Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 25

• Verizon to Pay $4.8 Billion for Yahoo’s Core Business: the internet is an unforgiving place for yesterday’s great idea, and on Sunday, Yahoo reached the end of the line as an independent company. The board of the Silicon Valley company agreed to sell Yahoo’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon for $4.8 billion, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak about the deal before the planned announcement on Monday morning. After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents.That’s a pittance compared with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Founded in 1994, Yahoo was one of the last independently operated pioneers of the web. Many of those groundbreaking companies, like the maker of the web browser Netscape, never made it to the end of the first dot-com boom. But Yahoo, despite constant management turmoil, kept growing. Started as a directory of websites, the company was soon doing much more, offering searches, email, shopping and news. Those services, which were free to consumers, were supported by advertising displayed on its various pages. For a long time, the model worked. It seemed like every company in America — and across much of the world — wanted to reach people using the new medium, and ad revenue poured in to Yahoo.In the end, the company was done in by Google and Facebook, two younger behemoths that figured out that survival was a continuous process of reinvention and staying ahead of the next big thing. Yahoo, which flirted with buying both companies in their infancy, watched its fortunes sink as users moved on to apps and social networks. Verizon, one of the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, plans to combine Yahoo’s operations with AOL, a longtime Yahoo competitor acquired by Verizon last year. The idea is to use Yahoo’s vast array of content and its advertising technology to offer more robust services to Verizon customers and advertisers. 

• Google Races to Catch Up in Cloud Computing: When it comes to cloud computing, Google is in a very unfamiliar position: seriously behind. Google is chasing Amazon and Microsoft for control of the next generation of business technology, in enormous cloud-computing data centers. Cloud systems are cheap and flexible, and companies are quickly shifting their technologies for that environment. According to analysts at Gartner, the global cloud-computing business will be worth $67 billion by 2020, compared with $23 billion at the end of this year.For Google, a loss in cloud computing would be a rare misstep for a company that revolutionized media with its advertising business, and then made the world’s leading smartphone operating system.But it will be an uphill climb. Amazon Web Services, which began its cloud product a decade ago, remains the leader. The company took in $2.6 billion, 9 percent of Amazon’s sales, in the first quarter of 2016. Profits from the service made up 56 percent of Amazon’s operating income. Those numbers may well be higher when Amazon reports its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Microsoft styled itself a cloud company, too, and the company said last week that revenue from Azure, its cloud business, which was founded in 2010, rose 100 percent over the last year. Cloud technology also figures in crucial businesses like Office 365. In contrast, Google Cloud Platform does not even figure in the earnings reports of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. That has to sting, since the company owns perhaps the largest network of computers on the planet, spending close to $10 billion a year to handle services like search, Gmail and YouTube.the company said it has used artificial intelligence to cut the power use in its data centers 15 percent, a huge decrease considering how efficient these data factories were already. Power is probably the largest single cost for all three of the cloud companies. Google is almost certain to use its savings to reduce prices, much the way it won in search advertising by figuring out its competitors’ costs, then undercutting them. That ability to find energy efficiency may be a powerful tool to sell to others over Google Compute.

• Apple Watch Sales Fall 55% in Second Quarter, IDC Report Says: Apple Watch sales fell 55 percent in the second quarter of 2016, dragging the global market for such devices lower, as potential customers hold off for an update coming later this year, according to a report from market intelligence firm IDC. Apple Inc. sold 1.6 million watches in the second quarter of this year, down from 3.6 million units a year earlier, IDC said. Global smartwatch sales fell 32 percent to 3.5 million units. While Apple held on to its position as the industry leader, with 47 percent of the market, it was the only company in the top five to see a decline. Samsung Electronics Co. saw its market share more than double to 16 percent.“Consumers have held off on smartwatch purchases since early 2016 in anticipation of a hardware refresh, and improvements in WatchOS are not expected until later this year, effectively stalling existing Apple Watch sales," IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani wrote in the report. “Apple still maintains a significant lead in the market and unfortunately a decline for Apple leads to a decline in the entire market.”

• Nintendo shares plunge, company says Pokemon GO's earnings impact limited: Shares of Nintendo Co (7974.T) tumbled as much as 18 percent early on Monday after the company said smash-hit mobile game Pokemon GO would have only a limited impact on its earnings. Nintendo said after the market closed on Friday that it had already factored in anticipated revenues from its Pokemon GO Plus device - an accessory worn on the wrist to alert players of nearby monsters to catch - and that it had no plans to revise its annual earnings forecasts for now. Nintendo said its affiliate Pokemon Co receives licensing and fees from the game's developer, Niantic Inc, and that profits at Nintendo from those revenues would be limited. The company, which owns 32 percent of Pokemon Co, is due to report first-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares and even with Monday's decline, the shares are still up some 60 percent compared with levels prior to the game's July 6 launch in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 11

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX nails landing at sea: After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football field-sized floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled off the dramatic feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year. The landing, the first ever of a rocket’s first stage at sea, was heralded as a breakthrough for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry, and its leader, SpaceX. The companies’ efforts to recover their rockets is part of what Bezos calls the “Holy Grail” quest of lowering the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments. Typically, the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a second stage, or a capsule, to space. But if the commercial sector can build innovative rockets that can be reused, many think that would dramatically reduce the costs, a key step toward making space travel more routine. SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform. The first stage was hurtling toward space when it started a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning itself around and heading back toward Earth. As it approached the platform, the booster was tilted into the wind but was able to right itself just before touching down, about nine minutes after liftoff. Crews were expected to board the ship and secure the rocket to the platform.

• Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing’s Giants Take In Billions: Imagine building an enormous beach resort, maybe the best in the world. Instead of renting the rooms, you charge guests based on the grains of sand they touch. You charge very little per grain, but if they lie on enough of them, it adds up. That is one way to think about what is going on at the world’s biggest cloud-computing companies. Instead of grains of sand, think about computing cycles, the activity that goes on in a computer server that is running software. For a price, think about one line of software code for two one-millionths of a penny. When tolls that tiny are paid often enough, they can make a billion-dollar business. At Amazon Web Services, which pioneered this method late last year, there is no charge for the first million times a customer runs code. Thereafter, A.W.S. charges by the million times, or for the hundreds of milliseconds the computer is used. “The scale at which we operate allows us to do innovative things,” said Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy at A.W.S. “When we get better economies of scale, we’ll use that to our advantage.” This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often. In other words, you have to be really big to worry about making money off things that are really tiny.

• China's $6 Billion Tech Funding Boom Signals Flight to Quality: If the startup funding party is finally breaking up, somebody forgot to tell China. The second-largest economy is avoiding the pitfalls affecting venture capital elsewhere, as investors around the world rein things in after an unprecedented technology financing boom. Ride-hailing app Didi Kuaidi, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate and online property service Homelink are close to raising at least $6 billion, people familiar with the separate deals say. The operator of Alipay, Alibaba’s affiliate, is targeting more than $3.5 billion alone, which would mark the technology industry’s largest single round of financing. All those numbers emerged over the space of just three days last week. In China, larger startups like them are attracting major backers and garnering the lion’s share of the money even as smaller operators are left to struggle. The frenetic pace is remarkable at a time venture investment globally is plateauing: there were fewer U.S. deals in the first three months than at any time in the past four years, according to research firm PitchBook Data. “China’s VC market is becoming very polarized," said Jarod Ji, an analyst at Beijing-based research firm Zero2IPO. “There’s not a lack of money in the market, but investors do feel that there’s a lack of good projects and that’s why companies like Didi are getting so much money.” The top 20 percent of Chinese startups could get 80 percent of the funding, he added.

