Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 17

• Ola shuts TaxiForSure unit, lays off up to 1,000 people: Cab-hailing company Ola has shut its TaxiForSure unit and is laying off as many as 1,000 employees, as the SoftBank Group Corp-backed firm tightens its belt to take on US-based rival Uber. According to at least half-a-dozen people with the direct knowledge of the development, about 90% of the staff being laid off from TaxiForSure works in the company’s call centres, driver relations and business development units. The employees that are being retrenched are located across a dozen cities and are being given three months’ salary as compensation, said the people mentioned above. These include current and former employees of the cab hailing company.Ola had acquired smaller rival TaxiForSure for $200 million in early 2015 to strengthen its position against Uber Technologies Inc. After the acquisition, Ola had centralized TaxiForSure’s operations to three major cities–Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi–and eight smaller cities. The company kept around 250 employees each in the three metros and around 30 each in the eight other cities. The layoff and shutdown comes at a time when Ola is locked in a bruising battle with Uber that involved public spats and legal wrangling. It is also dealing with adverse regulatory environment in various states that affect its operations. The company has been trying for a large fundraise for quite some time. Ola has so far raised around $1.2 billion from investors including Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. The taxi-hailing firm was valued around $5 billion at the time of its last fundraising. Although Ola had initially planned to retain TaxiForSure as a separate brand, resource crunch seems to have forced the company to wind down the unit. The people cited above said that drivers on TaxiForSure have been moved to the Ola platform. The company has also been prompting TaxiForSure users to migrate to the Ola app in recent months.

• Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN: Cisco is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Cisco, which had more than 70,000 employees as of April 30, declined to comment. Cisco increasingly requires "different skill sets" for the "software-defined future" than it did in the past, as it pushes to capture a higher share of the addressable market and aims to boost its margins, the CRN report said citing a source familiar with the situation. Cisco has been investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers, to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. The company has already offered many early retirement package plans to Cisco's employees, according to CRN.

• Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years: At a news conference on Tuesday at the company’s research center in Palo Alto, Calif., Mark Fields, Ford’s chief executive, said the company planned to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation in a ride-hailing service by 2021.Beyond that, Mr. Fields’s announcement was short on specifics. But he said that the vehicles Ford envisioned would be radically different from those that populate American roads now. “That means there’s going to be no steering wheel. There’s going to be no gas pedal. There’s going to be no brake pedal,’’ he said. “If someone had told you 10 years ago, or even five years ago, that the C.E.O. of a major automaker American car company is going to be announcing the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles, they would have been called crazy or nuts or both.” The company also said on Tuesday that as part of the effort, it planned to expand its Palo Alto center, doubling the number of employees who work there over the next year, from the current 130. Ford also said it had acquired an Israeli start-up, Saips, that specializes in computer vision, a crucial technology for self-driving cars. And the automaker announced investments in three other companies involved in major technologies for driverless vehicles.

• Univision is buying Gawker Media for $135 million: Univision has won the auction for Gawker Media. The TV network and digital publisher has agreed to pay $135 million for the bankrupt blog network, according to a person familiar with the deal. Univision’s offer will encompass all seven of Gawker Media’s sites, including Gawker.com Ziff Davis and Univision were the only two bidders for Gawker, which filed for bankruptcy after Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel won a $140 million judgment in a privacy case. Ziff Davis had originally offered $90 million for Gawker Media. The deal won’t be official for a bit. For starters, a U.S. bankruptcy court judge needs to sign off on the transaction. When it is final, the judgment funds will be set aside while Gawker appeals its court case; eventually the money will go to the side that wins. Whatever the result of the case, the auction is a disappointing conclusion for Denton, who founded the company in 2002. Last year, as rival media companies like Vice, BuzzFeed and Vox Media (which owns this site) were raising money at increasingly high valuations, Denton was arguing that his company was worth $250 million or more.

• ‘Shadow Brokers’ Leak Raises Alarming Question: Was the N.S.A. Hacked? The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America’s own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed. Most outside experts who examined the posts, by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, said they contained what appeared to be genuine samples of the code — though somewhat outdated — used in the production of the N.S.A.’s custom-built malware.Most of the code was designed to break through network firewalls and get inside the computer systems of competitors like Russia, China and Iran. That, in turn, allows the N.S.A. to place “implants” in the system, which can lurk unseen for years and be used to monitor network traffic or enable a debilitating computer attack. According to these experts, the coding resembled a series of “products” developed inside the N.S.A.’s highly classified Tailored Access Operations unit, some of which were described in general terms in documents stolen three years ago by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now living in Russia. But the code does not appear to have come from Mr. Snowden’s archive, which was mostly composed of PowerPoint files and other documents that described N.S.A. programs. The documents released by Mr. Snowden and his associates contained no actual source code used to break into the networks of foreign powers. Whoever obtained the source code apparently broke into either the top-secret, highly compartmentalized computer servers of the N.S.A. or other servers around the world that the agency would have used to store the files. The code that was published on Monday dates to mid-2013, when, after Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, the agency shuttered many of its existing servers and moved code to new ones as a security measure. While still widely considered the most talented group of state-sponsored hackers in the world, the N.S.A. is still recovering from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures; it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars reconfiguring and locking down its systems.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 19

• This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff: Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed.: Atlassian, which makes popular project-management and chat apps such as Jira and HipChat, doesn’t run on sales quotas and end-of-quarter discounts. In fact, its sales team doesn’t pitch products to anyone, because Atlassian doesn’t have a sales team. Initially an anomaly in the world of business software, the Australian company has become a beacon for other businesses counting on word of mouth to build market share. “Customers don’t want to call a salesperson if they don’t have to,” says Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-chief executive officer. “They’d much rather be able to find the answers on the website.” The way technology companies sell software has changed dramatically in the past decade. The availability of open source alternatives has pushed traditional brands and rising challengers to offer more free trials, free basic versions of their software with paid upgrades, and online promotions. Incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which employ thousands of commissioned salespeople, are acquiring open source or cloud companies that sell differently, says Laurie Wurster, an analyst at researcher Gartner. Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub are among the companies trying to attract corporate clients with small-bore efforts that rely largely on good reviews. The idea is to distribute products to individuals or small groups at potential customers big and small and hope interest spreads upstairs. So far, though, Atlassian remains the most extreme example of this model. It’s a 14-year-old company, valued at $5 billion since going public in December, without a single salesperson on the payroll. More than 80 Fortune 100 companies use Atlassian’s software, and venture capitalists and peers often talk about trying to follow, at least partly, its sales strategy.Atlassian’s roots lie in Sydney’s barren tech scene. It was kept aloft early on not by venture capital, but by the founders’ credit cards, meaning it didn’t have impatient investors to answer to. “I don’t think their success is replicable,” says Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures.

