percent. Shares of IBM fell as much as 4.4 percent to a five-year low of $137.33 and closed down 4 percent. News of the SEC probe came a week after the company posted lackluster quarterly results and cut its 2015 profit forecast. "It couldn't come at a worse possible time because now the stock is at another 52-week low as a result of this," said Belpointe analyst David Nelson. He said, however, that the probe "doesn't look like a massive smoking gun." "The investigation could be into warranty reserves, they could have recognized an item at the wrong time," Nelson said.

• PayPal says makes $1 billion in small-business loans in first two years: PayPal Holdings, the online payment processor, said on Tuesday its small-business lending program has processed $1 billion in loans in the first two years of its launch and more than doubled loan growth in that span. PayPal Working Capital is extending short-term loans totaling more than $100 million per month, or $3 million per day, to a mix of sellers on eBay and standalone small- to medium-sized merchants, the company said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. PayPal separated from eBay earlier this year, and Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman has stated he is looking to use PayPal's size to offer affordable financial services widely.

• Even As Oracle and AWS Circle Each Other, Oracle Will Not Build a Giant Cloud System Like AWS: Counter to the expectations of many industry watchers, Oracle, the world’s largest maker of software for businesses, is not planning a global computing system to rival Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, the other big global cloud companies. While it has built out a network of 20 data centers, largely filled with Oracle equipment, it now plans to go after customers by offering faster updates of its core products, new ways of customizing applications and a much younger, retooled sales force. “We’ve made our investments,” Mark Hurd, co-chief executive of Oracle, said in an interview. Compared with A.W.S., he said, “the place we like is one of higher profit margins.” Besides applications, Amazon sells raw computing and data storage, which are generally lower-margin businesses. Oracle is expected Tuesday to announce better security inside its cloud because of changes from its proprietary hardware, but won’t sell access to the machines on their own. Oracle’s better margins, Mr. Hurd said, will come from selling large-scale software that can be customized by its buyers to suit local markets and products. He hopes to lower his sales costs and bring in younger companies with salespeople recruited straight from college and given crash courses in selling Oracle cloud products. In the last four years, he said, the company has hired 1,000 graduates a year. “We train them in products, sales skills and processes,” said Mr. Hurd. “They’re selling within a year, with a much lower cost of sales.” Oracle’s sales force, some 30,000 people globally, is considered among the most aggressive and highly compensated in the tech business. Now, Mr. Hurd said, “we have to do some branding” to entice the kind of smaller companies and start-ups the new sales team is chasing. The ease of modification and the faster sales force illustrate how, while still far apart, Oracle and A.W.S. are becoming more like each other as cloud computing goes mainstream. For its part, a few weeks ago A.W.S. dropped all pretense and made a direct bid for Oracle’s customers. A.W.S. even put up a thinly disguised picture of Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison.

• Japan's Carmakers Proceed With Caution on Self-Driving Cars: At this week’s Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan Motor Co. will display a concept car with retractable steering wheel and message-flashing windshield, joining Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. in exhibiting vehicles with autonomous modes for changing lanes and avoiding collisions on highways. But while Tesla deployed its Autopilot system this month and Google aims to have fully self-driving cars on the road by 2020, Japan’s automakers see a wait for such vehicles, with introductions coming only after 2025. The unwillingness to take a software-testing approach -- with beta versions used for trial periods and ongoing updates -- and apply this to car-making divides traditional auto companies and tech-industry challengers, said Tatsuo Yoshida, an auto industry analyst with Barclays Plc. Whereas Tesla beamed Autopilot into Model S sedans with the promise the system would continually learn and improve itself, Japan’s automakers view such an approach as putting features on the road before they’re ready. They’re also wary of exposure to liability if they introduce safety features that fail. Each of Japan’s three biggest automakers have set targets to start deploying the technology around 2020. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told reporters this month the company can probably develop a completely self-driving car in about three years, while Google has forecast about a five-year time frame.