• SAP quarterly results fall short as U.S. market slows: Europe's largest software company, SAP (SAPG.DE), warned late on Friday that first-quarter results would be weaker than expected due to slower sales of software licenses to corporate customers, particularly in Brazil and the United States. Software license revenues fell 13 percent while the company's newer, but lower-margin cloud software business grew 33 percent. Business customers are shifting to cloud-based software delivered over the Internet instead of relying on older software packages they install and run on in-house computers. "America was a little more lumpy in terms of the signing of contracts," Chief Executive Bill McDermott told reporters on a conference call, noting that U.S. revenue from its classic on-premise software business grew more slowly than expected. First-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose 5 percent to 1.10 billion euros ($1.25 billion). Analysts, on average, had been looking for a first-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, of 1.15 billion euros, with 12 estimates ranging from 1.09 billion to 1.25 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. The company also reported revenue of 4.73 billion euros, shy of the I/B/E/S average forecast of 4.83 billion euros.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 6

• WhatsApp completes end-to-end encryption rollout: It’s a security project that’s taken around a year and a half to complete, but messaging giant WhatsApp has now fully implemented strong end-to-end encryption on its platform and across all mobile platforms for which it offers apps. This means users of the latest versions of the messaging app will have their comms and media end-to-end encrypted by default. And there are a lot of WhatsApp users; earlier this year the Facebook owned company announced it had passed a billion active users. Securing cross-platform video comms was the last piece of the puzzle, according to a WhatsApp spokesman. End-to-end encryption means the content of communications are not stored in plaintext on WhatsApp’s servers. Nor is the company able to decrypt users’ messages to access them since it does not hold the encryption keys. So WhatsApp will be unable to be compelled to hand over messaging data — even if served with a warrant by authorities demanding access.

• Virtual Reality Check: Rating the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift: JUST a week after Facebook released the Oculus Rift, the first high-powered virtual reality device for consumers, a less publicized contender has arrived: the HTC Vive. Similar to the Rift, the Vive — a joint development by the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and the video game distribution company Valve — is a virtual reality headset that connects to a powerful computer. The Vive is even more expensive than the Rift — it costs $799 for the headset and $1,000 to $2,000 for a compatible computer. Facebook’sOculus sells the Rift headset for $599, or $1,500 when the system is bundled with a computer. The main advantage of the HTC Vive headset is that it comes with motion controllers, which let you effectively reach out and grab objects in virtual reality. This kind of interaction feels much more natural for virtual reality than the game controller included with the Rift. Also, the Vive’s motion-sensing base stations capture richer movements, enabling people to walk around in a larger space or crouch and grab something while using virtual reality; the Rift’s camera can detect movements, too, but the Rift was primarily designed to be used while standing or sitting. Another benefit of the Vive is that the headset fits better. With the Rift, I could always see a small gap in the space beneath the nose. The Vive headset completely blocks the outside world. HTC also includes a piece of foam that can be inserted into the Vive for a better fit for a narrower face. But a major downside of the Vive is the setup, which is more demanding than the Rift’s. HTC recommends that you drill mounts into the ceiling to install the motion-sensing base stations to ensure that the sensors have a clear line of sight with the headset and your body. In other words, to take full advantage of the Vive, you probably need to dedicate a room to virtual reality; to use the Rift, you can get away with clearing out a bit of standing space. The other obvious downside of the Vive is the higher cost. With a computer and accessories included in the total price, the Vive will cost roughly $300 more than the Rift. Then again, if you are willing to spend more than $1,000 for virtual reality, that extra $300 might not matter much. This is Year 1 of powerful and capable virtual reality systems coming to the mainstream. Over time, the content that will become available for these devices will define their worth. There isn’t much to do with either system yet, and consumers would be wise to wait to see if any killer virtual reality apps or games emerge for the systems.

• After a Pause, Nutanix Signals IPO Plans Are Back on Track: Nutanix, a supplier of storage products for data centers, just updated its paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling that its plans for an initial public offering may no longer be on hold. The new filing shows that Nutanix, based in San Jose, Calif., nearly doubled its revenue in the six-month period ended Jan. 31, to $190 million from $102 million in the year-ago period. It ran a net loss of nearly $72 million, which increased from $56 million a year ago. Operating expenses rose to $190 million from $112 million previously. The company first filed for an IPO in December, but was reported to have put those plans on hold in February after markets turned south. After the Dell-owned security company SecureWorks, which is expected to offer about 20 percent of its shares in an IPO later this month, Nutanix would appear to be on track to be the second tech IPO of 2016.

• Amazon Acquires Image Analysis Startup Orbeus: The acquisition took place in the fall of 2015, said the person who asked not to be identified because Amazon hasn’t announced the deal. Orbeus developed photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of AI called neural networks and made this available as a consumer application, as well as a service for other companies and developers called ReKognition. It automatically categorized and identified the contents of photos. Orbeus’s app, PhotoTime, came out before Google launched its successful AI-based Photos app. "ReKognition API is no longer taking new customers," Orbeus says on its website. "But we’re up to new/exciting things." Other startups applying neural networks to image-recognition and related computer-vision tasks include New York-based Clarifai Inc. and Palo Alto-based MetaMind. Big technology companies are interested in this field, and other areas of AI. Salesforce.com Inc. said Monday it acquired MetaMind, while Apple Inc. said in January it purchased Emotient Inc., which specialized in facial-recognition technology.

• Medium Chases Revenue With Promoted Stories; Adds Subscriptions: Medium, the 4-year-old online publishing platform from Twitter Inc. co-founder Ev Williams, now has a plan to pay the bills. The company will make money in much the same way Twitter and Facebook Inc. do -- by allowing brands to post stories and pay for them to be promoted to a wider audience through prominent placement in the news feed. Alphabet Inc.’s Nest and Intel Corp. are among the first advertisers taking this approach to reach Medium’s 25 million unique readers. The blogging site also plans to extend its tools for media publishers, so they can host their entire website within Medium, helping the companies save money on technology costs. The Awl and Pacific Standard are among new publications coming to Medium starting Tuesday. Publishers can also choose to put some stories behind a members-only paywall. On Medium, people can publish and annotate long-form articles and follow networks of authors. The company, backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Google Ventures, last raised $57 million in September at a $400 million valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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• Twitter Built a New Button So You’ll Send More Private Messages:  Reply. Retweet. Like. And now Send. Twitter is adding a new button to the bottom of each tweet so that it’s simpler to send that tweet to another user within a private message. The new icon, a small envelope right next to the heart-shaped Like button, automatically attaches the tweet to a private message which you can then address to another user.  But the fact that Twitter is putting a new button onto each tweet is a pretty good indication of how important direct messaging is to the company. Twitter was late to building out its messaging service and as a result has always lagged behind other messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger or Snapchat. But Twitter DMs are increasing in popularity — Twitter claims that 60 percent more messages were sent in 2015 than 2014. Adding a new button to encourage more private messages should bump that number even higher. It should also make it easier for users to send tweets to brands or retailers, a customer service use case Twitter is starting to build features for. It’s one of the reasons the company removed the 140-character text limit for direct messages last summer; it’s hard to have a conversation with a customer service agent when you can’t send more then two sentences at a time. The customer service use case was also one of the reasons Twitter has considered spinning DMs into its own app. It ultimately decided against the idea.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 08

• Snapchat Thinks It Will Generate at Least $300 Million in Revenue This Year: Investors are buying into Snapchat’s massive $16 billion valuation because its business is growing significantly. Or at least expected to grow significantly in 2016. Snapchat is targeting between $300 million and $350 million in revenue in 2016, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. That’s six or seven times the $50 million in revenue Snapchat projected last year. Snapchat’s business is still new and evolving, and advertiser interest is still very experimental. Essentially that means it can be tough to predict incoming revenue with much accuracy, as most advertisers don’t have Snapchat as a staple of their advertising plans. The company hit a $100 million revenue run rate in Q4, according to one source. Advertising is cyclical, and Q4 is usually a strong advertising quarter, but it’s worth noting because the run rate metric gives us a glimpse at how the business is growing. Still, boosting projected revenue like that must mean the businesses is growing at a nice clip. We don’t know if the $16 billion valuation is pegged to this year’s expected revenue, but if it were, that would amount to more than 50 times this year’s sales. Facebook, by comparison, trades at a value of about 17 times its annual revenue.

