Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 23

• Facebook Says It Gave Advertisers Inflated Video Metrics: Facebook Inc. has been giving advertisers an inflated metric for the average time users spent watching a video, a measurement that may have helped boost marketer spending on one of Facebook’s most popular ad products. The company, owner of the world’s largest social network, only counts a video as "viewed" if it has been seen for more than 3 seconds. The metric it gave advertisers for their average video view time incorporated only the people who had watched the video long enough to count as a "view" in the first place, inflating the metric because it didn’t count anyone who didn’t watch, or watched for a shorter time. Facebook’s stock fell more than 1.5 percent in extended trading after the miscalculation was earlier reported in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook had disclosed the mistake in a posting on its advertiser help center web page several weeks ago. Big advertising buyers and marketers are upset about the inflated metric, and asked the company for more details, according to the report in the Journal, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The Menlo Park, California-based company has kept revenue surging in part because of enthusiasm for its video ads, which advertisers compare in performance to those on Twitter, YouTube and around the web.

• Apple Inc. has acquired Indian machine-learning startup Tuplejump  as it seeks to expand its expertise in artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker bought the Hyderabad, India-based company in June, according to a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified. Tuplejump’s software specializes in processing and analyzing big sets of data quickly. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed. Tuplejump has about a dozen employees, many of whom were already based on the west coast of the U.S., the person said. Founder Rohit Rai’s LinkedIn profile says he started working for Apple in May and is now also based in Seattle.

• Yahoo has confirmed a data breach with 500 million accounts stolen, as questions about disclosure to Verizon and users grow: Yahoo confirmed today that it had been subject of a massive hacking attack that exposed the data of at least 500 million users. Recode previously reported that Yahoo was about to reveal the breach and Yahoo had declined to comment when contacted last night. Now, the company is unveiling a situation much worse than expected, although the Recode report noted that it would be. Earlier this summer, Yahoo said it was investigating a data breach in which hackers claimed to have access to 200 million user accounts and one was selling them online. “It’s as bad as that,” said one source. “Worse, really.” The announcement has huge implications on Yahoo’s pending deal to be bought by Verizon for $4.8 billion. Sources at Verizon said they were largely unaware of the severity of the attack until recently and that CEO Marissa Mayer and others did not flag them as to the extent of the issue in the bidding process. You can read that ire clearly between the lines in a statement from Verizon-owned AOL, which is expected to be integrated with Yahoo when the deal is complete. "Within the last two days, we were notified of Yahoo's security incident. We understand that Yahoo is conducting an active investigation of this matter, but we otherwise have limited information and understanding of the impact. We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities. Until then, we are not in position to further comment." In addition, internal sources at Yahoo said the company had been subjected to a number of previous incidents that were not managed swiftly by CEO Marissa Mayer. One executive close to the situation said that former Yahoo information security head Alex Stamos had tried aggressively to get management to act more strongly at the time, but he had not been successful. The well-regarded techie left Yahoo in mid-2015 for a job as chief security officer at Facebook. This whole incident was first revealed in August when “Peace,” an infamous cybercriminal, advertised the sale of user credentials for some 200 million Yahoo users on the “dark web.” The data included user names, some passwords and personal information like birth dates and other email addresses. At the time, Yahoo said it was “aware of the claim,” but declined to say if it was legitimate. Instead, it opened an investigation, but did not issue a call for a password reset to users.

• Uber rival Grab partners with driverless car firm in Singapore: Users of ride-hailing firm Grab will be able to book driverless cars from Friday as it partners with a start-up testing the technology in Singapore, just days after rival Uber debuted its self-driving vehicles in the United States. The move comes as technology companies and automakers race to build autonomous vehicles and develop new business plans for what is expected to be a long-term makeover of personal transportation. Southeast Asia's Grab said its app will allow select commuters to book and ride start-up nuTonomy's driverless vehicles within a western Singapore district, where the vehicles are being tested, and adjacent neighborhoods. A safety driver and support engineer will ride in each nuTonomy car, the two companies said in a statement. nuTonomy, which started a limited public trial of the first driverless taxi in August in Singapore, has said it hopes to have 100 taxis working commercially in the city-state by 2018. Countries around the world are encouraging the development of autonomous technologies, and Singapore, with its limited land and workforce, is hoping driverless vehicles will encourage its residents to use more shared vehicles and public transport. Grab said its data showed drivers in Singapore are less likely to accept a passenger booking request originating from or destined for remote locations, highlighting the need for "robo-cars" that can meet transportation needs in far-flung areas. If a trip requires travel on roads outside of Singapore's one-north district, the safety driver will take control of the vehicle for that portion of the trip.

• LinkedIn is bringing Lynda.com courses to its news feed and building a messaging bot. LinkedIn is finally bringing Lynda.com — the online education company it bought 18 months ago for $1.5 billion — into its news feed. Beginning Thursday, LinkedIn will start recommending online courses for its members based on things like their jobs and their listed skills, and recommended courses shared by friends of colleagues. Users can take the course on LinkedIn, then add completed courses and new skills to their profiles after completion. CEO Jeff Weiner also teased out a number of upcoming products. Among them: A new LinkedIn messaging bot that will help LinkedIn users schedule and arrange meetings. The bot will pull info from users’ calendars to help find time for people to meet, then suggest physical meeting locations based on where the two people have met in the past. It’s the first such messaging bot from LinkedIn, which is not known for having an advanced messaging product. (It didn’t even announce a text-like messaging feature until a year ago.)

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 20, 2016

• Facebook just bought a small hardware startup called Nascent Objects: Facebook has acquired Nascent Objects, a small Bay Area startup that offers what the company calls a “modular electronics platform” — essentially a software program to help expedite the process for building physical gadgets, including 3-D-printed hardware. Nascent Objects will join Facebook’s Building 8, the company’s new top-secret hardware lab run byformer Xoogler Regina Dugan, who used to run Google’s advanced technology and products team that did things like 3-D mapping and modular smartphones.he “modular” element is interesting. The idea of a modular smartphone where you can easily add or remove different components like a camera or battery or storage has been kicked around for a while now but has never taken off. It’s unclear what Facebook wants to build, but Nascent Objects specializes in modular gadgets. The other key seems to be expediting the time it takes to prototype hardware projects, which is also why Facebook recently built a new hardware lab on its Menlo Park, Calif., campus.

• Ride-hailing app Grab raises $750 million in funding led by SoftBank: Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm Grab said it raised $750 million in a funding round led by investor SoftBank Group, adding that it would continue expanding in the region and also significantly invest in mobile payments capabilities. Southeast Asia is fast becoming a key battleground for ride-hailing firms thanks to a burgeoning middle class as well as a youthful, Internet-savvy demographic. Grab's announcement comes a few weeks after Uber sold its China operations to bigger domestic rival Didi and analysts have said Uber may focus its efforts and money elsewhere, such as in Southeast Asia.