• Rackspace Launches Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers: Rackspace is getting deeper into the container game. The company today announced the beta launch of its Carina container service. Carina gives developers access to a fully managed container environment that offers bare-metal performance and still allows them to use the same native Docker tools they are used to from their local development environments. Right now, the service — which will remain available for free during what the team expects to be a long beta period — focuses on Docker’s tooling, but over time, the idea here is to use the flexibility of Magnum and OpenStack to give developers the ability to use other container orchestration engines like Kubernetes and Mesos, as well. The team believes that the combination of a multi-tenant environment and (near) bare-metal access will allow it to deliver the right mix of a high-performance system and low cost. Otto acknowledged a multi-tenant system may not be the right choice for workloads that are highly security sensitive, but the service also gives users the choice to also run containers on Rackspace’s private cloud service. The service provides users with a set of defaults based on the company’s experience, but users can then tweak these as necessary. Otto believes most users will opt to stay with Docker Swarm as the container orchestration engine, simply because it gives users more control (and in an imperative way) than Kubernetes, which is far more opinionated. Because of the way the company architected the service without using a traditional hypervisor (using libvirt/LXC instead), containers will start significantly faster than on a similar service that uses more traditional virtual machines. Because there are still some advantages to running containers on virtual machines — especially when it comes to security — Rackspace also plans to support virtual machines. It’s no secret that large public cloud vendors like Google, AWS and Microsoft now all offer their own container services. The Rackspace team believes that it has an advantage over them in terms of speed, but also because they don’t abstract away the containers from developers. In addition — and this is no surprise coming from Rackspace — the company believes it can offer a level of service that is significantly higher than its competitors. Rackspace already worked with a number of partners to test the service in a private beta. These include O’Reilly Media, which is using containers to power parts of its online learning tools, as well as the Drupal and WordPress hosting service Pantheon, which has long used containers at the core of its platform.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 1

• Daily Report: The Buy Button Heads to YouTube and Twitter: On Tuesday, YouTube said it would make it easier for advertisers to pair their ads with videos highlighting a particular product. The new feature, available in the coming months, will allow viewers to get directly to a retailer’s site with a single click. No searching required. The new feature seems to be particularly appealing on the many videos of product reviews and tutorials, a type of video that has been growing in popularity on YouTube. It also, as Hiroko Tabuchi writes, brings “a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs.” If there was any doubt about that trend, Twitter put it to rest on Wednesday. As Vindu Goel reports, the company is making it possible to put a buy button in a tweet. “A Twitter user,” he wrote, “can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase.” It has been a big week for new online ad tools and features, several of which have been announced at Advertising Week in New York. As Sydney Ember wrote on Monday, Madison Avenue might still be the heart of the advertising industry, but much of the money — and influence — is coming from Silicon Valley.

• More on the Twitter Buy Button: Twitter Makes ‘Buy’ Button Widely Available: After two years of testing, Twitter is finally making it easy for millions of merchants to sell products through a tweet. The social network announced Wednesday that its “buy now” button will be available to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations. A store that is a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Shopify can use the software to tweet out a link to a product that will show up with a buy button. A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase. (The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information.) Twitter’s expansion of its buy button, which builds on a partnership with the e-commerce platform Stripe announced earlier this month, comes as competing platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly from their services. On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube service announced that advertisers can now place buy buttons in other people’s videos — allowing, say, Apple to offer a way to buy an iPhone from inside a fan’s video showing the unboxing of a new iPhone (yes, there are lot of videos like that). Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, are also testing buy buttons. Facebook isn’t so sure about Buy Buttons. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, said that Facebook studied the behavior of its 1.5 billion users and concluded that buy buttons should not be a high priority right now.