• Cisco's forecast tops Wall Street estimates; shares rise: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported better-than-expected results and gave an upbeat forecast for the current quarter, sending its shares up about 7 percent in extended trading. The company has been beefing up its wireless security and datacenter businesses to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. Results in the latest reported quarter were mainly driven by a 17 percent jump in sales in its security business, which offers firewall protection as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems. Revenue in the company's collaboration unit, which sells IP phones, rose 10 percent in the third quarter ended April 30. Sales in the data center business, which makes servers, rose 1 percent. The company's legacy switches and routers business is still by far its largest, accounting for nearly 60 percent of total revenue. Sales in the switching unit fell 3 percent, while router sales fell 5 percent, painting a grim picture of corporate technology spending.The company's net profit fell to $2.35 billion, or 46 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $2.44 billion, or 47 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 57 cents per share. Analysts on an average had expected a profit of 55 cents per share and revenue of $11.97 billion. Revenue fell to $12.00 billion from $12.14 billion.

• Tesla to raise $1.4 billion with public offering to fund Model 3 production:Tesla will raise at least $1.4 billion through a secondary stock offering, the company announced in SEC filings today, and an additional 5.5 million shares will be purchased by CEO Elon Musk via a stock option exercise. The funds will be used to "accelerate the production ramp of Model 3," according to the filing, with Tesla moving its 500,000 vehicle per year build plan to 2018 from 2020. Musk will exercise all his outstanding stock options for a total of 5,503,972 shares, with 2,777,901 of those being offered for sale to cover his tax burden. Tesla will not receive any of the proceeds from that sale, and Musk's net holdings in Tesla will increase. The Tesla Model 3 was unveiled in March and is the first "affordable" Tesla car, priced at around $35,000. Tesla says it will go more than 215 miles on a full charge and the success of the Model 3 will determine the future of the company. The first deliveries of the car are expected in late 2017, with volume production beginning in 2018. Initial demand for the car appears to be very strong, with the company reporting that it had taken roughly 400,000 preorders with refundable $1,000 deposits as of late April. In the filing Tesla revealed that as of May 15th, it currently had 373,000 preorders after 8,000 customer cancellations and 4,200 duplicate orders were cancelled by the company. Tesla is no stranger to secondary offerings. It raised around $500 million in a smaller offering last year.

• LinkedIn Says Hackers Are Trying to Sell Fruits of Huge 2012 Data Breach:  LinkedIn said on Wednesday that hackers were attempting to sell what they claimed were 117 million email addresses and passwords of its users, suggesting that a data breach in 2012 was magnitudes bigger than initially thought.LinkedIn is investigating the authenticity of the data, the company said. But a security researcher, Troy Hunt, said on Twitter that he had verified a portion of the breach and that it was “highly likely this is legit.” The hacker is trying to sell the data on an illegal marketplace for five bitcoin, or about $2,200, according to Motherboard. In 2012, the account information of 6.5 million users was posted to a Russian hacker site. LinkedIn settled a class-action lawsuit in 2015, agreeing to compensate 800,000 people who had paid for its premium services. Since the attack, the company has stepped up its security procedures, including enabling two-step verification, a technique security experts recommend for your most sensitive online accounts.

• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo. Let the Battle Begin. Google on Wednesday introduced Google Home, a voice-controlled, Internet-connected speaker that competes directly with Amazon’s smart speaker, Echo, which costs $180. The company also introduced Allo, a messaging app, and a rebranding of its virtual assistant. Here’s a quick explanation of what these major announcements, made at the Google I/O developer conference, mean for consumers. What do Home and Echo have in common? Home and Echo are both speakers that require a wired power connection. They stream music and perform tasks like web searches, adding calendar appointments and looking up movie showtimes over an Internet connection. What are the differences between Google Home and Amazon Echo? Google has yet to share many important details, including a price tag, about Google Home, which is scheduled for release this fall. However, from the announcement we can glean a few differences: Home, which can easily be held in one hand, is shorter and more compact than Echo. Both speakers have a cylindrical shape, but the top of Home is slanted downward, whereas Echo’s top is flat. Google is allowing consumers to choose from different colors for the bottom part of Home, while Echo comes only in black. (Amazon also sells a smaller voice-controlled speaker called Tap.) Most important, the brains of Home will be Google’s virtual assistant, which draws from Google’s extensive search database, whereas Echo relies on Alexa, Amazon’s assistant. In other words, consumers can expect voice commands that already work with Google’s assistant to work with Google Home. In a recent test comparing virtual assistants from Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, Google’s assistant was the most capable of performing basic tasks, largely because it drew data from Google’s search engine. Is Home smarter than Echo? Thanks to Home’s reliance on Google’s search engine, it will probably be a smarter speaker than the Echo when it comes to basic tasks like web searches and looking up traffic data. However, when it comes to actions offered by outside companies — like the ability to order a pizza from a restaurant or to set your Internet-connected thermostat — Home’s success will depend largely on whether Google persuades third-party developers to create tasks that work with it.

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Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 11, 2016

• Twitter User Growth Comes to a Halt - Stock Down After Quarterly Earnings: On Wednesday, after many quarters of slowing user growth, Twitter said its monthly visitors in the fourth quarter totaled 320 million — exactly the same as the company reported in the previous quarter. While the number was up 9 percent from a year ago, when monthly active users stood at 288 million, the figures showed that Mr. Dorsey’s recent moves have made little impact in attracting users. The user figures overshadowed otherwise positive fourth-quarter earnings results. Twitter reported revenue of $710 million, up 48 percent from $479 million a year ago. Net loss narrowed to $90.2 million, or 13 cents a share, from a loss of $125 million, or 20 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. But Twitter’s outlook was lower than projected by Wall Street. The company estimated revenue of $595 million to $610 million in the current quarter, compared with Wall Street expectations of $628 million. Shares of Twitter have been pummeled in the last year, dropping around 67 percent. The stock declined in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

• Facebook Disavows Marc Andreessen Comments on India, and He Apologizes:  Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and board member of the social network Facebook, has long been one of its vocal supporters. On Wednesday, Facebook did not welcome that support. Hundreds of users, many of whom said they were of Indian descent, reacted negatively to Mr. Andreessen’s comment and what appeared to be his pro-colonialist sentiment. The tweet has since been deleted. Facebook swiftly swatted down Mr. Andreessen’s comments on Wednesday. “We strongly reject the sentiments expressed by Marc Andreessen last night regarding India,” Facebook said in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also posted on the social network that he found Mr. Andreessen’s comments “deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all.” He added that through his travels to India, he has “gained a deeper appreciation for the need to understand India’s history and culture.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Andreessen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Andreessen posted new tweets in which he apologized for his previous comments, an apology he later repeated. “I now withdraw from all future discussions of Indian economics and politics, and leave them to people with more knowledge and experience!” he wrote.

• Tesla expects to become profitable in 2016, shares surge: Tesla Motors Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk on Wednesday promised investors that the electric luxury car maker will start making money this year, sending the company's shares up sharply despite a wider fourth-quarter loss.Tesla shares rose more than 10 percent in after-hours trading after the company forecast a 60 to 80 percent increase in vehicle sales this year and promised it would turn a profit on an adjusted basis. It will start generating positive cash flow in March. Tesla shares are still down more than 30 percent since the beginning of the year, reflecting investor concerns about continued losses. Tesla’s cash reserves dropped to $1.2 billion as of Dec. 31 from $1.9 billion a year earlier, despite a sale of shares last summer. The company’s cash burn has become a concern for some analysts, given the heavy capital spending it has mapped out. The slower-than-planned launch of the company's Model X sport utility vehicle during the last quarter added $67 million in unplanned costs, Tesla said. Tesla shares rose despite a wider fourth-quarter net loss of $2.44 a share, compared with a loss of 86 cents a share a year earlier. Tesla reported an adjusted loss of 87 cents per share in the fourth quarter, while analysts expected a profit of 10 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Deliveries of Model S sedans and Model X SUVs were 17,478 vehicles in the quarter, at the low end of prior forecasts. Revenue rose nearly 27 percent to a $1.21 billion.