• Alibaba's Ant Financial could be valued at nearly $60 billion: source Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba arm, Ant Financial Services Group, is seeking a valuation of nearly $60 billion in its current round of funding, a person familiar with the matter said. Ant Financial, which operates the "Alipay" online payment platform, is in talks to raise funds from existing and new investors, which could include CCB International, the person said on Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Monday that Ant Financial planned to raise up to 20 billion yuan ($3.07 billion), pegging its valuation at nearly $50 billion. Ant Financial declined comment on the Journal's story. The latest round of funding is expected to be completed by mid-April, the Journal reported. 

• Tech Companies, New and Old, Clamor to Entice Cloud Computing Experts: The hunt for the hard-to-find talent that can build and run the massive data centers behind cloud computing is pitting three generations of companies against one another. Old-guard companies like Oracle, tech’s current giants like Amazon and its peers, as well as Bay Area start-ups are offering big salaries and big perks for cloud computing experts. On the social media site LinkedIn, for example, there are over 130 engineering positions available at Oracle Seattle. Many of them are the kind of jobs that now pay $300,000 to $1 million a year, according to Shannon Anderson, who has been recruiting engineers in Seattle and the Bay Area for 25 years. Seattle and its surrounding towns are a hot spot for this kind of tech talent because they are home to A.W.S., which runs the biggest cloud computing service, and Microsoft, which has a large cloud business called Azure.Google also has a cloud computing office in the area. So does Facebook.“Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day,” Ms. Anderson said. “Compensation has doubled in five years.” For a recruiter, who is typically paid a percentage of a star engineer’s compensation, “this is a very good time,” she said. Cloud computing, which powers an increasing number of our devices and services, allows a vast collection of computers — often spread around the world — to operate like one giant machine. As other tech sectors show signs of slowing, cloud services have created unprecedented demand for highly educated engineers and mathematicians who can build and operate these flywheels of data. Instead of asking about the latest computer coding languages or how to make a web page load faster, the most important question in tech hiring has become: Can you handle petabytes? That is the data in about 13 billion images, or roughly the amount of printed information that would fit in 20 million file cabinets. In the Bay Area, $125,000 a year is not an uncommon salary for someone newly out of graduate school with the expertise to do cloud computing work. With five years of experience, $300,000 along with a range of stock or job opportunities that greatly inflate the value of those paychecks have become the norm. “It’s an aggressive market,” said Corey Sanders, director of program management at Microsoft Azure. “We are all data engineers now, and we can convince people that this is the best place to learn that.”

• Prompt debuts “a command line for the real world”: In a world suffering from app overload, the Y Combinator-backed startup Prompt introduces a different way to interact with services, make purchases or even control “Internet of Things” devices — all by way of text-based interface. The application, which can be used via SMS, Slack or the web, lets you text to do things like request an Uber, change the temperature on a Nest thermostat, get directions, track flights or packages and a lot more. 

• How Amazon Shames Warehouse Workers for Alleged Theft: While waiting to clock in each morning, workers at some Amazon.com warehouses get a steady stream of company-provided reading: the stories of co-workers fired for theft. In an effort to discourage stealing, Amazon has put up flatscreen TVs that display examples of alleged on-the-job theft, say 11 of the company’s current and former warehouse workers and antitheft staff. The alleged offenders aren’t identified by name. Each is represented by a black silhouette stamped with the word “terminated” and accompanied by details such as when they stole, what they stole, how much it was worth, and how they got caught—changing an outbound package’s address, for example, or stuffing merchandise in their socks. Some of the silhouettes are marked “arrested.” Theft is a persistent concern for Amazon, with warehouses full of small but valuable items and a workforce with high turnover and low pay. Workers interviewed for this story say the range of thefts posted on the screens is as varied as the company’s sprawling catalog: DVDs, an iPad, jewelry, a lighter, makeup, a microwave, phone cases, Pop Rocks, video games. Several recall a post about an employee fired for stealing a co-worker’s lunch. The digital bulletin boards also occasionally display information about firings related to workplace violence. There are cheerier announcements, too, such as updates on incentive bonuses or a message about Black History Month. In some warehouses that don’t have flatscreens, workers say, tales of firings are posted on sheets of paper tacked to bulletin boards or taped to the wall. Many of the workers say the screens aren’t a top concern compared with wages or workload. “Only people that would have something to say about it is people that’s doing wrong,” says Maurice Jones, a warehouse worker who left Amazon in February. “It’s just letting people know that you’re being watched.”  

• Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign: Apple customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware, researchers with Palo Alto Networks told Reuters on Sunday. Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data. Palo Alto Threat Intelligence Director Ryan Olson said the "KeRanger" malware, which appeared on Friday, was the first functioning ransomware attacking Apple's Mac computers. "This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom," Olson said in a telephone interview. Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon. 

• FCC cracks down on Verizon Wireless for using ‘supercookies’: The Federal Communications Commission is cracking down on Verizon Wireless for using a powerful type of code to track its customers around the Internet, as the agency pushes to increase its role in protecting online privacy. The code, dubbed a "supercookie" by privacy advocates, is almost impossible to disable and could allow almost anyone to follow users around the Web. Under the terms of a settlement agreement announced Monday, Verizon must pay a $1.35 million fine and will only be able to use the tracking mechanism when users connect to Verizon's corporate family of services unless the company gets customers' opt-in consent. Broader use could leave customers' Web habits visible to outsiders. Verizon began putting a unique string of characters into customers' web browsing in 2012 to help target its advertising program. The practice came to the public's attention in late 2014, when it received criticism from privacy advocates who called the code a "supercookie" because the it was almost impossible for users to avoid. The privacy advocates warned then that other companies, or even intelligence agencies, could leverage the super cookies to track wherever people went online. Verizon downplayed that concern at the time, with a spokesperson saying that the code "wouldn’t be able to be used for that." But last January, researcher Jonathan Mayer revealed evidence that others could hijack the supercookie for their own purposes: An online advertising company called Turn was using the codes to help follow people around online, he said. Turn used the supercookie to "respawn" its traditional cookies -- even if users took steps to protect their privacy by removing the cookies. Turn said it would stop and Verizon started offering a way for customers to opt-out of having the supercookie attached to their web traffic. But the FCC had already launched an investigation of Verizon's use of supercookies in December of 2014  -- and later brought Mayer on board as the chief technologist for the agency's enforcement arm. While the Federal Trade Commission is often thought of as the government's primary privacy watch dog, the FCC's power to police online privacy got a major boost last year. As a quirk of how the agency moved to enforce network neutrality rules, broadband providers will be subject to new privacy scrutiny. The FCC is in the process of coming up with a version of its privacy rules that apply to broadband Internet providers, which are expected soon.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 10