• More on the YouTube Buy Button: YouTube to Expand Shopping Links to More Videos: YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would introduce shopping ads on its videos that let viewers jump directly to retailers’ websites and buy the products featured in the clips. The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in. YouTube’s new ads bring a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced “buy button” functions that let users purchase the products that appear in the millions of posts and photos shared on their platforms each day. Google itself has pushed to become a shopping destination in an increasingly direct challenge to Amazon, currently the web’s de facto shopping search engine. YouTube’s ads seek to tap into the fast growth in product reviews and tutorials posted by users. Susan Wojcicki, the company’s chief executive, announced the change at an advertising industry event in New York. In the last year alone, viewership for product-related clips on YouTube has jumped 40 percent, she said. YouTube users have already uploaded tens of thousands of reviews of a battery-powered self-balancing skateboardlike device that retailers expect to be a hot holiday gift this year. Once the service is available in the coming months, videos from users who opt into the program, and which contain products that match YouTube ads, will display an icon in the top-right corner. Users can click on the icon to view a list of images and prices of the products featured in the video, and to jump to retailers’ websites for more reviews, information and an option to buy. YouTube matches videos with ads based on the video’s content and audience. Similar to YouTube’s AdWords service, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on a shopping ad. The site will test the ads this fall, and will offer the service to AdWords clients in the coming months, it said. For users who upload YouTube videos, the shopping ads could mean a new revenue stream, the sites said. And for viewers, YouTube promises an unobtrusive way to shop as they surf videos.

• What it’s like to ride in a Google self-driving car: Google’s cars have been trained to be extremely conservative in unusual situations. “They understand their own limitations,” said Dmitri Dolgov, principle engineer on Google’s self-driving car project, at a briefing later. “They understand that there’s something really crazy going on and they might not be able to make really good, confident predictions about the future. So they take a very conservative approach.” A few blocks away from Google I got another glimpse of the SUV’s cautious nature. A car, also with a stop sign, arrived at the intersection just after us. The Google car inched forward in two spurts. After a pause we drove through the intersection. We got through it fine, but slower than I expect most drivers would have. Soon we pull back in front of GoogleX’s building, a 14-minute ride in the books. “Manual,” calls out the female voice as our driver took control again, and turned the car off. If I was grading the SUV on our brief trek I would give it a B+. It wasn’t perfect driving, but safe and effective. Of course, our route wasn’t especially difficult. The real challenges come when pedestrians, inclement weather, construction sites and cyclists arrive.

• Microsoft, Google stand down in patent battles: Microsoft and Google have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany. In another sign of the winding down of the global smartphone wars, the companies said the deal puts an end to court fights involving a variety of technologies, including mobile phones, wifi, and patents used in Microsoft's Xbox game consoles and other Windows products. The agreement also drops all litigation involving Motorola Mobility, which Google sold to Lenovo last year while keeping its patents. However, as Microsoft and Google continue to make products that compete directly with each other, including search engines and mobile computing devices, the agreement notably does not preclude any future infringement lawsuits, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed.

• Sources: Jack Dorsey Expected to Be Named Permanent Twitter CEO: Jack is apparently back — for good this time. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has been serving as interim CEO for the past three months, is expected be named the company’s new permanent CEO as early as tomorrow, although that timeframe may change, according to sources. Dorsey will apparently continue to run Square, the payments company he founded where he’s also CEO. [UPDATE: Sources said that it’s not clear if the board has officially voted on Dorsey’s appointment, because it was still settling the status of other key execs this week, most specifically revenue chief Adam Bain and CFO Anthony Noto. Bain is widely expected to become COO, although Noto may also report directly to Dorsey. Both have indicated to the board, said multiple sources, that they want Dorsey in the top job. The Twitter board also has what one source called a “Plan B” of a single serious outside candidate, although every single person I have contacted who has been considered and also contacted by the company’s recruiting firm, Spencer Stuart, said that discussions did not progress very far.] Sources added that there is likely to be some shake-up of the board too, most immediately the departure of Costolo as a director.

• Google Is Acquiring Rich Messaging Startup Jibe Mobile: Google said on Wednesday that it has acquired Jibe Mobile, a messaging startup that specialized in helping carriers build support for native video messaging into their services. The effort, designed to make video chat as ubiquitous and interoperable as text messages, is known as Rich Communications Services, or RCS. Google said it is making the purchase as part of a commitment to supporting RCS as part of its messaging strategy. “SMS carrier messaging is used by billions of people every day and enables people to reach anyone around the world, regardless of their device, carrier, app or location,” Android engineer and “minister of messaging” Mike Dodd said in a blog post. “However, the features available in SMS haven’t kept up with modern messaging apps. Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard for carrier messaging and brings many of the features that people now expect from mobile messaging, such as group chats, high res photos and more.” Financial terms were not disclosed.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, September 23