• Twitter to lay off less than 20 employees at India center: source: Twitter Inc said on Monday it would lay off some employees and halt engineering work at one of its development centers in India's technology hub Bengaluru. The layoffs will impact less than 20 employees at the development center, according to a source familiar with the matter. The employees were part of ZipDial, an Indian mobile communications startup bought by Twitter last year, the source said."Over the past 18 months, we have incorporated the technology and talent of our ZipDial acquisition across our company," said a company spokesperson. Twitter said it remained committed to India as a strategic market and would continue to maintain a presence in the city. The company had 3,860 employees globally as of June 2016. However, it did not disclose the number of employees it had in India.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 10

• Jessica Alba’s Honest Company has been in talks to sell to a big consumer product giant: Honest Company, the diaper and personal care product company co-founded by the actress Jessica Alba, has been in talks to sell the company, several sources close to the situation said. Sources indicated that the buyer is likely to be a big consumer product company like Procter & Gamble or Unilever. As in all acquisition talks, the discussions may not result in a deal, and a potential acquisition price is not known. But Honest Company was most recently valued at around $1.7 billion when it raised $100 million in financing last year. The five-year-old company has raised $222 million in investments overall and brought in revenue of around $300 million in 2015, according to one source. The talks come as consumer-packaged goods companies are grappling with the increasing importance of e-commerce to their future and the challenge of competing in this new world without relying too heavily on sales through Amazon. Traditional retailers are facing similar challenges, as displayed by Walmart’s planned $3.3 billion purchase of Jet.com, a shopping site that’s only one year old. Along the way, the consumer packaged goods giants have become intrigued by startup brands like Dollar Shave Club and Honest that have built large followings by selling consumer goods directly to customers through their own websites and not through Amazon. In a surprise purchase, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion earlier this summer.

• Facebook Becomes Emerging-Markets Play as User Base Shifts: With Facebook Inc.’s user growth in developing countries soaring, mutual funds focused on emerging economies are increasing investments in the Menlo Park, California-based company.Six years ago, 60 percent of the social platform’s 482 million monthly active users lived in the U.S., Canada and Europe and the rest were from elsewhere. Now two-thirds of its 1.7 billion users are from outside of the heart of the developing world. Researcher eMarketer estimates India will surpass the U.S. next year as the country with the most Facebook users. It also ranks India, Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines as the top four countries to see the fastest Facebook user growth until 2020. “From a monetization perspective it’s still dominantly the U.S. but from a long-term opportunity perspective it’s definitely emerging-markets,” Charlie Wilson, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based managing director at Thornburg Investment Management Inc., said in an interview in New York. He has steadily added Facebook shares to the Thornburg Developing World Fund, and they now account for 3 percent of the $1.2 billion portfolio.

• Apple will not give first-weekend sales of iPhone 7, the company said on Thursday, making it harder for analysts to get a read on the product's prospects amid questions over whether its popularity has peaked. The company decided to stop the practice because the number of phones sold during the period has become more a reflection of Apple’s supply than demand, a company spokeswoman said, when asked whether Apple will be releasing the figure.The stakes for the iPhone 7 are high after sales of the gadget dropped during two straight quarters this year, the first declines in its history. As they try to assess whether the iPhone has reached a plateau, investors will not be happy about losing a data point, said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. "Less data is never good, particularly given the question marks around this phone," he said. Apple shares fell 2.4 percent to $105.71 in mid-day trading.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 2

• SpaceX Rocket Explodes at Launchpad in Cape Canaveral - Destroying Facebook Satellite: A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company. The blast is likely to disrupt NASA’s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agency’s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts. The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., intensified questions about whether Mr. Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities. This is not the first problem Mr. Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. Theowner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company’s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges. The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity. Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page “that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” a swipe at Mr. Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.

• Google shelves plan for phone with interchangeable parts - sources: Alphabet Inc’s Google has suspended Project Ara, its ambitious effort to build what is known as a modular smartphone with interchangeable components, as part of a broader push to streamline the company's hardware efforts, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The move marks an about-face for the tech company, which announced a host of partners for Project Ara at its developer conference in May and said it would ship a developer edition of the product this autumn. The company’s aim was to create a phone that users could customize on the fly with an extra battery, camera, speakers or other components.Axing Project Ara is one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Google’s various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones. Former Motorola president Rick Osterloh rejoined Google earlier this year to oversee the effort. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo Group in 2014.“This was a science experiment that failed, and they are moving on,” he said. Project Ara was one of the flagship efforts of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, which aims to develop new devices, but it had various stops and starts. Last year, the company shelved plans to sell the modular phone in Puerto Rico with Latin American carriers.

• When Things Go Very Wrong at a Start-Up: For many young engineers and business people, Silicon Valley is their version of Hollywood. If you want to make it big, go there, create your own company or sign on with a start-up on the way up, and get ready to make a fortune. Maybe you will even become famous. But Hollywood, it turns out, is not the only California destination with a boulevard of broken dreams. Last week, a Medium post about how things went south — badly — at an unnamed tech start-up drew attention to a side of Silicon Valley not many people talk about. For all the Googles and Facebooks and Oracles, there may be hundreds of companies that never make it. And in some cases, the employees who sign on may walk away poorer financially for their effort. As Katie Benner writes, it wasn’t long before online commenters figured out that the company in the Medium post was called WrkRiot. The unraveling of this company is, of course, a cautionary tale about the many things that can go wrong at a start-up, like questionable bosses and plain old bad ideas. Is it indicative of a larger problem in Silicon Valley? Industry veterans would probably say no. Some people view working for a dud of a start-up as a rite of passage — like a bad relationship that teaches you a lesson about what to avoid in a partner. Others figure that even if things go bad, there are so many good jobs in the area, you won’t be down on your luck for long. But just in case, do a little extra homework before you move across the country to take a start-up job.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 26

• Four years and $22 billion later, WhatsApp has decided ads aren’t awful, after all: First rule about being bought by an advertising company: You’re probably going to end up selling advertising.  WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting. Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company — including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service. “[B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp,” WhatsApp writes in a blog on the change today. “Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of.” WhatsApp will also be sharing the data with the “Facebook family of companies” — so presumably its user data could also be fed to VR firm Oculus Rift, another Fb acquisition, and photo-sharing network Instagram. WhatsApp data that will be shared under the new T&Cs includes the phone number a user used to verify their account, and the last time they used the service. Two pieces of data which — on a creepiness scale of ‘personal intel you’d rather not hand over to a data-mining tech giant’ — are both right up there.