• Apple releases major updates to leading products and pushes into new arenas. Apple unveiled an array of major improvements to its iPhones, iPads and other leading products Wednesday, including a voice-activated television box that the company said would form “a new foundation for TV.” The updated Apple TV includes some hardware improvements, such as a remote control that allows users to easily navigate through entertainment options simply by speaking to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. But perhaps the device’s more significant feature is its ability to function as a game console, which could set up the company to enter a new arena in living room entertainment. Apple said several major gaming software companies are making versions of popular titles for Apple TV. The new device will also come with its own app store, allowing third-party developers to shape how consumers get entertainment and videos on their televisions. Apple also showed how to use the best screen in the house to look at rooms for rent on Airbnb’s Web site or homes for sale on Zillow. That was one of several story lines during Apple’s presentation in San Francisco. The electronics giant also introduced a new tablet — a $799 iPad Pro — aimed at business clients, as well as new software on its watch and other mobile devices that Apple said would revolutionize how doctors and patients interact. At one point, the audience of several thousand reporters and Apple employees at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium was shown how a pregnant woman could record her fetus's heartbeat and send the sound in a live stream to her doctor. Apple also updated its most important product, the iPhone, which accounts for 56 percent of the company’s sales. The new iPhone 6S and its larger cousin, the 6S Plus, have 12-megapixel cameras, sharper screens and a feature called 3D Touch, which brings up different menus depending on how hard a user presses the screen.  Apple also introduced a new iPad Pro, which has a display area roughly twice that of the iPad Air and is largely aimed at businesses. The tablet can be bought with a keyboard and has a beefier processor that can run heavy programs such as Microsoft Office. And, indeed, to tout the device, Apple invited executives from Microsoft, its former rival, to show how the popular office suite would work on the iPad. Also on stage were executives from Adobe, another software company Apple in the past has criticized for lax security. And in another move that broke with the past, Apple displayed a new stylus for the iPad Pro that it called the Apple Pencil, a product that likely would have been blocked by the company’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, who in 2010 mocked companies that offered styluses to consumers

• Apple phone, tablet and TV fail to impress investors. Apple unveiled a new TV set top box that responds to voice commands and fresh iPhones that sense the pressure of a finger tap, changes which underwhelmed many social media commenters and investors. The new 6S and 6S Plus versions of the iPhone, Apple's biggest money maker, are the same size as the previous versions but come with a better camera, faster chips, new colors and the force-sensitive "3D Touch". Speaking before thousands of analysts, journalists and frequently cheering Apple employees, Chief Executive Tim Cook also brought on stage an executive from onetime archrival Microsoft  to illustrate the business-friendly credentials of a big new iPad, the Pro. Apple shares fell 1.9 percent to $110.15 by the close, replicating the recent history of such rollouts but also reflecting the lack of any transformative products that could jumpstart the company's sales ahead of the crucial holiday season. Apple shares have lost an average of 0.4 percent on the day of iPhone announcements over the past three years, according to BTIG Research data

• Google is chasing Amazon Web Services in a new area –- providing access to “on-demand” supercomputing resources. On Wednesday, Google announced the general availability of something called pre-emptible virtual machines, which amount to computing resources you can rent for very little. The service, first announced in May, enables people to buy computer processing that Google isn’t using at a steep discount, provided the customer is willing to yield the resources on short notice. A.W.S. has a similar short-term usage program, called Spot Instances. It lends itself to supercomputing exercises, particularly for universities and companies that don’t want to buy multimillion-dollar machines of their own, and has been used in areas like drug discovery and learning about new materials. The addition of Google as a competitor is likely to increase the number of ways these resources are used while lowering prices. Google also appears to be stressing its skills in machine learning, a powerful tool for finding new patterns in large data sets. Using Google, cancer researchers at the Broad Institute used 51,200 computing cores to look at the interrelationships between human genes, the billions of ways they are expressed, the cell lines from some 500 types of cancer, and molecules that perturb those cells. The idea was to sort through billions of data points quickly, looking for promising areas for researchers to seek drugs and treatments. The analysis, which on a single computer server would have run about 30 years, took a couple of hours, said Chris Dwan, the acting director of Information Technology at Broad. It cost about $4,000. “This isn’t like computing a few taxi trips,” said Mr. Dwan. “This is really heavy computing in complex biological systems, steering research.” He added, “the rules of how we work are being completely rewritten.”

• It's Like PayPal But Pays Interest, and India's Banks Are Afraid. That’s a concern for the nation’s largest banks, because 40 percent of the money they lend comes from millions of small depositors like Mungekar. If more like her start shifting to digital money, they risk draining those deposits. Last month, the Reserve Bank of India gave licenses to 11 entities to operate so-called payment banks that will function a lot like PayPal in the U.S, but with a distinction -- customers can get interest on the money they leave there. Payment banks can’t lend and can only invest the client’s money in the safest government securities. Their revenue comes from a small commission on each transaction. Their new licences are part of central bank Governor Raghuram Rajan’s mission to cut the nation’s addiction to cash and to increase efficiency at the banks. PayTM started off as a service for adding credit to burner phones, and has evolved into the country’s largest e-wallet repository, allowing customers to pay utility bills, buy bus tickets and pay for Uber rides. Now it plans to build on its base of urban middle-class clientele to become a pseudo bank -- accepting deposits, offering peer-to-peer money transfers, even providing a debit card for cash withdrawals. The payment banking license was the first step. E-Wallets may be attractive for people wary of sharing their bank or card details on the Internet. They also make it easier to reward customers with discounts and offers redeemable at online or brick-and-mortar outlets. Apart from One97, other payment bank licensees include three large telecom operators, industrial conglomerates, the state-owned postal service, and billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, which plans to run its venture with State Bank of India.

• Mobile payments company Square may hold IPO in fourth quarter: Bloomberg. Mobile payments company Square may file for an initial public offering by the fourth quarter of this year, although the timing depends on market conditions, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and its current chief executive, has assured investors and key employees that he will also remain Square's chief executive, Bloomberg said. At this point, the timing of Square's IPO is more contingent on market conditions than on whether Dorsey remains its CEO, Bloomberg said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, July 30

• Archived snippets are here      Fa

• Facebook Revenue Tops Estimates; Shares Drop as Spending Surges: Facebook, buoyed by robust advertising sales, signaled that it will keep up its brisk pace of investments to attract users and advertisers. Spending climbed 82 percent in the second quarter as the social-media company increased hiring, poured money into data centers and boosted marketing. While that was more than double the rate of sales growth, Facebook still managed to top analysts’ revenue estimate, crossing the $4 billion mark for the first time. Net income shrank to $719 million from $791 million a year earlier, while the operating margin, a measure of profitability, narrowed to 31 percent from 48 percent. Revenue rose 39 percent to $4.04 billion. Yet Facebook also signaled that it wouldn’t let investments grow uncontrollably. The company forecast that expenses will rise 55 percent to 60 percent this year, compared with a previous range of 55 percent to 65 percent. Facebook is improving tools for advertisers and expanding the audience for its mobile applications beyond Facebook itself, including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, which have yet to contribute meaningfully to revenue. Monthly active users for Facebook’s main social network jumped 13 percent to 1.49 billion, with 1.31 billion people logging in at least once a month via mobile. Shares of Menlo Park, California-based Facebook fell 3.4 percent in extended trading, after advancing 1.8 percent to $96.99 at the close in New York. The stock is up 24 percent this year. Facebook’s ability to keep adding users and keeping them engaged stands in stark contrast to Twitter, which is struggling to break past 300 million people. The total number of Facebook users who logged in daily rose to 968 million in June, the company said, slightly less than the 970.5 million projection of four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.