• The Risk of a Billion-Dollar Valuation in Silicon Valley: Deep inside a Silicon Valley unicorn lurks a time bomb. It is a peculiarity of venture capital financing that the engine that pumps money into a promising start-up can later cause the same start-up to self-destruct. With all the hoopla and debate over sky-high valuations of technology start-ups, it is worth keeping in mind that the switch that helps to drive those surging valuations can also be turned off. The “bomb,” so to speak, is known as a liquidation preference. In every financing round, the money that a venture capital firm invests is not given freely. The firm and the start-up will negotiate terms of protection. Negotiable terms include voting rights, seats on the start-up’s board and assurances that a future fund-raising won’t unduly dilute the venture capital firms’ stake. The liquidation preference is among the most important of these protections. This feature provides that the venture capital firm’s investment will be repaid before the founders and employees are rewarded. If the firm has particular leverage, it can negotiate an even more protective form, known as the senior liquidation preference, which provides that the firm will be paid not only before the common stockholders but also before anyone else who bought preferred stock in earlier rounds. These provisions apply in a sale but not in an initial public offering of stock. The idea is to ensure that even if the investment does not perform well, the venture investor will still get back its initial money. According to a recent survey by the law firm Fenwick & West of 37 unicorns — private companies with valuations of $1 billion or more — every investment had a liquidation preference. Higher valuations create higher expectations, and failure to meet them can set off a downward spiral and a forced sale. In that event, the venture capitalists are paid first, leaving “unicorpses” in their wake and the founders with nothing. And don’t expect I.P.O.s to save these companies. Some unicorns, like Honest Company, have terms that require minimum I.P.O. prices for the V.C. investors that they just won’t be able to meet anytime soon. As these valuations go up and down, remember that reaching a $1 billion valuation is not all good news for a start-up. Instead, it can simply mean that the newly foaled unicorn has made a Faustian bargain.

• Instagram Hits 400 Million Monthly Users, Mostly Outside U.S.  Instagram has passed 400 million monthly active users, mostly by adding people in countries outside the U.S. That compares with Twitter Inc.’s 316 million and Pinterest Inc.’s 100 million. Instagram’s number increased from the 300 million mark reached nine months ago, according to the company. Facebook has 1.49 billion monthly active users. More than 75 percent of Instagram’s users live outside the U.S., with most of the new participants coming from Brazil, Japan and Indonesia, the company said.  As it expands, the photo-sharing application has started to ramp up its advertising business, taking advantage of Facebook’s network of tools and marketers to increase its offerings and global reach. At the beginning of this month, Instagram advertised in eight countries. By the end, they’ll be making money in more than 200, the company has said.

• The tech behind how Volkswagen tricked emissions tests: Volkswagen isn’t hiding from its emissions cheating scandal, which the company now says affects some 11 million diesel cars worldwide. “Let’s be clear about this: Our company was dishonest with the EPA and the California Air Resources Board and with all of you,” Volkswagen U.S. chief Michael Horn said Monday night. “In my German words, we have totally screwed up.” Thanks for finally coming clean, VW. But how exactly did the technology behind Volkswagen’s so-called defeat device actually work? Regulators allege that Volkswagen installed software into its cars that allowed the autos to circumvent EPA tests. But that still doesn’t explain how VW vehicles were able to determine when they were being subjected to an emissions test in the first place. To understand more about how Volkswagen cheated, we have to know a bit about the EPA’s testing process. When carmakers test their vehicles against EPA standards, they place a car on rollers and then perform a series of specific maneuvers prescribed by federal regulations. Among the most common tests for passenger cars is the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule (UDDS), which simulates 7.5 miles of urban driving. In the first 505 seconds of the test, the driver pushes the car to highway-level speeds. The second phase of the test looks more like what you’d see in stop-and-go city traffic. In all these tests, the driver has to stay within two miles per hour of the required speed at any given moment. Along the way, the testers collect emissions data. There's a dizzying array of other tests that cars sometimes face. There’s a test to simulate aggressive driving, which tops out at some 80 miles an hour, and a test that simulates urban driving on a hot summer day, with the air conditioning on full blast. There’s a cold-start test, where you begin the test with everything in the car turned off. There’s a hot-start test. There’s something called a New York City cycle, which simulates driving in a busy downtown area where you never get above 30 mph. And then there’s the Federal Test Procedure, a 30-minute test that mixes various elements of the other tests. In the end, the detailed requirements for each test gave Volkswagen the advance knowledge it needed to teach its cars when to behave more cleanly. By measuring how long the engine was running, the vehicle’s speeds, and even seemingly esoteric factors, such as the position of the steering wheel and barometric pressure, Volkswagen vehicles could understand they were being tested and so adjusted their engine performance to pass the tests, according to the EPA. Using a special engine setting for vehicle tests isn’t all that unusual, according to Consumer Reports. Most new vehicles do something similar because otherwise vehicles might interpret some of the testing procedures, like traction issues from being on rollers, as dangerous. But the problem here is that the EPA says the carmaker used its testing mode in an inappropriate attempt to beat the system.