• Cisco beats profit estimates, adds $15 billion to buyback: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported a bigger-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by higher demand for its routers and security products, and added $15 billion to its share buyback program. The company's shares rose 5.1 percent in after-market trading on Wednesday. The results were a bright sign for investors after several tech stocks with lofty valuations plunged in the past few days due to disappointing sales outlooks from LinkedIn Corp and Tableau Software. Cisco is shifting to high-end switches and routers and investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers. Revenue in the company's routers business rose 5 percent to $1.85 billion in the second quarter ended Jan. 23, Cisco said. Revenue in the switches business, the company's biggest, fell 4 percent to $3.48 billion. Its security business, which offers firewall protection as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems, recorded an 11 percent rise in revenue to $462 million. Cisco boosted its current share buyback plan of $97 billion, of which $16.9 billion was remaining, by $15 billion.

• Amazon to buy back $5 billion of shares: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), the world's largest e-commerce company, said on Wednesday its board authorized a $5 billion share buyback program. The buyback replaces the $2 billion repurchase program approved in 2010. The company had $763 million remaining under the previous plan. The company's shares rose 1.5 percent to $498 in after-hours trading.

• More Top-level churn at Flipkart: Mukesh Bansal, head of marketplace and a board member at Flipkart, and chief business officer Ankit Nagori have decided to leave the e-commerce firm barely a month after a top-level reshuffle that led to a change in the roles of the company’s two founders. Separately, Flipkart announced that Nagori was also quitting the company. He had joined Flipkart about six years ago and quickly rose through the ranks. Mukesh Bansal didn’t specify a date by when he would leave the company but said he would continue to be available from outside as a mentor to the team. Mukesh had joined Flipkart nearly two years ago after the e-commerce firm acquired the online apparel retailer that he had founded, Myntra. Nagori, on the other hand, plans to start his own sports venture. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal will back his new venture, said a post on Flipkart’s website.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 4

• Lenovo Tumbles as Sputtering PC, Phone Demand Hammers Sales: Lenovo Group Ltd. plunged in Hong Kong trading after quarterly revenue declined for the first time in more than six years on stalling demand for phones and computers. Shares fell 10 percent in their biggest decline in two years. The world’s largest PC maker said revenue dropped 8 percent in the three months ended December, even as broadening cost cuts delivered a surprise rise in net income. Lenovo is relying on cutting $1.35 billion from annual costs and eliminating 3,200 jobs to shield its earnings from intensifying smartphone competition and a shrinking market for PCs. While it’s expanding into other businesses, the company still gets more than half of revenue from a market that Intel Corp. last month warned was off to a “soft” start in 2016 amid tepid economic growth. Focusing internationally helped Lenovo lift the proportion of smartphone shipments from outside China to 83 percent from 59 percent. Expansion into markets from India to the U.S. helped shore up margins even as its global market share slipped about 1.5 percentage points to 5.1 percent in the period. The company once hailed as a symbol of global ambitions for Chinese corporations now faces the twin challenges of a competitive global smartphone and PC environment and a home country growing at its slowest pace in a quarter-century.

• GoPro forecasts revenue below estimates, names new CFO: GoPro forecast current-quarter revenue well below analysts' estimates on weak demand for its wearable cameras and the company named Brian McGee as its new chief financial officer. GoPro said McGee, who joined the company from Qualcomm in 2015, would succeed Jack Lazar as CFO on March 11. The camera maker's shares fell 10 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Demand for GoPro's helmet- and body-mounted cameras has been declining as rivals such as China's Xiaomi XTC.UL offer cheaper products and smartphone cameras turn increasingly advanced. GoPro forecast revenue of $160 million to $180 million for the first quarter ending March. The company's revenue fell 31 percent to $436.6 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing the average analyst estimate of $496.1 million. GoPro, which had already released its quarterly numbers last month, reported an adjusted loss of 8 cents per share. Analysts had expected the company to break even on a per-share basis. The company's shares were trading at $9.72 after the bell. Up to Wednesday's close, the stock had fallen more than 80 percent in the past 12 months.

• Cisco to pay $1.4 billion for Internet of Things firm Jasper: Cisco Systems Inc said on Wednesday it was buying Jasper Technologies Inc, a startup that connects devices like cars and medical devices to the Internet, for $1.4 billion in cash and equity awards, its largest acquisition since 2013. Legacy technology companies like Cisco have been trying to find paths for growth while new technology developments, such as the rise of cloud computing, threaten their core businesses. The so called Internet of Things, the area Jasper specializes in, offers Cisco a chance to offer cutting-edge technology to its current customers such as telecommunications companies. Jasper connects devices like cars, jet engines and pacemakers to the Internet and also makes a software platform that helps monitor these devices once they are online. Jasper had been planning an initial public offering and had banks to help it prepare. Its investors such as Singapore's Temasek, Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital, will now get a chance to cash out without having to brave the rocky equity markets which have seen no technology IPOs this year. Jasper's chief executive Jahangir Mohammed will stay on with Cisco and run a new Internet of Things Software Business Unit once the deal closes in the third quarter.

• Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but It Is Still in the Game: There are no obvious signs of distress at the lavish San Francisco headquarters of the cloud storage company Dropbox, where on any given day, its hallways bustle with upbeat, well-compensated tech workers enjoying the customary trappings of start-up life. Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. But that isn’t the image of Dropbox you’d encounter in the news media. Two years ago, the company raised a round of financing that valued it at $10 billion, making it one of the most highly prized start-ups of the tech boom. Now it faces a stock market that has turned unfriendly to initial public offerings of tech companies, not to mention stiff competition from publicly traded companies like Microsoft, Google and Box, the similarly named firm in a similar line of business. As a result, Dropbox’s valuation has been battered by a series of “markdowns” from large investors who appear to have turned skeptical about its future. For instance, the mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price now considers Dropbox’s shares to be worth half what they were at the time of the last fund-raising round. So what’s really going on at Dropbox? Is it thriving or dying? Neither one, yet. When you look inside the company, you find something that defies Silicon Valley’s typical straight-up or straight-down narrative: a complicated story of incremental and potentially accelerating success, but one clouded by outsize dreams of yesteryear. It’s a fate that other Silicon Valley start-ups may be facing, especially with the dip in public and private markets for funding tech ventures. Dropbox’s problems have less to do with the strength of its current business than with a delay, so far, in realizing the towering expectations that once surrounded the company. The start-up is like the college basketball star who manages to turn pro but is still regarded with doubt because everyone has now realized he might never be the next LeBron James. What happens to a company once thought to be worth $10 billion when it turns out to be worth only $5 billion, or $2 billion? According to Dropbox’s executives, nothing too terrible — it can just wait out the market freeze and perhaps grow into its $10 billion valuation. In other words, Dropbox can keep working and may yet turn into LeBron. The murkier issue is not whether Dropbox can build a good business, but whether it can ever become the $10 billion goose that investors had once seen it as. Reports of Dropbox’s demise are premature. But so are reports of its comeback.