• Samsung Electronics cautious on outlook, says mobile business environment tough: Samsung Electronics offered a downbeat outlook for the third quarter after April-June profit dropped on a supply shortage for one of its main smartphone models, underscoring continued headwinds for the tech giant. Samsung remained the world's top smartphone seller in the second quarter, but investors and analysts say the South Korean firm's inability to meet demand for its curved-screen S6 edge smartphones likely cost the firm in April-June. Second-quarter operating profit fell 4 percent to $5.9 billion, matching an estimate issued by the company early this month. But the firm doubled its interim dividend payout to 1,000 won per common share. The firm said on Thursday that the mobile division faces a tough business environment as smartphone market growth slows. On the bright side, the chips division reported an operating profit of 3.40 trillion won, up from 1.86 trillion won a year earlier on the back of healthy demand for memory chips and sales growth for its mobile processors. Overall, annual profit is expected to rebound from a three-year low marked in 2014, thanks to robust semiconductor profits and some stabilization for the mobile business. In addition to the supply shortage for the S6 edge model, some analysts are worried by softer demand from China and Europe. Research firm TrendForce last week cut its forecast for 2015 global smartphone shipment growth to 8.2 percent from 11.6 percent, citing a weaker world economic outlook.


• Alibaba cloud unit sets sights on Amazon in $1 billion global push: Alibaba said on Wednesday it would invest $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing arm to challenge Amazon.com's lucrative Web Services division, opening a global front in the battle between the two e-commerce giants. With the global cloud computing market estimated by analysts to be worth about $20 billion, Alibaba said in a statement the investment would go toward setting up new Aliyun data centers in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and Europe. The firm also plans to strike business partnerships with telecom and enterprise technology providers in those regions. Although Alibaba and Amazon have so far avoided competing directly in their core business of e-commerce outside China, Aliyun's international expansion takes aim squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS), an increasingly central and profitable division of the Seattle-based company. Amazon shares soared last week after the company reported, among other items, an 81 percent revenue increase for AWS, which hosts Web customers like Netflix and Airbnb. As it expands, Aliyun will face stiff competition from some of the biggest names in technology. Amazon led the global cloud infrastructure market with a 28 percent share in 2014, trailed by Microsoft, IBM and Google Inc at 10, 7 and 5 percent, respectively, according to Synergy Research Group. After Amazon made a limited "beta" entry into China last year, where cloud adoption rates by businesses are far lower than in the rest of the world, Aliyun opened a data center in Silicon Valley in March to serve U.S. customers. "Our goal is to overtake Amazon in four years, whether that's in customers, technology, or worldwide scale".


• Steep Discounts a Boon for Customers, but a Gamble for Start-Upsh: Jet.com, a well-funded new shopping site, opened to the public last week and celebrated the debut by sending reporters a big box of swag. I got a T-shirt with a company logo, fuzzy socks, stickers and $1,400 in oversize, fake $100 bills. Jet is a discount site, so I suspect the funny money was meant to illustrate the cash I’d save by shopping there. But the faux bills immediately evoked a more cautious reminder — of all the money Jet plans to spend to become the next force in online shopping. It isn’t just Jet. On a venture-capital high, tech start-ups are burning through vast cash reserves to offer rock-bottom prices, and to sign up new customers with discounts, giveaways and other deals that may sound too good to be true. Jet, a Costco-like members-only discount company that has raised more than $225 million from investors before opening its doors, is only the largest such example. Forget the fake bills; for Jet, as well as for many of its smaller start-up kin, giving away real money is a key part of business. This sounds fishy. But there’s an upside: While investors’ cash lasts, consumers could be in for a boon. After all, from the perspective of customers, what’s so bad about companies giving away their venture-funneled cash? Jet’s prices may be the most ambitious. In May, I found the company was vastly undercutting Amazon, and The Wall Street Journal recently ordered a basket of goods from the site for which it calculated that Jet lost nearly $243 on a single order. In an interview, Mr. Lore was unfazed by these numbers, because, he said, they were already built into his projections. “We understand really well what these costs are now and how they’ll come down over time, and it’s simply a matter of understanding how much capital it’s going to take,” he said. In fact, he added, losing money on each order isn’t his biggest worry; instead, it’s failing to draw enough orders to get to scale. “The hard part is, can you get to $20 billion in five years?” The only way to get there, Mr. Lore said, is to keep spending. Whether or not he’s right, enjoy it.


• E-commerce firms boost Indian postal department revenues: With e-commerce platforms increasingly turning to the Indian Posts to deliver their orders to customers, the fast flourishing e-retail business has become a revenue generator for the state-run agency, whose traditional operations are dented by the deep penetration of e-mail and mobile phones. Realising the potential, the Postal Department has set up a dedicated e-commerce and parcel processing center in the country’s commercial hub Mumbai. Spread across 12,000 sq ft, the facility at Parel in the city has bagged good business in a short span, handling around 5,000 orders a day. The department officials expect at this pace the traffic would soon increase to 10,000 parcels per day. The facility has a capacity to process 30,000 parcels per day.


• Google Loon To Cover Entire Country Of Sri Lanka With Internet: Google is working on many things, and that includes balloons that fly high in the sky to bring Internet infrastructure to locations that can’t be wired for it easily. Today, Sri Lanka announced that it’s the first country to ever get universal Internet access from Google’s Project Loon. Thanks to a partnership with Google, the country promises “affordable high-speed Internet” for all of its residents. Google Loon was announced in 2013, with only incremental and anecdotal information hitting the presses up until now. This is a landmark moment for Loon, and clearly for Sri Lanka.


• GitHub Raises $250M Series B Round To Take Risks: GitHub, the software development collaboration and version control service based on the popular open source Git tool, today announced that it has raised a $250 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Institutional Venture Partners also participated in this round. The company, which was founded back in 2008, has now taken a total of $350 million in outside funding. While the company isn’t talking about its valuation, the WSJ reports that it’s currently hovering around $2 billion. GitHub’s 2012 Series A round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, the company’s valuation was said to be around $750 million. As GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath told me shortly after the new round was announced, the company plans to use this new round to accelerate growth and expand its sales and engineering team (as most companies do when they raise). He also stressed, though, that the round isn’t just meant for that. “The round is not just to accelerate, but also to allow us to think bigger and take larger risks,” Wanstrath said. This means GitHub acquisitions are likely on the horizon, but he also noted that the company wants to push its international strategy forward. It recently opened an office in Japan (and hosted its first meetup there) and other locations will likely follow. There can be no doubt that Git has become something of a de facto version control system for many startups and GitHub currently leads the charge among companies that essentially offer Git as a service. Atlassian, Microsoft, GitLab and others offer similar services, both cloud-hosted and on premise, but GitHub has clearly attracted most of the mindshare in recent years. GitHub says it currently has about 10 million users who are in collaboration on over 25 million projects (that’s up from 10 million in January 2014). Given that the company offers free accounts, it’s not clear how many of these users are actually paying for the service, though (pricing starts at $5/month).


• Caller ID App Truecaller Is Raising $100M At A $1B Valuation; India Is Its Biggest Market: Communications apps that strike a chord with users across different markets are hot property these days, and it looks like another one of them may soon enter the so-called unicorn club. TechCrunch has learned that Truecaller — a caller ID app that now has 150 million users — is looking to raise around $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. We’re hearing that Truecaller has hired Morgan Stanley to lead the process, and there are term sheets out. The round is likely to have previous and new investors. To date, True Software, maker of Truecaller, has raised around $80 million. Previous investors include Atomico, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Sequoia Capital, Access Partners and Open Ocean. The plan will be to use the funds to grow the product. Truecaller, founded in Sweden, has seen a lot of traction in markets like India, its biggest market at 80 million users. Now it wants to expand elsewhere, like the U.S., and will be building out the company’s office in the Bay Area. The company is projected to hit 300 million users this year. Truecaller works by aggregating directory services via deals with white pages companies, and platforms like Yelp to bring in businesses. It complements this with crowdsourced information from the app’s users. That includes accessing your own address book, although you can opt out. Individual users can also opt out from being listed. It then uses big data analytics and machine learning to offer additional services beyond caller ID such as predicting who you might want to call next based on where you are and what time of day it is, or what the top-reported spam number is in your area at the moment. Other features include spam blocking, directory services and “smart” SMS services. The company makes revenues through in-app purchases for premium features, as well as advertising within the app. The company’s country manager for India has also reportedly said that Truecaller may launch a paid version by the end of this year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 29