• Quirky, an Invention Start-Up, Files for Bankruptcy:  Quirky, an ambitious crowdsourced invention start-up, which raised $185 million from investors that included General Electric and leading venture capital firms, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The failure of the company, based in New York, will surely raise questions about how far the crowd-based model of innovation and product development, made possible by the Internet, can go. Other companies are using crowdsourcing to make physical goods, from Threadless for T-shirt designs to Local Motors for automobiles. None, though, were doing it as broadly and across as wide a range of products as Quirky. The company said on Tuesday that it was seeking protection from its creditors while it arranged a sale of “substantially all its assets.” Quirky said that it already had an initial bid of $15 million for its Wink subsidiary, which was created last year. Wink makes software so that an array of Internet-connected home devices, as varied as thermostats and door locks, can be controlled from a smartphone app. Quirky had some success, with revenue rising sharply last year to about $100 million. But the scale of its ambitions — managing a sprawling community of inventors, transforming raw ideas into product designs, and orchestrating manufacturing and distribution — proved daunting and too costly.

• The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip and Print Is Far From Dead: Five years ago, the book world was seized by collective panic over the uncertain future of print. As readers migrated to new digital devices, e-book sales soared, up 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, alarming booksellers that watched consumers use their stores to find titles they would later buy online. Print sales dwindled, bookstores struggled to stay open, and publishers and authors feared that cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business. Then in 2011, the industry’s fears were realized when Borders declared bankruptcy. Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago. E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television. E-book subscription services, modeled on companies like Netflix and Pandora, have struggled to convert book lovers into digital binge readers, and some have shut down. Sales of dedicated e-reading devices have plunged as consumers migrated to tablets and smartphones. And according to some surveys, young readers who are digital natives still prefer reading on paper. The surprising resilience of print has provided a lift to many booksellers. Independent bookstores, which were battered by the recession and competition from Amazon, are showing strong signs of resurgence. The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago.

• Payments Businesses Are Damn Hard: The Cover App Edition: Cover, a young payments app, is accepted in 350 restaurants in four cities. It has processed more than $10 million in transactions since the beginning of the year. But it will record, at most, just $150,000 in revenue in 2015 after passing on a big cut of its fees to other financial institutions, its founder says. So go the economics of a young payments business. And so ends Cover’s life as a stand-alone company. Founder Mark Egerman said today that his startup has sold to European competitor Velocity in a small deal, after passing on taking on more venture capital under less-than-great terms. “Payments is really a hard business,” Egerman said flatly. Cover allows diners to pay for a meal by pressing a few buttons in a smartphone app at partnering restaurants instead of handing over a credit card or cash. The company generates revenue by charging restaurants 3 percent of the price of each meal. But, like many payment processing businesses, Cover passes along about two-thirds of that fee to banks and other financial institutions behind the scenes. So on a $100 meal, Cover’s cut is $3, but it only keeps $1 for itself. Then it has to pay for all of its expenses. If that doesn’t sound sustainable for a small, venture-backed company, that’s because it’s not. (Cover has raised about $7 million.) Cover’s fate underscores how hard it is to build sustainable payment-processing businesses without enormous transaction volume, and why even much bigger payments startups such as Square and Stripe are diversifying their product offerings to beef up profit margins and create new e-commerce markets. Square processes more than $30 billion in brick-and-mortar transactions each year, charging merchants a 2.75 percent fee for each transaction. Like Cover, it passes on about two-thirds of that fee to other financial players in the payments ecosystem, including banks and credit card companies. To supplement this business as it readies for an IPO and to live up to its $6 billion valuation, the company has unveiled a host of products to create new revenue streams with better profit margins. Its cash-advance business, Square Capital, was doling out $1 million a day as of August. It is also selling software products to merchants through monthly subscriptions — another avenue to move past the minor margins of the payments business. Stripe, the online payments company, has said it processes billions of dollars in payments, but it already has a $5 billion valuation. Its one and only revenue source is still the 2.9 percent cut it takes of most transactions, plus a flat 30-cent fee. It, too, is looking for new areas of growth from new types of commerce.