• Amit Singhal, head of Search, to retire - will be repaced by head of AI: Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of its global computer system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. He has been involved with many of the technologies that have made Alphabet an engineering powerhouse and one of the world’s most valuable companies. His replacement, John Giannandrea, currently works in artificial intelligence, or A.I., at Alphabet. A.I. has been increasingly important to Google and other companies like Amazon, as they seek to build products that can do things like respond to voice commands, deliver complex alerts about changes to a user’s schedule, or drive a car. In a post to the Google Plus social network, Mr. Singhal indicated that he wished to spend time with his family and intended to give away some of his fortune. “It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate, and make time for my family,” he wrote. Mr. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. A native of India, he has a doctorate in computer science from Cornell and worked at AT&T Labs before Google. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms developed by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google was one of many search engines, but it distinguished itself both in the quality of its results and in building features like spell check, which could offer correct answers to misspelled queries. The early engineering team also developed search-related tools for its advertising, which quickly turned into a very profitable business. Unlike some other early Google employees who scaled back their efforts or left the company altogether, Mr. Singhal appeared to remain fully engaged in advancing search. In an interview last summer, he described his job as looking at “what’s beyond the horizon,” particularly in building ways that people can easily get information from mobile devices. Mr. Giannandrea, 50, came to Google from the 2010 acquisition of another company, Metaweb Technologies. He has played an important role in incorporating machine learning into various Google products, like the image recognition in Google Photos and smart replies in Gmail’s Inbox. In addition to Mr. Singhal’s stated philanthropic and family interests, it is likely that his skills in building large computer networks and in A.I. will still be in demand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 22

• Cisco reviews code after Juniper code backdoor found; more scrutiny expected: Networking equipment maker Cisco said on Monday it has launched a product review to look for tampering after rival Juniper Networks's disclosure found code in firewall software that made it vulnerable to cyber attacks. Juniper warned customers on Thursday that it had uncovered "unauthorized code" in its firewall software, saying it could be exploited to allow an attacker to unscramble encrypted communications that travel through the security devices. That prompted the code review by Cisco. Security experts said they expect other technology companies to conduct similar investigations after last week's unprecedented news from Juniper. It was the first time a major technology firm discovered the addition of an unauthorized 'back door," or code that could be exploited to facilitate cyber attacks, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was investigating how the Juniper "back door" might impact government networks.

• Toshiba Plans to Cut 7,800 Jobs as It Warns of Huge Loss:  Toshiba warned on Monday that it would incur its largest net loss ever as it tries to restructure a stable of unprofitable businesses. The Japanese company, whose financial struggles were laid bare this year in a $1.2 billion accounting scandal, said it would eliminate 7,800 jobs, mostly in its slumping consumer electronics division. That brings the number of job cuts announced this year to more than 10,000 total, or roughly 5 percent of its work force. Shedding workers is expensive in Japan, where the majority of employees enjoy legal protection from layoffs. Toshiba will have to negotiate voluntary buyouts instead, a process it said would contribute to a loss of 550 billion yen, or $4.5 billion, in the financial year ending in March. The bookkeeping scandal has been an embarrassment for corporate Japan. Though wrongdoing by businesses is hardly unheard-of here, Toshiba was among the bluest of blue-chip companies, featuring on a prominent index of businesses believed to combine profitability with clean, modern corporate governance. Instead, it turned out that the company had been massaging its earnings since the global financial crisis took hold in 2008. A committee of investigators hired by the company concluded in the summer that it had engaged in a “systematic cover-up.” The committee found problems in virtually all corners of Toshiba’s business, which encompasses products as various as refrigerators and nuclear power plants. Half the company’s board of directors stepped down. The more than 150 billion yen in profit overstatement discovered by the committee was equal to about a third of the pretax profits that Toshiba reported during the seven-year period under scrutiny.

• Ericsson signs patent deal with Apple, shares soar: Swedish mobile telecom gear maker Ericsson said it had signed a patent license deal with Apple Inc over technology that helps smartphones and tablets connect to mobile networks, sending its shares up much as 8 percent. The deal ends a year-long dispute with Apple, one of the biggest legal battles in mobile technology and Ericson said it would pave the way for cooperation between the companies on future technologies. Ericsson had said in its filing to a U.S. district court in January that Apple's license to use the technology developed by the Swedish firm had expired, and that two years of negotiations had not led to a new deal. Ericsson on Monday estimated overall revenue from intellectual property rights in 2015 would hit 13 to 14 billion crowns ($1.52-$1.64 billion) up from 9.9 billion in 2014 as a result of the agreement.

• Uber's Rival Lyft Plans to Raise Up to $1 Billion in New Funds: Ride-hailing company Lyft plans to raise as much as $1 billion in new funds, according to a Delaware state filing, in a round of financing analysts said could sharply boost the valuation of Uber’s largest U.S. rival. Lyft didn’t indicate in the Friday evening filing how much had been raised, who was investing in the round or list a valuation. Sven Weber, a financial filings expert, pegged the pre-money valuation at about $4.5 billion while Justin Byers at VC Experts estimates it closer to $3.9 billion. Lyft was valued at $2.5 billion when it announced a previous funding round in March. The latest fundraising round contained some downside protection for new investors, including the provision of extra shares should Lyft go public at a lower valuation. Lyft is competing aggressively with Uber, which recently filed to raise $2.1 billion at a $62.5 billion valuation. The discrepancies in the valuations reflect Uber’s pole position in the U.S. and its global ambitions. On Dec. 3, Lyft said it was teaming up with Uber’s biggest rivals in Asia, including China’s Didi Kuaidi, Singapore’s GrabTaxi, India’s Ola, to form a global alliance that will make their apps cross-compatible for travelers. Lyft lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to fundraising documents obtained by Bloomberg. It said last month it has gained market share in key markets such as San Francisco, and has a gross revenue “run rate” of $1 billion.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, November 13

• Cisco quarterly forecast misses expectations, shares down 5%: Network equipment maker Cisco forecast adjusted profit and revenue growth for the second quarter below analysts' estimates, citing a slowdown in order growth and weakness in its enterprise business outside the United States. Shares of Cisco, considered a bellwether for the performance of the broader network gear industry, fell 5 percent to $26.41 in extended trading on Thursday. Revenue rose 3.6 percent to $12.68 billion, while analysts were expecting $12.65 billion. Net income rose 33 percent to $2.43 billion, or 48 cents per share, in the first quarter ended October 24. Needham & Co analyst Alex Henderson attributed Cisco's disappointing forecast to its exposure to emerging markets. "It has a much higher percentage exposure to those emerging markets than most companies," Henderson said. Cisco is beefing up its enterprise and wireless security businesses to counter lower spending by telecom carriers, its traditional customers, and nimbler rivals who are quickly grabbing market share through their software-focused networking products. In August, Cisco teamed up with Apple to improve the performance of iPads and iPhones on its network.