• Archived snippets are here, and MP3 versions are here

• Twitter Shares Surge on Earnings Beat, then Slump on Slowing User Growth: After reporting quarterly sales that topped estimates, interim Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey and Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto struck a critical tone, saying user growth won’t improve until the social-media company reaches a mass market -- something that will take a mixture of product improvements and marketing. The company’s efforts so far have had minimal success, they said. Shares dropped 11 percent in extended trading, after climbing as much as 12 percent following the earnings release. n the second quarter, revenue rose 61 percent to $502.4 million, the social-media company said Tuesday in a statement. That exceeded analysts’ average projection for $481.9 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Twitter’s net loss narrowed to $136.7 million, or 21 cents a share. Profit excluding certain items was 7 cents, compared with the 4 cents analysts estimated. On a conference call, executives quashed any initial optimism generated by the report by confronting Twitter’s underlying problem: It’s much smaller than the competition. The company today reported 316 million monthly users, while Facebook has 1.4 billion. Twitter recently started counting feature-phone users in emerging markets as part of its tally. Without that extra boost, Twitter’s user count was 304 million. Noto said Twitter changed its tone on the call because growth slowed so meaningfully, the company wanted to explain how it’s working to address the deceleration. “In the past we may not have had the growth that investors wanted us to have, but it was still quite strong. And this quarter we barely had any growth.”


• Yelp Plunges After Reducing Sales Forecast, Ending Brand Ads: Yelp, the customer-review website, plunged as much as 18 percent when it reduced its revenue forecasts and said it will stop selling national brand advertising. Yelp lowered its third-quarter sales forecast to a range of $139 million to $142 million, below analysts’ average estimate of $152.7 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Annual revenue was projected at $544 million to $550 million from an April forecast of $574 million to $579 million. The website attracts more than 160 million visitors looking for customer reviews about local businesses. National brand advertising revenue decreased 8 percent to $8.3 million in the second quarter and Yelp will phase out those sales by the end of the year to focus on its core local advertising. Yelp shares fell in April after the company reported declining advertising sales. The shares rebounded in May following reports that Yelp was exploring a possible sale. Yelp reported a net loss of $1.3 million, or 2 cents a share in the quarter, from a profit of $2.7 million, or 4 cents a share, a year earlier. “I certainly think they can survive, as to whether or not they can flourish time will tell,”


• Akamai forecasts revenue, profit below estimates; shares sink: Online content distributor Akamai Technologies forecast third-quarter revenue and profit below estimates, citing a stronger dollar. Shares of Akamai, which claims to deliver between 15 and 30 percent of all Web traffic, fell as much as 13 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday. The company's second-quarter profit fell nearly 8 percent after 11 quarters of growth, as costs rose. Akamai, whose customers include MTV Networks and online home rental marketplace Airbnb, forecast an adjusted profit of 56-58 cents per share and revenue of $543 million-$555 million for the current quarter. Akamai and rivals Limelight Networks and Level 3 Communications face increasing competition as companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Comcast enter the content delivery market. Akamai has been trying to differentiate itself by investing in cloud security services, as well as investing to expand its content delivery platform to better handle rising video traffic. Revenue rose 13.6 percent to $540.7 million, beating the average estimate of $540.4 million. Overall net income fell to $67.2 million, or 37 cents per share, from $72.9 million, or 40 cents per share, a year earlier. Up to Tuesday's close of $73.65, Akamai's shares had risen about 17 percent this year.


• Stripe, Digital Payments Start-Up, Raises New Funding and Partners With Visa: Stripe is gaining more financial allies to help it take on the digital payments industry. The start-up, based in San Francisco, said on Tuesday that it had raised new funding from investors like Visa, American Express and Sequoia Capital, among others, valuing the young company at $5 billion. That is a significant jump for Stripe, coming roughly six months after it garnered $70 million at a $3.5 billion valuation. Stripe declined to disclose the amount of new funding, except to say it was “less than $100 million.” Founded five years ago, Stripe has quickly gained traction by offering simple software and services for online small and medium-size businesses. Similar to Square and PayPal, Stripe accepts credit and debit cards for merchants who have not taken them previously. Stripe charges a small fee per transaction. On Tuesday Stripe also announced a partnership with Visa, one of the world’s largest credit card companies, in which the two will work on ways to improve digital transactions. The companies said they expected to collaborate on initiatives like payments security, as well as software like website “buy buttons.” Stripe said it would rely on Visa’s global footprint to expand its international availability. Stripe is currently available to businesses in more than 25 countries, and hopes to expand further with help from Visa. That Visa is partnering with Stripe instead of a larger payments processor is something of a coup for the start-up. Visa has become increasingly wary of other payments companies, such as PayPal, which processed more than $220 billion in online transactions last year and this month was spun off from its onetime parent, eBay. While PayPal has handled online credit transactions since the early days of e-commerce, Visa said it became concerned by PayPal’s ability to siphon customer relationships away from card companies and steer customers to debit transactions, in which PayPal sees healthier profit margins.


• LinkedIn, Notorious for Sending Too Many Emails, Cuts Back: On Monday, LinkedIn decided that less is more. In a blog post, the site acknowledged its history of overzealous email habits and said it was taking steps to reduce the amount that users would receive. Among the examples, users who receive too many requests to connect will now get just one weekly digest, and users who subscribe to several of the site’s groups will get updates in a streamlined format. “For every 10 emails we used to send, we’ve removed 4 of them,” Aatif Awan wrote in the post. “Already, member’s complaints have been cut in half.”


• Price Is Only One Weapon Amazon Is Using to Win the Cloud War: Remember how a few months ago there was talk of a “price war”in the world of cloud computing services? It’s over and all the signs point to Amazon having won. As we reported last week, Amazon posted a stunning 81 percent rise in revenue at its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit, along with a five-fold surge in the unit’s operating income, giving it an operating margin of 21 percent. During the quarter Amazon said it cut prices on many of its cloud services for the 49th time since the service launched in 2006. Meanwhile, at least one of Amazon’s rivals — Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure — raised some of its prices in Europe and Australia. Portions of emails to Azure customers published by the Dublin-based blogger Aidan Finn earlier this month detailed price increases of 11 percent in Europe and up to 26 percent in Australia. The last time Amazon gave a ballpark estimate for how many customers it had on AWS was late last year when it said it had more than one million active customers. It hasn’t updated that figure since then. Whatever the number, it suggests that the average revenue per customer is on the rise. If Amazon’s margins are increasing it implies that its operational costs are coming down at the same time that its customer count is going up. Logically speaking, that implies that quality of service might suffer. There’s a few reasons that it doesn’t, and it has to do with how Amazon’s costs come down as it scales up. As Amazon’s cloud footprint grows, its fixed costs per customer on things like commodity memory chips and electricity decrease. The more chips and power it buys, the more negotiating leverage it has to squeeze a good deal from suppliers. Meanwhile, business and administrative costs associated with keeping the system running — billing and personnel, for example — shrink as more customers sign on and processes become more efficient. Finally, there’s more that those customers can do with AWS all the time. Amazon has added 350 individual new features to AWS in the first half of the year. Two new services include one called AWS Device Farm which allows mobile app developers to run their software on simulated Android mobile phones. At its current pace it will by sometime this fall have added about 700. And the pace at which those features are being added is increasing too. Last year it added 516 new features. The year before that, it was 280, and the year before that 159.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 26