• Groupon to Cut About 1,100 Jobs Worldwide:  Groupon, operator of a daily deals website, said it would cut about 1,100 jobs globally as it restructures outside North America. Groupon is shutting operations in Morocco, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay after exiting Greece and Turkey, the company said in a separate blog post on Tuesday. Groupon, which had about 11,800 employees globally at the end of December, said that it expected to complete the job cuts, mainly in sales and customer service, by September 2016. A strong dollar has hurt companies with a large presence in markets outside the United States. Markets outside North America accounted for about 43 percent of Groupon’s revenue in 2014. The company said in April it would sell a 46 percent stake in its South Korean business as part of its turnaround efforts. “I think it’s actually a good thing for investors to hear that they’re taking some more cuts out of their international operations,” Topeka Capital Markets analyst Blake Harper said. Groupon, once the leader in the online coupons market, has also been struggling to boost sales as competitive deals on online marketplaces operated by Amazon and eBay make its coupons less attractive to shoppers. The company has started selling products on its website. Groupon said it expected to incur pretax charges of up to $35 million, including $22 million-$24 million in the third quarter, related to the job cuts.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 15

• Facebook Works With Google To Let Mobile Web Users Get Push Notifications Via Chrome: A big reason developers hate mobile websites is that they lack the push notifications which help re-engage people with native apps. That was a serious problem for Facebook. It sees a ton of users on its m.facebook.com site, especially in the developing world where data budgets are tight, but had trouble pulling them back in. So today Facebook announced that after working with Google on its new mobile web alerts standard, m.facebook.com mobile web users can now opt to receive push notifications via Chrome. Google first announced the development of its third-party push API through Chrome back in April and noted some partners like eBay and Vice News who had committed to implementing the standard. Now Facebook has rolled out the feature,  so mobile Chrome users on m.facebook.com will be asked to turn on Chrome pushes. Facebook’s product manager on browser partnerships Jonathan McKay tells me that already, “We’ve seen an increase in visitation from launching push notifications.”

• Indian cab-hailing firm Ola is raising $500 million+, at a valuation that we’ve heard is around the $5 billion mark, with $225 million committed so far. The news comes as the company — which competes in its home market against the likes of Uber and Indian startup Meru — continues to expand into more cities, and more products. Today, Ola launched a new car leasing service for drivers on its network; last week it expanded to shuttle services for commuters. The raise is due to be finalised in the next week or two and announced officially then, sources tell TechCrunch. As it is still in progress, the final amount and final valuation may also change. This funding, a Series F, has been rumored for some time now, with the first reports surfacing just after Ola announced its last raise of $400 million in April of this year. That round, a Series E, valued the company at $2.5 billion.