• Google Fiber is pulling back on its broadband rollout as pressure grows to cut costs: For the past year, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and its parent Alphabet, has told Wall Street that Google Fiber is her most expensive unit outside of the core business — and is well worth the costs. Her bosses may be telling Fiber employees the opposite. According to a report in The Information, Alphabet chiefs Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently instructed Fiber to severely trim staff and expenses, frustrated with mounting costs of delivering high-speed internet by digging up dirt. Creating broadband networks via traditional pipes is enormously expensive. And Fiber still hasn’t proven that it has figured out a better way to do it. The Information story comes on the heels of reports that Fiber has put plans to build broadband networks on hold in two cities as it ponders ways to roll out experimental wireless tech. Fiber, like the “Other Bets” businesses outside of Google, is facing ongoing scrutiny about its operations. Here are the key parts of The Information’s report. The unit initially shot for five million broadband subscribers in its first years, but has fallen short of that. Last month, Page told Craig Barratt, the CEO of Fiber (or Access, as it’s known), to halve his staff down to 500. Porat, who has developed a reputation as a cost cutter, interceded on Fiber’s behalf, arguing to Page that Fiber’s business model is defensible. Barratt considered leaving earlier in the year, reportedly irked by the changes at Alphabet. If he did, he would not be the first “Other Bets” exec to do so.

• Uber Loses at Least $1.2 Billion in First Half of 2016: The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. is not a public company, but every three months, dozens of shareholders get on a conference call to hear the latest details on its business performance from its head of finance, Gautam Gupta. On Friday, Gupta told investors that Uber's losses mounted in the second quarter. Even in the U.S., where Uber had turned a profit during its first quarter, the company was once again losing money. In the first quarter of this year, Uber lost about $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to people familiar with the matter. In the second quarter the losses significantly exceeded $750 million, including a roughly $100 million shortfall in the U.S., those people said. That means Uber's losses in the first half of 2016 totaled at least $1.27 billion. Subsidies for Uber's drivers are responsible for the majority of the company's losses globally, Gupta told investors, according to people familiar with the matter. "You won't find too many technology companies that could lose this much money, this quickly," said Aswath Damodaran, a business professor at New York University who has written skeptically of Uber's astronomical valuation on his blog. "For a private business to raise as much capital as Uber has been able to is unprecedented." Bookings grew tremendously from the first quarter of this year to the second, from above $3.8 billion to more than $5 billion. Net revenue, under generally accepted accounting principles, grew about 18 percent, from about $960 million in the first quarter to about $1.1 billion in the second. Uber also told investors during the call that it was changing how it calculates UberPool's contribution to revenue in the second quarter, which had the effect of increasing revenue. Uber's losses and revenue have generally grown in lockstep as the company's global ambitions have expanded. Uber has lost money quarter after quarter. In 2015, Uber lost at least $2 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Uber, which is seven years old, has lost at least $4 billion in the history of the company.

• First driverless taxi hits the streets of Singapore: The first driverless taxi began work on Thursday in a limited public trial on the streets of Singapore. Developer nuTonomy invited a select group of people to download their app and ride for free in its "robo-taxi" in a western Singapore hi-tech business district, hoping to get feedback ahead of a planned full launch of the service in 2018.The trial rides took place in a Mitsubishi i-MiEv electric vehicle, with an engineer sitting behind the steering wheel to monitor the system and take control if necessary. The trial is on an on-going basis, nuTonomy said, and follows private testing that began in April. Parker, whose company has partnered with the Singapore government on the project, said he hoped to have 100 taxis working commercially in the Southeast Asian citystate by 2018.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 10

• Yelp swings to surprise profit, raises full-year revenue forecast: Consumer review website operator Yelp Inc swung to an unexpected second-quarter profit and raised its full-year revenue forecast as investments in sales and marketing led to more businesses and consumers signing up for its services. The company also gave a better-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter and said it partnered with and made a small investment in Nowait, a mobile platform that allows restaurants to manage their waiting lists. Shares of Yelp, whose website and app allow users to rate restaurants and a variety of other businesses, jumped more than 13 percent to $35.90 in extended trading on Tuesday. They hit a 52-week high of $32.90 in regular trading. Yelp posted a net profit of $449,000, or 1 cent per share, for quarter ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $1.3 million a year earlier and $15.5 million in the prior quarter. Revenue rose 29.5 percent to $173.4 million.

• P&G, the biggest advertiser in the world, reminded us why Facebook wants to be TV: Facebook is a giant, mega-successful advertising business. It has 1.7 billion users, and it knows a ton about them, which is why it did $17 billion in ad revenue last year. But despite years of trying to convince advertisers otherwise, Facebook is still not TV — the place advertisers go when they want to spend huge sums on brand advertising, meant to create overall awareness of their products. Instead, Facebook is the place advertisers go for direct response ads: Ads that send you somewhere when you click on them, so you can buy or download something immediately. Facebook is better at DR ads than anyone — see that second sentence at the top — but DR ads are of limited use for some advertisers. We got a reminder of that today, when the Wall Street Journal reported that P&G, the world’s biggest advertiser, was going to pull back on the targeted ads it was running on Facebook, because targeted ads weren’t helping P&G sell Tide and Pampers. But P&G is increasing its TV budget. P&G isn’t cutting back on its overall Facebook spend, and this news isn’t going to be a long-term problem for Facebook.

• Virtual Reality Classrooms Another Way Chinese Kids Gain an Edge: Deep within a building shaped like the Starship Enterprise, a little-known Chinese company is working on the future of education. Vast banks of servers record children at work and play, tracking touchscreen swipes, shrugs and head swivels - amassing a database that will be used to build intimate profiles of millions of kids. This is the Fuzhou hive of NetDragon Websoft Holdings Ltd. a hack-and-slash videogame maker and unlikely candidate to transform learning via headset-mounted virtual reality teachers. It’s one of a growing number of companies from International Business Machines Corp. to Lenovo Group Ltd. studying how to use technology like VR to arrest a fickle child’s attention. (And perhaps someday to make a mint from that data by showing them ads.) China - where parents have been known to try anything to give their kids an edge and tend to be less obsessive about privacy - may be an ideal testing ground for the VR classroom of the future. As it’s envisioned, there’ll be no napping in the back row. Lessons change when software predicts a student’s mind is wandering by spotting an upward tilt of the head. Dull lectures can be immediately livened up with pop quizzes. Even the instructor’s gender can change to suit the audience, such as making the virtual educator male in cultures where teachers are typically men.The notion of adaptive, computer-based teaching has bounced around for more than a decade. Done right, it’s got the potential to fundamentally alter learning. Educators who’ve relied on their gut and visual cues could be replaced or augmented by digital avatars powered by algorithms, which can in turn be replicated across the planet. Advocates argue that the benefits of using machines to scrutinize children and learning to adapt to their foibles will outweigh questions of privacy because soon there won’t be enough human teachers.

• Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers, but It Strives to Make Ads More Relevant: Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up onFacebook’s desktop website, you will now be out of luck: The social network has found a way to block the ad blockers. On Tuesday, Facebook flipped a switch on its desktop website that essentially renders all ad blockers — the programs that prevent websites from displaying ads on the page when a user visits the site — useless. The change allows the Silicon Valley company to serve ads on its desktop site even to people who have ad-blocking software installed and running.Facebook’s move is set to add to a furious debate about the ethics of ad blocking. On one hand, many digital ads are a nuisance — they slow loading times of web pages and detract from the online experience. Yet the ads also serve as the business foundation for many digital publishers to provide content to readers. Ad blockers have become a threat to publishers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which are facing declining advertising revenue. About 200 million people worldwide use ad-blocking software on their desktop computers, according to estimates from PageFair, an anti-ad-blocking start-up. An additional 420 million use ad blockers on their smartphones, the company said. Several digital publishers, including Wired, Forbes and The Times, have begun experimenting with anti-ad-blocking techniques, including asking visitors who use ad blockers to “whitelist” their sites so that ads may still appear.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, August 5

• Meet the China ‘whisperers’ who get the big deals done in Silicon Valley: When Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick wanted advice about whom to hire to run his ride-hailing business in China, he asked Carmen Chang, a longtime Silicon Valley lawyer and investor who had helped a previous generation of tech companies navigate that murky territory. When Uber sold its China business to its rival Didi this week, Chang was a trusted confidante.When Lyft, Uber’s smaller rival, needed an entree into China, the company’s president turned to another Silicon Valley insider who shuttles between worlds. The introduction from Connie Chan, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, to China’s largest ride-hailing company led to a $100 million investment and partnership. Behind the scenes of an unprecedented flood of capital from China into Silicon Valley over the past two years is an elite network of brokers. These brokers do more than deal-making; they play anthropologist and cultural translator -- from coaching startup founders about the culturally appropriate place to sit at a conference room table in China to breaking down how emojis are used in Chinese apps. Their acumen is growing more valuable, entrepreneurs say, as they navigate a cast of hard-to-parse characters with alluring deep pockets and promises of big business opportunities overseas. “She is the whisperer between China and Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, a web security startup, of Chang. Last year, Chang helped Prince -- whose company had given up on China in 2011 -- clinch a partnership with Baidu, China’s search giant. “There’s very few that really understand both sides.” Chang, who was born in Nanjing, China, came to the States to seek a doctorate in Modern Chinese History. She got pulled into tech industry after graduating from Stanford Law School in the early 1990s, when she got a job as an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Silicon Valley firm known for its ties to the clubby venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. One of her early clients was Masayoshi Son, the billionaire Japanese investor who founded the Japanese telcommunications giant Softbank. At the time, she said, senior management at the firm had never been to Asia, and Son “wasn’t considered important enough” to be represented by a general partner. “So he got an associate,” she says.

• Snapchat Used to Spook Advertisers. Not Anymore. When Snapchat opened itself up to advertisers more than a year ago, many initially griped that the company needed to lower its ad prices. Some were mystified about how to reach the right audience with the ads, since Snapchat did not provide traditional ad-targeting tools. Most of all, brands wondered how Snapchat could be effective when the ads — like Snapchat messages — disappeared. In the last 15 months, Snapchat has moved to respond. It introduced new ad formats. It dangled its attractive user base — the service now claims 150 million daily users, including nearly half the country’s population from ages 18 to 34 — to lure advertisers. Most important, Snapchat has persuaded brands like Tiffany & Company, Kraft Foods and Burger King that its ads let them interact playfully with this young audience.Now Snapchat faces the challenge of keeping up its nascent ad business as its early success raises the competitive hackles of rivals. On Tuesday, Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, introduced a near carbon copy of a Snapchat photo and video service known as Stories. A lot is riding on Snapchat’s building up its ad business. The company, which Mr. Spiegel helped found in 2011 and is now based in the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles, needs to justify a valuation of about $19 billion that its investors have placed on it. The company also faces sky-high revenue expectations; the investment bank Jefferies recently projected that Snapchat’s revenue would grow to $1 billion next year from more than $350 million this year.Mr. Khan’s biggest job was to explain why Snapchat’s unusual platform was better for advertisers. The task was thorny because Snapchat is a messaging, sharing and broadcast service where most content disappears. Companies had few comparable apps to judge Snapchat against. The potential became clearer after brands started experimenting with Snapchat’s geofilters, a tool that adds custom stickers, a type of colorful icon, to the app when people enter a certain geographic area, and lenses, which are whimsical images that transform someone’s face in the app.

• Facebook's News Feed to show fewer 'clickbait' headlines: Facebook's News Feed will show fewer "clickbait" headlines over the next few weeks, the company announced Thursday, as it seeks to establish itself as the prime web destination for news and social updates. The company receives thousands of complaints a day about clickbait, headlines that intentionally withhold information or mislead users to get people to click on them, Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management for News Feed, said in an interview. In an effort to eliminate clickbait from the site, Facebook created a system that identifies and classifies such headlines. It can then determine which pages or web domains post large amounts of clickbait and rank them lower in News Feed. Facebook routinely updates its algorithm for News Feed, the place most people see postings on the site, to show users what they are most interested in and encourage them to spend even more time on the site. The system looks for commonly used phrases in clickbait headlines, similar to how filters for email spam work, Facebook said in a blog post. It categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by looking for headlines that intentionally withheld information and those that exaggerated the content of an article. News Feed, a team of about 200 people, uses a similar classification system to determine what it should show each user, Mosseri said.

• Amazon adds several new devices to its Dash Replenishment auto ordering service: At the beginning of the year, Amazon flipped the switch on Dash Replenishment, a service aimed at bringing the instant reordering of its devoted product buttons directly to connected devices. The idea being that you don’t have to, say, order ink for your printer or batteries for your smart lock — the devices will do it for you. The retail giant has already announced a slew of different partners for the program, including Brother Printers, the Gmate SMART blood glucose monitor and a GE washing machine, all of which went live in the first round. Today the company announced a number of new additions. The highest profile of the additions is GE, which will be extending its involvement to driers and dishwashers, which will be updated to order fabric softener and dishwasher detergent, respectively, when supplies start to dwindle. Neato joins the list as well, bringing the Wi-Fi-connected robot to the service to order replacement filters and brushes, while Petcube’s Kickstarter-supported Bites camera will be able to order pet food. Also on the list are the Behmore Connected coffee brewer, Simplehuman trashcan and SmartThings platform. Even The Hershey Company has been added to the stable with an unnamed device. That should be interesting.

• LinkedIn Results Beat Expectations Ahead of Microsoft Deal: LinkedIn Corp. reported earnings and revenue that were higher than analysts expected, after the company negotiated a $26.2 billion sale to Microsoft Corp. LinkedIn said second-quarter revenue was $933 million, up 31 percent from a year earlier. The average analyst estimate was $899 million. Earnings, excluding some items, were $1.13 cents per share in the second quarter, compared with analysts’ projection of 78 cents. This may be LinkedIn’s last earnings report as an independent company, before it joins Microsoft in one of the largest technology industry deals on record. 