• Uber Signs Digital Mapping Deal With TomTom: Uber, the ride-hailing service, agreed on Thursday to use digital maps provided by the Dutch technology company TomTom in its smartphone applications. The move is the latest foray into digital mapping for Uber, which had offered to buy Nokia’s mapping business for around $3 billion early this year but lost out on the deal to a consortium of German automakers. Uber, which is increasingly using digital maps to run its fast-expanding global operation, has also acquired a portion of Microsoft’s map technology and hired a number of engineers from Microsoft’s mapping team. As part of the latest deal, Uber will license TomTom’s mapping and traffic management services in the more than 300 cities where it operates. Uber did not say how much it would pay for the licensing rights. The agreement represents a lift for TomTom, which also provides the core mapping services used in Apple’s Maps app, as well as in its own mapping products. TomTom has faced stiff competition from the likes of Google Maps and Nokia’s former mapping unit, called Here, which is now owned by Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler. Both of those competitors have greater financial resources to invest in their mapping services, though analysts said the Dutch company could benefit as people who do not want to rely on Google or the German carmakers look for alternatives. That appears to be the case with Uber, which has shown increased interest in developing its own mapping operations despite maintaining close ties to Google. In February, for instance, Uber announced plans to open a research and development center in Pittsburgh, where the company said it would study autonomous cars.

• Facebook Is Now Selling Virtual Reality-Like Video Ads: Facebook will start publishing more 360-degree video content into your News Feed — and it’s also going to start including 360-degree video ads. You don’t need a virtual reality headset to watch these videos, but they simulate what it’s like to look anywhere in a scene. Facebook first launched 360-degree video in News Feed back in September — you can see how it works down below — and now it’s bringing that functionality to iOS devices and opening it up to advertisers for the first time. It’s also creating tools to make it easier for people to share 360-degree content to their profiles. It added a resource hub so people can learn more about how to upload 360-degree videos, and it’s partnering with camera manufacturers like Theta and Giroptic to add “publish to Facebook” features directly into the camera. It also poached three Microsoft researchers last month to handle this very challenge — to get people sharing more VR-like content to Facebook.

• Apple is working on a person-to-person payments service that may give iPhone owners another reason to use their Apple Wallets. The company is in talks with banks about the new service, which would let people use their smartphones to send money to one another as easily as they send messages, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The service, which could be ready as soon as next year, would compete with PayPal’s peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, and Square’s Square Cash. Apple started Apple Pay, a mobile payments service, in October 2014. This summer it combined payments with Passbook, an app that stored digital tickets and airline boarding passes, as the rebranded product Wallet. Apple has said that it wants a bigger slice of the payments industry. Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said at the company’s annual developer conference in June that Apple’s goal was “replacing the wallet.” Peer-to-peer payment services, which can foster consumer loyalty, are growing. This year, users of Facebook Messenger were offered a payment service akin to one that users of China’s popular messaging app WeChat use to send payments to friends. Google has also experimented with payments in its messaging service. Banks are trying to create peer-to-peer payment products within their own mobile banking apps using a bank-owned digital payments network called clearXchange, which covers about 80 percent of all of the banks. And Square Cash has processed more than $1 billion in money transfers since the peer-to-peer program was introduced about two years ago, according to Square’s recently filed prospectus for its initial public offering. Venmo, the money transfer app owned by PayPal and popular among younger users, processed nearly $2.4 billion in 2014. To date, few of these efforts are direct moneymakers for the companies. Square Cash and Venmo are free to use when linked to a customer’s checking account, and consumers are charged only a small fee when using a credit card. For companies like Apple and Facebook, peer-to-peer payments are a way to involve customers more deeply with their products and to encourage them to leave their wallets at home.

• Amazon might export delivery model from India: E-commerce giant Amazon.com is taking lessons learnt from its daily battles with India's choked roads and cramped cities to some of its largest developed markets, exporting a model of cheaper deliveries and reduced warehousing costs. Online shopping is booming in India, where millions of consumers are newly able to access the Internet thanks to cheap smartphones. For Amazon, it is already the largest contributor of new customers outside the United States. More than two years on from its arrival in India, Amazon says it is now ready to apply some of the innovations applied here to markets including the United States, Mexico and Brazil. Britain, for example, could get a delivery service called Easy Ship, where orders are picked up by Amazon's crew directly from sellers, cutting out the time and cost of sending goods to a warehouse and the need for more space. Launched in India in 2014, Easy Ship, for example, cuts out costs of storing, packing and separately shipping goods. "This probably cuts your overall transportation cost at least by half," said Samuel Thomas, Amazon India's director of transportation, adding that it trains sellers to provide the service, now used by 30,000, or more than 75 percent of them. Another service introduced in India in May and considered for export to other markets, Seller Flex, allows sellers to have the flexibility to store goods and ship them to customers on their own, instead of routing them through Amazon. Amazon provides technology and training to ensure goods are packed, labeled and delivered as the company would. While Amazon in developed markets may not want to tweak its model for best selling goods, analysts said, it could consider the made-in-India seller solution to cut down on warehousing and delivery costs for thousands of "non core" products which are offered, but infrequently bought.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 1

Apple and Cisco Team Up on iPhone and iPad Sales: Apple Inc. is teaming up with Cisco Systems Inc. to make its mobile devices work better with corporate networks using Cisco’s equipment, part of a push by Apple to expand sales to business customers. The partnership, announced on Monday by Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers and Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook at Cisco’s annual sales meeting in Las Vegas, will make it easier to use iPhones and iPads together with Cisco’s products, including videoconferencing systems and the WebEx online meeting service. Last year, Apple and International Business Machines Corp. set aside a three-decade-old rivalry to create business software for iPhone and iPad users, seeking to cater to an increasingly mobile workforce. While Apple is pursuing a bigger slice of the market for corporate users of smartphones and tablets, IBM and Cisco are looking for opportunities in the mobile-computing boom. Engineers from both companies have been working together for 10 months, and Cisco and Apple salespeople will go on joint sales calls, he said. For example, iPhone users could click on a calendar appointment, and immediately start a videoconference or Cisco’s Spark chat application, instead of having to pull up each separately. IPhone users’ personal contacts can be integrated with directories on their desk phones. And since workers are increasingly mobile, calls from work colleagues would automatically ring on both the desk phone and iPhone.Apple and Cisco are also working on behind-the-scenes networking enhancements. Using a feature called Fast Lane, a videoconference that’s critical to closing a deal can be given more bandwidth priority over YouTube video streams to desktops. Cisco is also developing ways to help companies prevent network slowdowns when Apple releases updates to its iOS software, by storing parts of Apple’s software code so that iPhone owners on Cisco networks won’t have to download it from a far-off data centers.