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Marketers Will Drool Over Facebook’s New Signup Ads That Auto-Fill Your Email Or Number: Businesses desperately want your email address, but it’s annoying to enter it on mobile. Cue Facebook’s latest News Feed ads. A marketer can buy an ad asking for you to sign-up for a newsletter or request a sales call, and with two-taps you can auto-fill your email address, phone number, or other info you’ve registered with Facebook. Facebook is testing these “Lead Ads” with a small group of businesses around the world to gain feedback before considering rolling them out. Google has tested similar contact form ads for years, but they always required users to manually enter their info. To make Facebook’s ads privacy-friendly, Facebook won’t just hand your info over. You have to click the call-to-action button like “Subscribe,” and then “Submit” your info once you’ve reviewed what was auto-filled. Users can edit that info inside the ads, and businesses only get what’s voluntarily submitted. From there, advertisers can only use the data in accordance with a mini-privacy policy they embed in the ad, and can’t resell it to anyone else. Rather than ads that lead you offsite to fill out sign-up forms, it’s pulling that experience into the News Feed, so when you’re done, you keep right on social networking. Removing the click away and manual data entry could drastically boost conversion rates on these kinds of ads, making them easier to sell at higher prices.


• Alibaba affiliate launches Internet bank for small enterprises: Alibaba's financial affiliate launched on Thursday Internet bank MYbank, targeting the small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises that have struggled to obtain credit from major financial institutions. MYbank, which is 30-percent owned by Alibaba-linked Ant Financial Services Group, has 4 billion yuan ($644 million) of registered capital and will offer loans of up to 5 million yuan. It will only be able to take in deposits when regulators approve a facial recognition technology that allow its customers to remotely open bank accounts, an Ant Financial spokeswoman told Reuters. MYbank follows in the footsteps of Alibaba arch-rival Tencent Holdings Ltd, which began trial operations of its WeBank, China's first online bank, in January. Credit conditions have remained tight for SMEs, despite a series of policy easing, as banks avoid the companies worst hit by an economic slowdown. State-owned banks have also avoided customers such as farmers and smaller businesses because of the difficulties in assessing their credit worthiness and they have little to offer as collateral.


• Clashes Erupt Across France as Taxi Drivers Protest Uber: Irate taxi drivers blocked roads, burned tires and attacked drivers who they thought were working for Uber, the ride-hailing company, during a day of protests Thursday that disrupted Paris and slowed traffic to a crawl. Fights broke out on streets, a couple of cars were burned and travelers were frustrated all over Paris and in major cities elsewhere in France, where the labor battle snarled several cities’ streets. “Economic terrorism” is the favored term of Parisian taxi drivers for Uber’s lower prices, flexible hours and the way it is operating outside French law. In France the UberPop service is illegal. It allows anyone who wants to become a driver to sign up without a professional chauffeur license and to pick up fares through the Uber smartphone app. Other Uber services are permitted under strict conditions, and the company is contesting the constitutionality of parts of the law limiting UberPop. The company has instructed its drivers to keep working. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who met Thursday evening with the taxi unions, deplored the violence, but saved his most angry words for Uber. He said the company behaved with “arrogance” in its flouting of French law and declared that “the government will never accept the law of the jungle,” referring to Uber’s stark form of competition.


• Amazon wants the Echo to be your personal robot butler: Amazon's fuller ambitions for the Echo and its Alexa cloud-based voice software have become a little clearer. The company announced Thursday that it is opening up the system to developers, so that anyone can design their own programs to work with the sleek cylindrical in-home assistant. The company announced that its new developer's kit will make it easy for programmers to work with the device, even without previous knowledge of how to work with voice-recognition systems. That means amateur and professional developers alike can make programs for themselves. That means they could make custom commands for smart appliances such as thermostats and sprinklers, or custom programs that work with Web sites so you can get news updates fed to your Echo. It also means Amazon's set up the Echo to potentially be the central point from which you run your whole life. The Echo itself can't vacuum your home, but it could theoretically tell your vacuum when to start going. It may not do your dishes, but it can prompt your dishwasher to fire up as well. So while it won't be your robot maid, it could theoretically be your robot butler. Earlier this week, Amazon began selling the Echo widely -- it had previously been an invite-only device. Those moves set Amazon up a little more solidly as a competitor to Apple and Google, which have also laid out ambitions to create hubs for the smart homes of the future. Earlier this week, Apple released a new set of home-related prompts that will work with its Siri voice assistant for individual smart devices -- "turn on the coffee maker" -- as well as for groups of smart devices. So you can tell Siri to "turn off the upstairs lights," for example, if you want to save a little energy while your family is gathered in the living room.


• IBM Pushes Networking and Research to Catch Rivals in the Cloud - Mulls India Data Center: IBM will expand the networking services available through its SoftLayer cloud technology, trying to catch up with deep-pocketed rivals. IBM researchers and engineers are now making regular trips to SoftLayer’s headquarters in Dallas to discuss product plans and get educated about cloud operation, said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s chief technology officer. Increasing cloud revenue is critical for IBM. It has tried to boost sales for operations like cloud computing and data analytics but that hasn’t been enough to make up for declines in longstanding operations -- such as services and hardware -- and revenue lost from divestitures. The initiative comes almost two years after the Armonk, New York-based company acquired SoftLayer for $2 billion to help IBM compete against Google, Microsoft and Amazon. SoftLayer also plans to open a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is looking at a location in India.


• Uber growing 40% month-over-month in India: Uber’s Asia Head: Uber may have had its share of challenges in the Indian market, but the ride sharing app has been growing at over 40 per cent month-over-month here. In fact, Bangalore and Kolkata are some of the fastest growing cities for Uber globally, Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Asia, Uber told Techcircle. The team at Uber India has their work cut out. The regulatory overhang over Uber, which started after a passengers’ sexual assault by an Uber driver in December, continues to play out. It has been facing ban calls in Delhi and other places. Earlier, it came under the RBI scanner over its payment system which automatically debited a user’s credit card after a ride.


• Amazon Puts a Store on Wheels, Continues to Flirt With Physical Retail: Amazon continues to explore new ways to bridge the gap between online and offline retail, even if the most recent example seems stunt-ish. The company today is introducing the Amazon Treasure Truck in Seattle, which will carry a limited quantity of one product each day that shoppers can order on Amazon’s app and then collect from the truck at a designated pickup location. The company said the truck will feature hard-to-find, heavily discounted or limited edition products and food, ranging from paddle boards to beach bikes to steak — yes, steak. The Treasure Truck introduction comes as Amazon flirts with physical retail: Amazon product vending machines have popped up in some airports, and a recent patent application lays out a vision for a new kind of technologically advanced retail store.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 25

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Driven by smart acquisitions, Facebook stock at all-time high; Company valued at ~$250 billion : Facebook set an all-time high today, closing at $88.86 per share, valuing the company at just under $250 billion. However, what’s most interesting in the Facebook bump isn’t the simple fact that it is now worth more — shares and markets gyrate. Instead, it’s the reasons why analysts are more bullish that are notable: Piper cited the Oculus Rift headset as a coming revenue source, while RBC gave the top line potential of Instagram as key to Facebook’s value. Translating those points slightly, it seems that investors are taking into account the revenue side of Facebook’s past purchases, and are adjusting their expectations higher as those acquisitions mature into income streams. That concept underscores how well the social company has done its recent acquisitions.