• As Chinese hacking abates, FireEye plans layoffs, cuts forecasts; shares plunge: Cyber security firm FireEye Inc said on Thursday it planned to lay off 300 to 400 of its 3,400 workers as it announced quarterly sales below its own forecast, due to a slowdown in demand for its services helping businesses respond to hacking attacks. FireEye's shares were down 16.2 percent at $14.02 in extended trading.Chief Executive Kevin Mandia said the company is now responding more frequently to financially driven cyber criminals, who engage in crimes such as ransomware, which are relatively simple to clean up. "The size and scope have changed. The whole remediation was more complex" when the company was responding to large numbers of state-sponsored hacks from China, he said. FireEye cut its full-year revenue forecast to $716 million-$728 million from $780 million-$810 million.Executives blamed much of the trouble on a slowdown in its services business, including its high-profile Mandiant forensics unit that helps organizations respond to cyber attacks. That division's revenue rose just 2 percent in the second quarter, compared to a 40 percent increase in the first quarter. Its total number of engagements rose, but average revenue from each one fell dramatically because work performed was less extensive. Mandia said that was due to a shift away from previous years where there were large numbers of state-sponsored espionage hackers from China attacking customers in the United States. FireEye and other cyber security firms said in June that cyber espionage attacks from China appeared to have dropped this year as the Chinese government made good on a pledge with the United States to stop supporting the digital theft of U.S. trade secrets.

• Zynga plummets 9% in after-hours trading: Social game developer Zynga tumbled 9 percent in after-hours trading following the second quarter 2016 earnings announcement after the bell today. The company reported a net loss of $4.4 million, while still beating analysts’ expectations in terms of revenue.For the second quarter ended June 30, the San Francisco-based maker of FarmVille and Words with Friends posted revenue of $181.7 million and non-GAAP net earnings came in at $0. 

• Grand Theft Auto' publisher Take-Two's revenue jumps 13 percent: Videogame publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc reported a 13 percent rise in revenue, helped by strong sales of its "Grand Theft Auto V" and "NBA 2K16" titles. Take-Two, like its rivals, has also benefited from a shift by players downloading digital copies of its videogames – which generate higher margins – rather than buying physical game discs. Take Two's net revenue rose to $311.55 million in the first quarter ended June 30 from $257.30 million a year earlier. Digital downloads accounted for about 55 percent of revenue in the quarter. Net loss narrowed to $38.57 million, or 46 cents per share, from $67.02 million, or 81 cents per share.

• Activision revenue surges on "Overwatch" launch, "Candy Crush" deal: Activision Blizzard Inc reported a 50.4 percent surge in quarterly revenue on Thursday, propelled by the popularity of the newly-launched "Overwatch" game and the boost from the acquisition of "Candy Crush" maker King Digital. Activision's total adjusted revenue, which excludes deferred revenue and related costs, rose to $1.57 billion in the second quarter ended June 30 from $1.04 billion a year earlier.The company's shares were up 1.4 percent at $41.40 in extended trading. Activision, best known for its "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" games, released "Overwatch" on May 24 to rave reviews. The multi-player futuristic game now has more than 15 million players and has generated about $500 million in revenue to date, excluding deferrals, the company said. The company's net income dropped 40 percent to $127 million, or 17 cents per share, mainly due to costs associated with the near $6 billion acquisition of King Digital in February.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, July 28

• Facebook trounces Wall Street estimates with sharp ad sales growth: Facebook Inc provided more evidence on Wednesday that it can turn eyeballs into profit as the maker of the world's most popular app and social website trounced Wall Street's estimates, sending its shares to an all-time high. The leading social media company's mobile app and push into video attracted new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to spend more. It now has more than 1.7 billion monthly users, well ahead of any rivals. Its shares were up 5.4 percent in after-hours trading at $130.01, after hitting their highest since the company went public in 2012. Mobile advertising revenue accounted for 84 percent of the company's total advertising revenue, compared with 76 percent a year earlier. Total advertising revenue surged 63 percent to $6.24 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $5.80 billion.Meanwhile, Facebook still has several untapped areas for revenue opportunities, including its WhatsApp and Messenger apps, both of which have more than 1 billion users. But Wehner said the company does not plan to monetize them any time soon, and that it is instead focused on building interactions between businesses and users on the apps. Facebook also owns picture-sharing app Instagram, which recently announced it has more than 500 million users. Facebook has yet to say how much money Instagram makes, but research firm eMarketer predicts it will make $1.5 billion in revenue this year.Total revenue rose 59.2 percent to $6.44 billion, ahead of analysts' average estimate of $6.02 billion.

• GoPro revenue plunges 47 percent, but beats estimates: GoPro's quarterly revenue plunged 47.4 percent, but beat analysts' estimates, which have been sharply lowered on shrinking demand for the company's body-mounted point-of-view cameras. The company's shares were up 2.4 percent in volatile trading after the bell on Wednesday. GoPro's revenue fell to $220.8 million in the second quarter ended June 30 from $419.9 million a year earlier.The company, whose cameras are worn by surfers, skydivers and other action junkies, said second-quarter units shipments rose 8 percent to 759,000 compared with the first quarter. Its average selling price increased 11 percent sequentially and 14 percent on a year-over-year basis. GoPro, however, maintained its full-year revenue guidance of $1.35 billion to $1.5 billion. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $1.34 billion. GoPro posted a loss of $91.77 million, or 66 cents per share, for the second quarter.

• Groupon reports better-than-expected revenue, still not profitable: Deal site Groupon saw its shares rising today in after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected second quarter earnings report.Groupon revenue in the first half of 2016 reached $1.49 billion.Groupon beat Wall Street revenue expectations with second quarter revenue of $756 million. And it posted a better-than-expected net loss of $6.8 million on a non-GAAP basis, or $0.01 loss per share. In a phone interview, Groupon CEO Rich Williams said that the reasons the company did not make profits in the last quarter are essentially two: Groupon is still investing in marketing and other efforts to attract new customers, and they face other costs associated with company restructuring.In the first half of 2016, Groupon revenue looked better than it did over the same period last year. But the company is not looking quite as strong as it did in the first half of 2015 in terms of profitability.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 20