India’s Antitrust Commission Accuses Google Of Rigging Its Search Results: Less than a week after it responded to anti-competition claims laid down by the EU, Google is under-fire once again for its business practices. This time in India. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has charged the U.S. company with rigging search results to benefit its many businesses, as The Economic Times reports. Google copped a $166,000 fine last year for failing to cooperate with this probe, but this time around, the worst case scenario could see it fined up to 10 percent of its revenue — the company posted a net income of $14 billion on $66 billion in revenue for 2014 — according to reports. TechCrunch understands that the CCI’s document is over 600 pages in length, although the chief concerns center around how Google positions and uses its own services with its search engine. Like the initial European investigation, Indian authorities appear to believe that its search engine is favoring the company’s maps service, travel sites, and advertising products, at the expense of competitors and those that use its advertising services. As part of its probe, the CCI sought out industry opinions on Google’s position. Economic Times reported that a bevy of high-profile technology companies — including Flipkart, Facebook, and Nokia — corroborated the complaint, which was initially filed by matrimony service Bharat, nonprofit Consumer Unity and Trust Society. TechCrunch understands from sources, though, that it wasn’t all one-way traffic. Other companies had voiced no complaint in response to the various accusations levied against Google, and those include Times Internet, Make My Trip, Group M, and Rediff.

U.S. developing sanctions against China over cyberthefts: The Obama administration is developing a package of unprecedented economic sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals who have benefited from their government’s cybertheft of valuable U.S. trade secrets. The U.S. government has not yet decided whether to issue these sanctions, but a final call is expected soon — perhaps even within the next two weeks, according to several administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Issuing sanctions would represent a significant expansion in the administration’s public response to the rising wave of ­cyber-economic espionage initiated by Chinese hackers, who officials say have stolen everything from nuclear power plant designs to search engine source code to confidential negotiating positions of energy companies. Any action would also come at a particularly sensitive moment between the world’s two biggest economies. President Xi Jinping of China is due to arrive next month in Washington for his first state visit — complete with a 21-gun salute on the South Lawn of the White House and an elaborate State Dinner. There is already tension over a host of other issues, including maritime skirmishes in the South China Sea and China’s efforts to devalue its currency in the face of its recent stock market plunge. At the same time, the two countries have deep trade ties and the administration has sometimes been wary of seeming too tough on China.

Hotels Fight Back Against Sites Like Expedia and Priceline: For years, travelers have been drawn to online sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline to find and reserve hotel rooms, flights and rental cars. Hotels welcomed the system — or at least learned to live with it — even though the business came at the cost of substantial commissions. But now they are fighting back. With the online giants consolidating and potentially tightening their hold on travel bookings, major hotel chains are offering a host of benefits to lure travelers to book with them directly: digital check-in, free meals, Wi-Fi and even the ability to choose a specific room. At the same time, the industry has been outspoken with regulators this year in an attempt to block a merger of two of the largest online booking companies, Expedia and Orbitz. Hilton has introduced a number of services for guests who book directly, including a digital check-in option that eliminates waiting in line. Quickly adopted by its customers, the app is now used by over one million people each month, according to Geraldine Calpin, who oversees Hilton’s worldwide digital efforts. Hilton also offers direct-booking guests the ability to choose their exact room, a feature similar to an airplane’s seat-map function. “The guest can see the plan of each floor and click on the room they want,” Ms. Calpin said. Loyalty programs also help steer consumers toward booking directly with hotels, with rewards points and “elite” level benefits like concierge lounges, free meals and upgrades. Some chains are also trying to beat online travel agencies at their own game. Marriott has arranged for some rooms to be booked directly through the travel review site TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor gets a commission, but only about half what Expedia would charge. Expedia has been on a takeover binge this year: In January, it snapped up Travelocity, for $280 million, and last year it acquired a popular Australian site, Wotif.com. Its proposed takeover of Orbitz would give the combined company control of roughly 75 percent of the entire domestic market for third-party online booking, according to the research firm Phocuswright, potentially giving it enormous leverage over the commissions that hotels pay for their listings.

Russia’s Fist Just Clenched Around the Internet a Little Tighter: Global Internet firms operating in Russia wake up on Tuesday to a new era in Kremlin regulation. A law now forces tech firms with Russian customers to operate local servers to handle Russian personal data. It’s the latest in a string of about 20 laws tightening government control of the Internet, all put into place since President Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2012. Taken at face value the new program is aimed at protecting the privacy of Russian citizens. It’s not a uniquely Russian idea, and is something Brazil and Germany are also exploring in the post-Snowden era. Yet human rights activists fear the regulation will be misused, allowing officials to spy on citizens and suppress political activists. It comes into force days after Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted because of an article about cannabis. All eyes are now on Facebook, Google and Twitter, which have been meeting with the Kremlin in private to make sense of the law. At this stage it’s not clear whether they will agree to comply.

Venture capital cash surfers may see waves recede in market turmoil: The waves of cash surfed relentlessly by some of Silicon Valley's largest venture-backed businesses are showing signs of receding amid concern the companies may already be worth more than their likely valuations once they finally go public. Investors have created 132 privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more each, according to tracker firm CB Insights, including ride-hailing service Uber [UBER.UL], accommodation service Airbnb and messaging app Snapchat. After a turbulent week for equities, prompted by worries about the faltering Chinese economy, it may take longer for companies aiming to join their ranks to raise multimillion-dollar funding rounds, and they may not get the investment terms they want. "Many companies in the market for funding right now are struggling to meet their valuation expectations and are going to have to reassess," said Jon Sakoda of venture firm NEA. "Investors are now being much more selective identifying which companies can succeed under the scrutiny of the public markets," said Roger Lee, an investing partner with Battery Ventures. One indicator could be GSV Capital, a Nasdaq-traded fund that buys shares of private companies from early employees and others. The fund, which as of June 30 held 12.5 percent of its assets in data-analysis company Palantir and 7.7 percent in storage company Dropbox, has dropped 6 percent since Aug. 20. One late-stage venture investor said that five to six startups he declined to fund last quarter - because of what he considered pricey terms - came back willing to re-enter negotiations after being turned down elsewhere.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 12

Alibaba Skids as Revenue Growth Slowest in Three Years; $4 Billion Stock Buyback Is Planned as Stock Plunges 5% to New Low: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's shares fell to a record low after China's biggest e-commerce company posted its slowest revenue growth in over three years as its strategy to shift more services to mobile devices hurt advertising sales. The company's shares declined as much as 8 percent to $71.03 - just shy of their IPO price of $68 - wiping off nearly $16 billion from its market value on Wednesday. The stock has lost declined nearly 30 percent this year, up to Wednesday's close. Alibaba also announced a $4 billion share repurchase program over two years, aimed at offsetting the impact of its share-based compensation programs. The company's results come at a time when China's economy is expected to grow at its slowest pace in a quarter of a century. Adding to investor concerns, China devalued the yuan on Tuesday, guiding the currency to its lowest point in almost three years. mobile was still less profitable than business via personal computers, where profitability also decreased. Revenue for the three months through June rose 28 percent to $3.27 billion, well below forecast. Gross merchandise volume (GMV) -- the total value of goods transacted across Alibaba's platforms -- rose 34 percent to 673 billion yuan ($105 billion), also the slowest growth in more than three years.