• How Beacons Are Helping People Network at Cannes, As Festival Tests the Technology for a Second Year: The Cannes Lions festival is testing out beacon technology in the official Cannes Lions app for the second year in row, upping the number of location-based devices set up around venues from fewer than 10 last year to 100. The Around Me section of the app employs location-based targeting to find people who have check into venues. Festival goers can also see which sessions are the buzziest. On top of the geo-targeting, the app crawls LinkedIn profiles to connect online connections offline. And as many ad executives know from cold LinkedIn pitches, that often means meeting someone in real life for the first time. The app sends out mass push notifications to everyone about schedule changes and information about the event. If the beacons detect that someone has stayed in a session for 15 minutes or more, the app will automatically save the session as a favorite. The liked panels then serve as a virtual icebreaker for attendees to find common interests.


• What Online Retailers Should Know About Amazon Business: Amazon Business has replaced AmazonSupply. Amazon Business features a simplified layout with fewer ads and includes products suitable for business purchase. Plus, unlike AmazonSupply, third-party sellers are invited to join Amazon Business. Sellers must be approved to sell on Amazon Business. There are 45 active professional categories within this new marketplace umbrella. To be accepted on Amazon Business, you must meet a sales minimum and have an acceptable seller rating to demonstrate a high level of customer satisfaction. Once approved, you’ll need to set up a Business profile. You’ll then be able to use special features like business-only pricing, quantity-based pricing and more. Buyers must be approved to buy on Amazon Business. To get a buying account on Amazon Business, shoppers need to create a new account and register tax information. Once done, they can add buyers and share payment and shipping information. Amazon Business supports business credentials. Credentials include “ISO 9001 certified,” “Minority Owned” and other quality, sourcing and social responsibility goals.


• The Internet of Things Has Vast Economic Potential, McKinsey Report Says: A study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the Internet of things, a term for sensor-laden machines connected to the web, will in the year 2025 create between nearly $4 trillion to $11 trillion in economic benefits globally. That includes profits to device-makers, efficiencies, new businesses and savings to consumers from better-run products. It is difficult to measure the current economic benefit though, because most people now working with the technology are still in the early investment phase. The biggest gains will be made by companies that figure out how to adapt to the new technology, the report said. On an oil-drilling platform, for example, this might mean knowing by the temperature or chemical changes in a pump that something may have happened upstream, away from the pump. In managing city traffic, this could mean learning how to correctly balance information from cars, roads and traffic lights. “This puts a premium on predicting incidents based on data from a multitude of sources,” said Michael Chui, one of the report’s authors. But it will be a challenge for companies to find ways to both organize and take advantage of that information.


• Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up: Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No.?2 Box and No.?3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.


• Now you can use Facebook Messenger without Facebook: Are you one of the 1.44 billion people who use Facebook? Then this post isn't for you. The company made an announcement Wednesday for those other folks -- the Facebook holdouts who are probably tired of being pestered by their friends to give in and sign up already. Now they can talk to their friends on Facebook without having to open account, via Messenger. The option is limited, for now, to people in the United States, Canada, Peru and Venezuela. But non-Facebook users in those countries can use all of the Messenger features, including group and multimedia messaging, by simply signing up for a Messenger account. "With this update, more people can enjoy all the features that are available on Messenger – including photos, videos, group chats, voice and video calling, stickers and more," the company said in an official blog post. "All you need is a phone number."Communication, generally, has become a bigger focus for Facebook, which is attempting to to build a family of social apps that extends beyond its core social network. Giving Messenger a larger potential install base is an easy way for Facebook to continue that spread, although its growth shouldn't worry WhatsApp users. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no plans to merge the two services any time soon.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, June 19

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• Alibaba Finance Arm Is Valued Above $40 Billion in Latest Funding Round: Alibaba’s finance affiliate, which runs China’s biggest online payments business, closed a private placement valuing the unit at more than $40 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ant Financial sold stakes to external investors, including China Development Bank Capital Company. China’s National Social Security Fund has become a strategic investor, the finance arm said on its official microblog account, without giving details of the investment. The pension fund acquired about 5 percent. Ma spun off the finance operations into a new company he controls in 2011, citing the risk of foreign ownership restrictions. Yahoo and SoftBank held a majority of Alibaba at the time. Prior to Alibaba's record $25 billion IPO in September, the companies struck a new deal that entitled the e-commerce operator to a share of earnings at Ant Financial, which is moving into new businesses, including money-market funds. Alipay, which has more than 800 million registered users, is a service similar to PayPal. Alibaba is entitled to either a third of Ant Financial shares or a one-time payout equal to 37.5 percent of the equity value, according to Alibaba’s IPO prospectus. Alibaba also holds perpetual claim to 37.5 percent of Ant Financial’s pretax earnings until it receives a third of the financial arm’s equity.


• Chinese government deals help nurse Alibaba's bottom dog cloud business: Alibaba is an underdog in the global cloud computing industry, but it has one thing going for it: it's Chinese. The firm scored a minor deal with China's northeastern port city of Dalian to build a cloud computing center and provide online government services such as bill payment.The pact is a small part of a growing portfolio of similar cloud services tie-ups between Alibaba and government bodies around China and comes against a backdrop of Beijing's deepening paranoia about foreign technology. The domestic alliances will help Alibaba's cloud unit Aliyun, literally "Ali Cloud", build scale and gain experience before any global campaign to challenge market leaders Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google. "China wants control of its information, of its data, of its news, of its technology food chain, and so there are huge opportunities." For the time being, Aliyun is small.It accounted for just 1 percent of Alibaba's overall revenue for the year ended March 31. But it says in China it has the biggest market share in cloud computing. Aliyun has forged cloud agreements with more than a dozen Chinese provinces and cities including Hainan, Guangdong, Tianjin and Shanghai. It also works with China Meteorological Administration, China Central Government Procurement Center and the state railway service center. The deals range from developing cloud storage solutions to helping the government of the southern province of Guizhou gather and crunch data to optimize its traffic lights. Aliyun in April announced a deal with state oil and gas giant Sinopec, to create a cloud system to track its petrochemical production chain and emissions. Cheng Jing, an Aliyun director who deals with government agencies, said his primary consideration was the bottom line. "First, we have to be sure that our services can make money. If these services can also promote Ali's relationship with the government then that's a good thing."


• Traders bet on Twitter near-term gains as takeover chatter persists: Dick Costolo's decision to step down as Twitter's chief executive last week failed to stem the weeks-long slide in the company's shares, but options traders appear to be betting on a near-term rebound. The stock has shed more than a third of its value since Twitter reported first-quarter results in April. It edged up 6 cents to $34.62 on Thursday, after touching a year-low of $33.51 on Tuesday. Since May, open interest in calls, usually used for bets on the shares rising, has swelled at a faster pace than the open interest in puts. For every open put contract, 1.7 calls are open, the most bullish for this ratio since early March. Traders have bid up near-dated options, with the demand for upside reflected in options skew - the difference between expectations for volatility priced into puts versus calls. Normally, puts tend to have a higher premium relative to calls, because people are willing to PAY more to protect against risk of losses. For Twitter, calls have become more expensive than puts. "The upside skew in Twitter most likely reflects the possibility of an upside event between now and July expiration," Place said."It seems that everyone and their uncle is betting that Twitter will be bought by another firm"


• A Fearless,“Fail fast, fail often” Culture Fuels America's Tech Culture, and Why Europe Trails: Here’s a stark comparison: In the United States, three of the top 10 companies by market capitalization are technology companies founded in the last half-century: Apple, Microsoft and Google. In Europe, there are none among the top 10. There are institutional and structural barriers to innovation in Europe, like smaller pools of venture capital and rigid employment laws that restrict growth.Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures. “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States. Bankruptcy codes are far more punitive, in contrast to the United States, where bankruptcy is simply a rite of passage for many successful entrepreneurs. There is also little or no stigma in Silicon Valley to being fired; Steve Jobs himself was forced out of Apple. Europeans are also much less receptive to the kind of truly disruptive innovation represented by a Google or a Facebook