• Microsoft Earnings Are Up, Cushioned by Its Cloud Business: On Tuesday, in its quarterly earnings results, Microsoft offered strong signs that its cloud business was growing quickly. Revenue from Azure, a business Microsoft started to compete in cloud computing with Amazon, the market leader, rose more than 100 percent in the quarter. Revenue from Office 365, a subscription version of the old Office software, rose 54 percent from commercial customers and 19 percent from consumers.Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has made cloud computing a priority for the company since becoming chief executive two years ago. Many believed it was a move that Microsoft had long needed to make but was held back by the reluctance of its previous boss, Steven A. Ballmer. There is risk in this transition. The profit margins from renting software in the cloud are not as high as selling a license to customers, and Microsoft investors have always counted on the company to generate exceptional profits. But the cloud business model tends to be more stable — a trade-off for slimmer margins. After Microsoft’s misadventures in the smartphone market, it is a necessary trade-off. Last week, the company said it would fail to meet a goal of getting its Windows 10 operating system running on one billion devices before June 2018, largely because of its retrenchment in the mobile phone business.Now the company has laid off most of the thousands of people who joined Microsoft through the deal, written off the value of nearly all of the acquisition and whittled back the number of smartphones it sells. On Tuesday, Microsoft said that its phone revenue had declined 71 percent from a year ago. For years, people have put off purchases of new machines or avoided them entirely in favor of smartphones and tablets. Last week, IDC, the technology research firm, said worldwide PC shipments fell 4.5 percent in the most recent quarter compared with a year earlier.For the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft reported net income of $3.12 billion, or 39 cents a share, compared with a loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents a share, during the same period a year earlier. Revenue fell to $20.61 billion, from $22.18 billion a year ago. The decline was partly the result of a $2 billion deferral of revenue related to Windows 10, its latest operating system. Accounting rules require Microsoft to recognize revenue from the software to be recognized in pieces over time. Without the deferral, Microsoft’s revenue rose 2 percent from a year earlier to $22.64 billion. The company’s shares jumped about 4 percent in after-hours trading following the release of its results.

• Google has found a business model for its most advanced artificial intelligence: Two years ago, Google spent over half a billion dollars for the tiny artificial intelligence startup DeepMind. Since then, the unit has walloped Atari video games and beaten an impossible board game. Impressive stuff, that. But those AI demonstrations have yet to spell actual revenue. Until now — although the efforts are helping Google save money on its most expensive part. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis told Bloomberg that his unit recently began applying its advanced AI to Google’s data centers, finding ways to reduce the company’s sizable energy bill. Google started using machine learning for its data centers two years ago, searching for ways to reduce costs for one of the company’s top expenses. A month ago, it aimed the more specialized AI tools from DeepMind at the problem of cooling these server farms. That cut the energy needed for cooling by 40 percent, the company said. It didn’t offer a dollar figure for that, but it’s safe to assume that it means hundreds of millions in savings over the long haul.DeepMind technically sits outside of Google in Alphabet. (I’ve heard people describe it as in the “Alphaverse,” whatever that means.) But a rep said that Google was not paying DeepMind for its cost-cutting research here.

• Facebook Pilots Offline Video for India in Duel With YouTube: Facebook Inc. is piloting a feature in India allowing users to save videos to watch offline, chasing a similar program from Google’s YouTube, as the companies attempt to crack a market ridden with poor internet connectivity. The move followed feedback from users in the country citing poor video experiences because of limited mobile coverage, Facebook said in a statement. “We’re testing an option for people to download videos to Facebook while they’re online on good internet connections, to view the video at anytime, online or offline, without using extra mobile data,” the company said. YouTube introduced offline video in 2014 to cater to Indians crazy about watching Bollywood song sequences, cricket snippets and comedy sketches. Despite the cost of downloads, an estimated 40 percent of data consumption on phone networks is video, said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of the New Delhi-based Medianama.com, which monitors news on the digital industry.Facebook, which has 142 million users in India, said the new feature helps users get through the lag between downloading and playing a video by saving it for later, similar to the YouTube feature. Only original videos posted on personal Facebook accounts and on the social network’s pages can be downloaded. The program is being tested on a small percentage of Indian users, the company said without providing details on broader rollout.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 30

• Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family: For years, Facebook has courted publishers of all sizes, asking them to depend more and more on the social media giant to expand their audiences. Now, Facebook has a new message for publishers: Tamp down your expectations. Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to make a series of changes to its news feed algorithm so that it will more favorably promote content posted by the friends and family of users. The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook. The move underscores the never-ending algorithm-tweaking that Facebook undertakes to maintain interest in its news feed, the company’s marquee feature that is seen by more than 1.65 billion users every month. It is also a reminder that while Facebook is vastly important to the long-term growth of news media companies, from older outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to upstarts like BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox Media, publishers rank lower on Facebook’s list of priorities.

• Landing with a bump? Germany's Rocket falls back to earth: When German e-commerce investor Rocket Internet launched Jumia in 2012 as a would-be African Amazon, it was optimistic that a rapidly expanding middle class would quickly shift from street markets to shopping online. Four years on, falling sales for sites like Jumia and slower growth from Nigeria to Russia and Brazil is casting doubt on Rocket Internet's ambition to become the world's biggest Internet company outside the United States and China. Jumia made a loss of 17 million euros ($18.8 million) in the first three months of 2016 on sales that fell more than a third. The devaluation of Nigeria's naira last week is a new blow for Jumia, which now operates in more than 20 countries in Africa. Revenue growth has also slowed at most of Rocket Internet's other 11 leading start-ups, ranging from furniture e-commerce and food delivery in Europe to online fashion in markets from India to Latin America and the Middle East. That is the consequence of Rocket's shift to rein in spending on marketing and logistics as it seeks to stem losses which it said peaked at 1 billion euros in 2015. As a result, shareholders have cast doubt on the valuation Rocket has put on its portfolio and questioned the strategy of sending business school graduates to set up 150 start-ups in more than 110 countries in just a few years. Exclusive interviews with shareholders reveal growing scepticism about Rocket's sprawling empire as emerging markets sour and technology stocks cool. Its share price has fallen 39 percent this year.

• Google Capital Makes First Public Company Investment in Care.com. Shares in Care.com Inc soared 18 percent in extended trading, after the home care provider announced a $46.35 million investment from Google Capital, the growth equity arm of Alphabet Inc. Google Capital’s investment makes it the largest shareholder in Care.com, and Laela Sturdy, a partner at the fund, will join the company’s board, Care.com said Wednesday in a statement. The company provides child, adult, senior, pet and home-care services and had a market capitalization of $276 million as of Wednesday. Google Capital was founded in 2013 and has invested in numerous private companies. It pairs its companies with advisers spread across Alphabet, and in the last six months has tapped 300 different people to give advice to its companies, Sturdy said. This deal marks its first investment in a public company.Care.com said it used a portion of the Google Capital investment to repurchase 3.7 million shares of its common stock from Matrix Partners at a price of $8.25 per share, a 5 percent discount to the 30-day volume-weighted average price. It also issued a new series of convertible preferred stock to Google Capital at an initial conversion price of $10.50 per share. Dividends on the stock will accrue at 5.5 percent annually, the company said. Matrix had been an investor since 2006 and wanted to make some divestments, so it was a good time to do a buyback, said Sheila Marcelo, Care.com chairwoman and chief executive officer. “It helps us reduce pressure on our stock,” she said.