Online grocer BigBasket raises $50M from Bessemer, others: Online grocery retailer BigBasket.com, has raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding led by existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The Times of India, which first reported the development citing BigBasket CEO Hari Menon, said BigBasket has also mandated Citigroup to raise $150 million (Rs 950 crore) from new investors. The new round of funding, which values BigBasket at $1 billion, will power the company’s plans to enter 50 more Tier-II cities, the report said. BigBasket.com is an online grocery store with operations in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Mysore. It was founded by a team of five in 2011. The team has both offline and online retail experience, as it had earlier set up India’s first e-commerce site FabMart.com in 1999, and then established the Fabmall-Trinethra chain of more than 200 grocery supermarket stores in southern India. Trinethra was sold to Aditya Birla Group in 2006 and currently operates under the brand name ‘More’. The startup has investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Zodius Capital. It was valued at Rs 1,400 crore when it last raised funds in January. The company is understood to have closed fiscal 2015 with a top-line of Rs 250 crore and a run-rate of 6,000 orders a day with average billing of Rs 1,500 per customer.

Strong U.S. sales help Cisco beat estimates: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit as strong demand for its products in the United States more than offset weakness elsewhere. Shares of Cisco, considered a bellwether for the performance of the broader network gear industry, rose nearly 4 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company is the market leader in selling network equipment to businesses, controlling about half of the $38 billion global market and overshadowing rivals Hewlett-Packard and China's Huawei, according to market research firm Gartner. For the fourth quarter, the company earned 59 cents per share on an adjusted basis, while revenue rose nearly 4 percent to $12.84 billion. Cisco's latest results also underscore an ongoing recovery in sales of the company's switches and routers, which were hit by a slowdown in spending by telecom carriers, its traditional customers, in the second half of 2014. The company has also been investing in new products and services such as data analytics software, security and cloud-management tools. Cisco said in June it would buy cloud-based security firm OpenDNS for $635 million. The company also said revenue from telecom providers rose 2 percent in the quarter but added that it did not expect an increase in capital spending by its traditional customers.

Lenovo quarterly revenue misses expectations, announces 10% cuts: Lenovo missed quarterly revenue expectations on Thursday and said it plans to lay off about 10 percent of its global non-manufacturing workforce, after posting a steep sales decline in its mobile division. The world's No. 1 PC maker said it plans to cut about 3,200 non-manufacturing positions to save $650 million in the second half of 2015 and about $1.35 billion on an annual basis, reflecting intense competition among global smartphone makers. Chief executive Yuanqing Yang said Lenovo would also restructure its lagging smartphone business at a one-time cost of $600 million, and was facing its "toughest market environment in recent years". Lenovo, which last year spent $2.91 billion to buy handset brand Motorola from Google in a bid to solidify its position in smartphones, pointed to "intensifying competition and long product development lifecycles" in the business.

Tinder Invokes North Korea in Strange Response to Vanity Fair Article, then Backtracks: Like a person scorned after a bad date, the tech company Tinder went a little bit crazy on social media on Tuesday after Vanity Fair published an article blaming technology for the death of dating. The article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” was not just about Tinder — there is a wider Internet at work, the writer Nancy Jo Sales suggested. But the app, which lets users quickly swipe left to signal rejection or right to signal interest, was used to illustrate the problems young daters face when technology fuses short attention spans with too many options. On its official Twitter account, Tinder took issue with the report’s suggestion that its dating app was fueling a culture of casual sex. Tinder’s defense continued for more than 30 posts. The outrage was not lost on Twitter users, who relished the opportunity to point out that Tinder was being awfully thin-skinned. One post came under particular scorn. Tinder said it helped people find friends and make connections in places where Internet use is restricted. The claim that Tinder had “many users” in North Korea prompted a few creative memes featuring that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and many derisive questions about the extent of Tinder’s user base in China and North Korea. Both countries maintain strict controls on the Internet, and information in general. On Wednesday, Tinder issued a statement acknowledging its outburst. “Our intention was to highlight the many statistics and amazing stories that are sometimes left unpublished, and, in doing so, we overreacted,” the company said

WeChat’s Growth Shows Why Messaging Apps Attract Big Valuations: For an idea of why messaging applications are attracting valuations in the tens of billions of dollars, look no further than WeChat, a 600 million-user messaging application that’s part of Tencent. WeChat, a smartphone instant-messenger, digital wallet and car-booking service rolled up into one, is probably worth $83.6 billion1, or about half of TenCent's value, according to HSBC. As people spend more and more time sending short messages to each other—instead of, say, browsing websites or shopping online—such services have become some of the hottest technology businesses around. WeChat's user count jumped by 37 percent in the latest quarter, according to Tencent's results—and it isn't even the Internet company’s biggest messaging product. That honor goes to QQ, which has 843 million users. Facebook’s own Messenger has 700 million users. Skype, the Internet calling service operated by Microsoft Corp., also lets people exchange messages and boasts 300 million users. By comparison, Twitter Inc., which is projected to generate $2.24 billion in revenue this year, only has 316 million users. When it comes to innovation, however, WeChat may be far ahead of the pack in terms of money-making opportunities. It already includes shopping and in-app games, features that other services are rushing to replicate, according to Adley Bowden, senior director of analysis at Pitchbook Inc. "WeChat's success is a little bit of a game-changer in the take on messaging as a platform," Bowden said. Line, a messaging app popular in Japan, may soon offer a better picture of how investors are valuing messaging apps. The company, controlled by South Korean search portal Naver Corp., is preparing for a dual listing in Tokyo and New York next month, people with knowledge of the matter said in May. Line, which makes money by selling teddy bear icons and games to its 211 million users, had $223.9 million in revenue in the latest quarter. Competition for users remains fierce. Viber, a popular messaging app, has 249 million users. Kik, a Canadian messaging service, has more than 200 million, while South Korea’s KakaoTalk has 48 million people exchanging messages and photos. Eventually, within three to five years, there will be a few winners that survive, said Gartner's Blau. That will probably involve more acquisitions by the biggest messaging service providers, with the main question being how much further valuations can go.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 1

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• Facebook is testing a more conservative definition of video views, but is still far more aggressive than YouTube in charging advertisers: While Facebook charges advertisers for videos the second they appear in a news feed, views are defined differently since users can easily scroll past the ads. Facebook considers a view to last three seconds compared with YouTube's 30-second rule. This has resulted in marketers' clips uploaded to Facebook to amass a wealth of views compared with those published on YouTube in recent months. But those views don't necessarily mean people are watching ads. Now, advertisers can start paying for videos with a cost-per-view rate that kicks in after a user watches for 10 seconds, making the ad seemingly more valuable to advertisers who want to pay for qualified views. Until now, advertisers have paid for videos immediately after they show up in a news feed—something akin to a cost-per-impression model. When Twitter launched autoplay video earlier this month, it tried to address concerns by promising brands 100 percent viewability: promising only to charge on video ads that have been seen 100 percent in full view of the user..


• Xiaomi Continues International Push, Starts Selling $160 Redmi 2 Phone in Brazil: Xiaomi made its expected move into the Brazil market on Tuesday, announcing plans to sell its affordable Redmi 2 smartphone for 499 Brazilian reals ($161). To avoid hefty taxes placed on foreign imports, Xiaomi is working with Foxconn to have the devices built in Brazil, with additional products coming soon.