• Russian Authorities Rule Google Broke Antitrust Regulations:  Russian antitrust authorities ruled on Monday that Google broke the country’s competition rules, adding to the regulatory headaches the search giant is facing worldwide. Russian officials said that Google had abused its dominant market position with Android, its mobile operating system, by favoring the company’s own services over those of rivals, including Yandex, a Russian competitor. Earlier this year, Yandex had complained to the country’s competition authority that cellphone manufacturers were not able to include the company’s rival digital offerings in the Android operating system. After the complaint, the regulator began investigating whether Google unfairly bundled its own services, like digital maps, in its Android software. Unlike in other parts of the world, where Google has outmuscled domestic search rivals, Yandex still holds more than a 50 percent market share in Russian online search, according to industry statistics. The company’s share price rose more than 8 percent in early afternoon trading in New York after the regulatory decision was announced. “Russia is the first jurisdiction to have officially recognized these practices as anticompetitive,” Yandex said in a statement, in reference to Google’s favoring of its own services in Android over those of rivals. The company added that it believed the antitrust ruling would “serve to restore competition in the market.” European and other international antitrust watchdogs are taking an increasingly tough line against the company.

• The auto and tech worlds are fighting for the best minds in race for self-driving car: Google had all of Silicon Valley to choose from when deciding on a leader for its ambitious self-driving car division. Instead, the tech behemoth hired an auto-industry lifer: John Krafcik, a former head of Hyundai's American brand who got his start as an engineer working on the Ford Explorer. The announcement on Monday comes just a week after Toyota said it, too, had looked outside its industry for its next big name. Earlier this month, the carmaker said it had tapped the military’s chief robotics engineer, Gill Pratt, to lead a $50 million push into not just driverless cars but artificial intelligence, through investments into tech research labs. The high-profile hires spotlight the growing overlap between the global giants of autos and tech, and analysts say it could point to a growing tension between some of the industries' biggest, wealthiest names. Tech giants increasingly see ways to make money and save lives in the old-fashioned, hyper-profitable business of cars. But traditional automakers, who could lose heavily if self-driving cars go mainstream, aren't hesitating to grab onto some of tech's top minds, either, as a way to adapt in a world beyond cars.

• Twitter, InMobi Embrace New Stripe Mobile E-Commerce Tool: Stripe Inc., the online-payments processor, unveiled a tool to simplify mobile e-commerce for stores and software applications developers. Twitter Inc. said it’s adopting Stripe’s offering, called Relay, to make it easier to buy products from a link in a tweet. InMobi, a mobile-advertising company, and SAP SE’s e-commerce software unit Hybris also said they are integrating their services with the San Francisco-based startup’s product. Payments processing company Stripe Inc launched a new tool on Monday that will connect retailers and brands to sell on platforms like Twitter Inc and tap an increasing number of consumers shopping on mobile apps. Twitter's adoption of Stripe's new product, Relay, is expected to help the microblogging site further dabble in e-commerce and generate revenue through its "buy buttons," which lets shoppers buy a product and enter payment and shipping information without leaving Twitter's platform. Twitter has been struggling to increase its audience and in July said its number of monthly average users grew at its slowest pace since it went public in 2013. Stripe, which makes software that helps businesses accept various types of payments on websites and in apps, counts grocery-delivery startup Instacart, ride-sharing app Lyft and e-commerce platform Shopify among its clients. The payments company's new Relay product functions as a universal sell button for retailers, allowing companies like eyewear brand Warby Parker to list products in a single place and sell them directly on Twitter as well as other e-commerce platforms like ShopStyle.

• Alibaba Falls After Barron's Suggests Drop, Company Rebuts Alibaba shares fell Monday, the first day of trading since a Barron’s magazine article on Saturday suggested the Chinese Internet company may lose another 50 percent of its value. The company, in a statement posted Monday on its website, said the article was inaccurate and misleading. Barron’s based its conclusion that the Chinese company is overvalued, in part, by comparing Alibaba’s share price as a multiple of earnings estimates with EBay. Alibaba said the comparison is unfair because EBay’s online marketplace doesn’t do significant business in China. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares fell Monday, the first day of trading since a Barron’s magazine article on Saturday suggested the Chinese Internet company may lose another 50 percent of its value. The company, in a statement posted Monday on its website, said the article was inaccurate and misleading. Barron’s based its conclusion that the Chinese company is overvalued, in part, by comparing Alibaba’s share price as a multiple of earnings estimates with EBay. Alibaba said the comparison is unfair because EBay’s online marketplace doesn’t do significant business in China.