• It’s official: Kleiner just pulled off a $1.4 billion fundraise: So much for losing its mojo. Despite twists and turns in recent years that have sometimes rivaled those of a telenovela, and even with its most famous member, John Doerr, no longer a general partner, Kleiner Perkins has raised two new funds totaling $1.4 billion, show newly processed SEC filings. The firm’s digital growth fund — its third — has secured $1 billion in commitments. The capital will be managed by Mary Meeker, Ted Schlein, Mood Rowghani and Noah Knauf, who very recently joined Kleiner from Warburg Pincus. Kleiner’s newest (17th!) early-stage fund, meanwhile, has closed with $400 million in commitments. As you’ve read here recently, Kleiner’s early-stage team now features five general partners: Schlein, Mike Abbott, Eric Feng, Beth Seidenberg and Wen Hsieh.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 7

• Uber Rolls Out App Improvements to Meet Driver Demands: Tensions have long simmered between Uber and its drivers who power the ride-hailing service. Drivers held protests when Uber cut fares with little warning and have filed class-action lawsuits to be recognized as company employees rather than independent contractors. Uber is now trying to improve the experience of its drivers. On Monday, the company announced a host of software improvements to its app to address driver demands. Among the changes, drivers can now more easily pause ride requests, making it easier for them to take bathroom breaks and fill their gas tanks. Drivers can now also be paid instantly for each ride they complete, rather than weekly, and see on the app’s dashboard how much they have earned.Among the many changes for drivers that Uber announced on Monday was a partnership with companies that can give tax advice to drivers. Uber said drivers could now also receive discounts on Uber rides, auto maintenance and cellphone data plans. In addition, Uber created a fuel finder function in the app that shows drivers the cheapest places nearby to fill up the gas tank, with the aim that Uber can someday negotiate with filling stations to provide discounts to Uber drivers. And the Uber app will automatically start a ride two minutes after arriving at a rider’s location so that drivers are paid if they have to wait for passengers. Tardy passengers are a frequent complaint on driver blogs.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
• Line Plans Year’s Biggest Tech IPO, Pitching U.S. Investors: 
  • Japan’s Line Corp. is headed for what could be the biggest initial public offering for a technology company this year, including a major pitch to American investors. The company behind one of Asia’s most popular messaging apps plans to go public in Tokyo and New York in mid-to-late July, with a goal of raising between $1 billion and $2 billion at a valuation of $5 billion to $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tokyo-based company aims to get about half the money from U.S. investors as it plots a long-term expansion there after pushing further into Southeast Asia, said the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Line is already profitable and it will make that a focus for investors when it begins a roadshow toward the end of this month, according to one of the people. If it reaches its goals, Line would be this year’s biggest tech offering globally, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, providing a rare bright spot for the moribund market for listings. No business has raised more than $150 million in a technology IPO in 2016, even though more than 160 private companies are currently valued at $1 billion or more. The market debut would come two years after Line filed an application to list in Tokyo in July 2014. That offering valued the company at 1 trillion yen ($9.2 billion), people familiar with the situation said at the time. A deal didn’t materialize and the company, controlled by South Korea’s Naver Corp., later replaced its chief executive officer. Naver shares, which aren’t trading on Monday due to a national holiday, are up 7.4 percent this year.The lower valuation for next month’s expected listing reflects the company’s slowing user growth and a cooling in technology valuations and listings. Global tech companies raised about $900 million in the first quarter of this year, down from $6.5 billion during same period in 2014 and $2.8 billion in the first quarter of last year, according to Ernst & Young LLP. This year’s biggest tech listing is Australia’s WiseTech Global Ltd., a logistics software company that raised about $130 million in April, according to Bloomberg data.
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• T-Mobile is giving every customer a share of its stock: T-Mobile had another of its un-carrier events today, which now have so many regular giveaways they are starting to look like an episode of Oprah. First, the company announced that every current T-Mobile account holder on a postpaid plan will get one share of common stock in the company, which is currently worth about $43. New qualifying customers will also get one share once they sign up with T-Mobile. Plus, existing customers will be able to earn another free share (or two if you’ve been a customer for over five years) for each new customer they refer to the company — maxing out at 100 shares a year. The prospectus for the offering is here, and gives a little more color on how exactly the promotion will work. Once a customer redeems the share via T-Mobile’s new app, the security will be held in a brokerage account at LOYAL3 Securities. Stockholders can then hold on to their new investment, sell their shares via the platform or transfer their shares to another brokerage account. Customers can even electronically participate in proxy votes to vote their shares. Notably, instead of issuing additional shares, T-Mobile says shares needed to meet the needs of the program will be purchased on the open markets.

• Facebook founder Zuckerberg's social media accounts restored after alleged hack: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts have been resecured, a spokesman from the social media platform said on Monday, responding to questions about weekend media reports that the founder's sites had been hacked. Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts were compromised over the weekend, according to a report on Sunday from technology news website VentureBeat. Those accounts have since been "re-secured using best practices," a Facebook spokesman told Reuters, adding, "no Facebook systems or accounts were accessed." Zuckerberg's Twitter account, @finkd, last used in January 2012, posted a tweet on Sunday with the message, "Hey, @finkd You were in LinkedIn Datatbase with the password 'dadada' ! DM (direct message) for proof," according to a screenshot posted to Twitter by Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall), founder of Katacoda, an interactive learning platform for software developers. The tweet appeared to ask Zuckerberg to contact the sender, who claimed to have accessed his account. Zuckerberg's Pinterest page, meanwhile, was defaced with the headline "Hacked By OurMine Team" according to a screengrab of the page posted by VentureBeat. "Hey , we are just testing your security ,please dm (direct message) us for contact! twitter:twitter.com/_OurMine_," the compromised page said in a message that seemingly identified the hackers as being associated with the linked Twitter account. The Twitter page associated with that account, @_OurMine_, has since been suspended.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 26

• Alibaba Facing SEC Investigation Over Accounting Practices: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. fell the most in four months after the e-commerce giant said it’s being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its accounting practices and whether they violate federal laws. The company is providing documents and cooperating with the probe, according to the Hangzhou, China-based company’s annual report. The investigation is looking into consolidation practices, related party transactions and data reported from its Singles’ Day promotion. Singles’ Day is Alibaba’s biggest shopping day, attracting more than 90 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) of sales on its e-commerce platforms in a 24-hour period last year. Alibaba fell 6.8 percent to $75.59, the biggest drop since January. It was down less than 1 percent this year through Tuesday.

• In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge: Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about. Valleywag declined to play the game. It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised but were off the table. It said Google co-founder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That the Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That the Napster co-founder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker’s wedding was seriously over the top. Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay. This was gossip with an attitude, and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Mr. Thiel’s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag’s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in $140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing. The revelation of Mr. Thiel’s involvement in the suit this week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media once again to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone’s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies are less transparent about what they do.