• Online recharge and mobile wallet app MobiKwik targets $700M GTV in 2015-16, profits by 2016-17: MobiKwik.com, is gunning for a nearly four-fold jump in gross transaction value to $700 million (Rs 4,270 crore) this year. “We don’t have the audited numbers right now, but I can tell you that we have crossed the 2014-15 target of Rs 1200 crore ($190 million) sales and are looking forward to $700 million sales this year,” Upasana Taku, co-founder of the company told Techcircle. The Gurgaon-based company aims to turn profitable by financial year 2016-17. “We expect to meet our goal of 100 million users for the mobile wallet by 2016-17 and so next year we anticipate to start generating profits,” she added. Profitability is the holy grail for India’s fast growing consumer internet firms. MobiKwik’s competitor, the Alibaba-backed Paytm saw the gross value of the transactions conducted on its network rise to around Rs 4,000 crore by 2014-end from around Rs 1,000 crore the year before. Paytm is said to be targeting gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of $3-4 billion by March 2015. MobiKwik plans to spend about Rs 100 crore on marketing this financial year. Most of the money will be deployed on television and online campaigns. MobiKwik is also betting big on joining hands with offline service provider. It started a service for offline players in March 2015 and has the likes of quick service restaurants, grocery stores and coffee stores on its platform. It has tie ups with Big Bazaar, Cafe Coffee Day and other players for the same.


• Apple Music First Look: Rich, Robust — But Confusing: Paid streaming music has arrived on Planet Apple, where it was regarded as unworthy for years. Today, the tech giant has entered the streaming music business with its much-anticipated Apple Music subscription service. Like other streaming services, it offers access to tens of millions of tracks for a monthly fee. Would I pay $10 a month — $120 a year — to use it? My answer is a tentative yes, with some caveats. Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods. But it’s also uncharacteristically complicated by Apple standards, with everything from a global terrestrial radio station to numerous suggested playlists for different purposes in different places. One of the most confusing aspects of Apple Music is that it moves all your iTunes Music to the cloud, along with the streaming catalog. On the other hand, the service has three big strengths, in my view. First, it smoothly integrates the existing library of iTunes songs you own with the much larger catalog of music you are merely, in effect, renting. Second, while the service does use some algorithms, it suggests numerous playlists, albums and songs curated by 300 human editors, based on your tastes. Third, while Apple’s $10 monthly fee per user is both standard — and for some, pricey — the company is offering a family plan that cuts the price dramatically.


• LTE-U versus WiFi: The future of mobile data pits cellphone carriers against cable giants: To cellular providers, WiFi represents a huge missed opportunity. Internet consumption on cellular data networks — your 3G or 4G connection - could've grown by a whopping 84 percent last year, according to Cisco. But because consumers shunted so much traffic to WiFi, that figure was much lower, at 69 percent. Carriers could charge you for all that extra access to the mobile data network. Instead they're losing out when you hop onto WiFi at your home or office. And LTE-U is the industry's solution. The cable industry, on the other hand, wants to keep you on WiFi as much as possible. This is the math they fear: By 2019, Americans are expected to consume nearly 10 times more mobile data than they did in 2014. By then, 77 percent of all Internet traffic will be sent and received over mobile devices rather than stationary PCs. That's not good for cable, an industry that built its reputation on running fast (but fixed) Internet service into people's homes and businesses. You're probably familiar with 4G LTE, the current cutting edge of mobile data technology. Under ideal conditions, it provides download speeds that rival what you can get on a wired connection — fast enough to download a song in less than a minute. LTE-U is virtually identical to LTE, but with one key difference: It runs on the same frequencies that WiFi does. Unlike regular LTE, which piggybacks on airwaves owned exclusively by your carrier, LTE-U travels on public airwaves that are free to anyone. Garage door openers, cordless phones, WiFi routers — all also transmit over these open channels. Interference between the two technologies can slash WiFi transmission rates by 75 percent, according to a Google white paper filed last month to the federal government. The cable industry's top trade group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, argued the technology could be "disastrous" without further protections and "will severely degrade consumers' Wi-Fi experience, rendering unusable many services that are widespread today, to say nothing of the innovative new uses currently on the horizon."


• Google's Local Search, unlike Google's Organic Search, Favors Google+ Results, Yelp Claims: According to a highly critical new paper out from legal scholar Tim Wu, Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca and data scientists at Yelp, many of us are totally missing out on the information that’s most relevant, and critical, to our lives. In a statement to The Washington Post, Yelp vice president of public policy Luther Lowe uses this example: If a parent searches “pediatrician NYC,” he or she will, in a prominent first-page listing, see the names of seven pediatricians who happen to have Google+ or Google+ Local pages. “The Google organic ranking algorithm does a great job at identifying helpful content on the Web,” Lowe said. “But it’s sadly not being deployed in the most common user behavior on Google: local search.” According to Yelp, from one-third to one-half of all Google searches are local. They primarily involve something called the “Local OneBox” — the special, extra-prominent list of seven links that Google displays at the top of local search results. Local OneBox takes up a big chunk of first-page real estate, frequently at the very top of the page, which means people are disproportionately more likely to click into it than they are into regular links. Local OneBox also pulls exclusively from Google’s versions of specialized search sites, such as Google+ Local.


• Samsung, HTC suffer blowback from phone financing schemes of years past, as consumers turn slow to upgrade: It’s payback time for handset makers that long profited from Americans’ tendency to upgrade their mobile phones early and often. U.S. consumers got a taste for phone financing two years ago and never looked back. They bought fancy new devices for a few more dollars a month with no service contract attached. Now they’re holding on to their old smartphones longer than they did when they signed two-year contracts and got freebies, spelling further trouble for manufacturers like Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. that have struggled with declining sales. “When people spend $600 to $700, they are not in the mood to upgrade every year,” said independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma. Thrifty consumers are starting to buy devices every 20 to 24 months instead of every 15 months when carriers subsidized all of their devices and made up the cost through higher service charges, he said. While iPhone maker Apple Inc. -- whose customers tend to be less price sensitive -- has remained largely unaffected, Samsung and HTC may see the most impact, analysts said. In a sign that the end of subsidies is on the horizon, Dallas-based AT and T asked in May that retail partners like Apple and Best Buy stop offering subsidized phones with two-year contracts and to sell them on its Next financing program instead. Verizon, which has been slower to move to phone financing, expects 50 percent of new sales to be on its Edge installment payment plan this year.


• Cisco to buy OpenDNS for $635 million to boost security business: Cisco said it would buy OpenDNS, a privately held cloud-based security firm, for $635 million, the latest move to boost its security business as cyber attacks increase in number and sophistication. Cisco has been buying a number of security companies, which has made its relatively tiny security business one of its fastest growing areas in the past two years. OpenDNS uses predictive intelligence to block malware, botnets and phishing threats that antivirus and firewalls miss. Cisco was a minority investor and was one of the backers that invested $35 million in OpenDNS in May last year. When Cisco buys stakes in startups, it often receives defensive rights that give it an edge to acquire companies it has invested in ahead of competitors. Cisco, whose security business is known for its firewalls, expanded into intrusion detection and prevention systems with the $2.7 billion acquisition of Sourcefire in 2013. Cisco, which has acquired dozens of companies over the years, is transitioning towards high-end switches and routers and investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers. It bought malware analysis company ThreatGRID in 2014 and security advisory firm Neohapsis this year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 2

• Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet on SoundCloud.

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

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

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

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