• HP Inc profit beats Street amid weak market for PCs, printers: HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday. HP Inc, which houses the former Hewlett-Packard Co's legacy hardware business, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit as aggressive cost cutting helped counter weak demand for personal computers and printers. The company's shares reversed course to trade up more than 2 percent at $12.45 after the bell on Wednesday.The company's revenue fell about 11 percent to $11.59 billion.Revenue in the personal systems business, the company's biggest, fell 9.9 percent in the second quarter, while revenue declined 15.8 percent in the printing division.Total costs and expenses fell by 10.3 percent to $10.75 billion in the second quarter ended April 30, from a year earlier.

• Salesforce inks deal with AWS to expand international presence: AWS announced today that it was expanding its relationship with Salesforce.com, with Salesforce naming the cloud giant a preferred cloud provider. The agreement should help Salesforce increase its international presence without having to build its own data centers in countries that have data sovereignty laws, which require that data stays in-country. It’s expensive to build their own, so they are turning to a public cloud infrastructure provider like Amazon to do the heavy lifting for them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spoke glowingly of AWS. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” he said in a statement. It’s worth keeping in mind, however that Salesforce also has a deep relationship with Microsoft — and CEO Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference last fall. But the relationship has a flip side and the companies also compete with one another. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research, points out that this announcement should help Salesforce compete with Oracle and Microsoft overseas.

• Terrapattern is reverse image search for maps, powered by a neural network: Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn’t Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map — a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout — and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It’s remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. How does that work? And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it — and for under $35,000? The secret, as with so many other interesting visual computing projects these days, is a convolutional neural network. It’s essentially an AI-like program that extracts every little detail from an image and looks for patterns at various levels of organization — similar to how our own visual system works, though the brain is infinitely more subtle and flexible. In Terrapattern’s case, the neural network was trained to look at small squares of the landscape and, comparing those patterns to a huge database of tagged map features from OpenStreetMap, it learned to associate them with certain concepts. Think of how a camera recognizes a face and knows when it is blinking or smiling. It doesn’t actually “know” what faces, smiles and eyes are, but it associates them with certain patterns of pixels, and can reliably pick them out. Once Terrapattern had been trained to recognize and categorize all manner of geographical features, from boats to water towers, its creators set it free on detailed maps of the greater New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and San Francisco areas. It scoured the landscape and built a huge database of features and similarities — which can be quickly queried and the results returned immediately (the neural network isn’t doing any “thinking” when you click on a feature — its work is done for this dataset). Of course, you could just search for “tennis fields in Oakland” or the like and get perfectly good results, but this allows one to search for things that may not be listed so formally. What if you were looking for houses in the middle of fields, or cul de sacs, or dead lawns, or circular parking lots? Terrapattern knows where those are just as much as it knows where the airports and ferry terminals are. They’re all just assemblages of features to the neural network.

• Facebook will shut down FBX, its desktop ad exchange: Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we’ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this is part of Facebook’s shift to mobile (in its most recent earnings report, mobile accounted for 82 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue). He said: "Mobile is now a necessary component of effective marketing campaigns, and Facebook is helping millions of businesses understand their customers’ purchase path across devices. Dynamic Ads and Custom Audiences have mobile at their core and are delivering excellent results for businesses, so Facebook Exchange spending has shifted towards those solutions. This is about giving people more relevant ads and marketers more effective formats, especially in an increasingly mobile world. Our ads API is open to all developers so they can innovate on our platform and build great ad experiences for brands and their customers." Facebook launched FBX back in 2012, but its focus seemed to have shifted away from the exchange in recent years.

• Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too: The company is taking a $950 million charge to unwind the last vestiges of the Nokia deal. Microsoft is further scaling back its flagging phone business, exiting the consumer market and cutting another 1,850 jobs. As part of the move announced Wednesday, Microsoft will take a $950 million charge and cut what little remained of its Finland-based phone hardware business, unwinding the last of its disastrous $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's phone unit. Last week, Microsoft announced separately that it was selling what was left of its low-end"feature phone" business.  The company has been scaling back its phone ambitions ever since the Nokia deal closed, with CEO Satya Nadella quickly shifting to a strategy focused on bringing Microsoft's software and services to Android and iOS rather than trying to convince phone buyers to shift to Windows. Despite all the cuts — and having already seen its market share dip below 1 percent — Microsoft says it isn't totally out of the phone-making business. The company insists it will continue to serve phones aimed at the business market and license Windows 10 to any other hardware makers that want to give Windows Phone a try.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 13th

• Facebook, Facing Bias Claims, Shows How Editors and Algorithms Guide News:  Facebook, the largest social media network, published internal editorial guidelines on Thursday, the company’s latest attempt to rebut accusations that it is politically biased in the news content it shows on the pages of its 1.6 billion users. The 28-page document details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the “Trending Topics” section of users’ Facebook pages. Facebook describes a list of processes it uses to display some of the most popular content across the network, including relying on algorithms to detect up-and-coming news trends as well as a team of editors who, much like a newsroom, direct how those topics are presented and decide what should be displayed to people who regularly use the service. As the guidelines make clear, at practically every point in the process, a human editor is given the leeway to exercise his or her editorial influence. The document was released just days after a report on the tech news siteGizmodo said Facebook editors had intentionally “suppressed” news topics from conservative publications trending across the network. The report also said editors were able to artificially inflate the importance of other topics by “injecting” them into the Trending section of users’ Facebook pages. Since those claims surfaced, Facebook has been questioned by news sites across the political spectrum and by legislators in Washington. On Thursday, critics urged the company to consider the biases of its editors. “As long as Facebook is hiring editors who lean left politically, those stories are going to get preferential treatment,” Erick Erickson, former editor in chief of the conservative website RedState and founder of another conservative site called The Resurgent, said in an email. “I’d hope that Facebook would take care to consider all views and all news.” The company has continued to deny accusations of political bias and pointed to editorial rules that discourage Trending Topics staff members from taking one viewpoint or another.

• Alibaba Bears Retreat as Sales Growth Endures China Slump: Chart: Bearish bets against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have dropped to the lowest level since January after the Chinese e-commerce leader’s quarterly revenue beat analysts’ forecasts even as the nation’s economy grows at the slowest pace in 25 years. Short interest fell to 7.1 percent this week after peaking at a two-year high of 8.5 percent two months ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Markit Ltd. The U.S.-traded stock has risen 4.4 percent since the company reported its quarterly results, while its main competitor JD.com Inc. tumbled 12 percent after reporting a slowdown in sales volume.

• Intel Sells $2.75 Billion of Bonds to Refinance 2016 Debt: Intel Corp. sold $2.75 billion of bonds on Thursday to refinance debt due this year and a portion of notes maturing in 2017. The world’s biggest chipmaker issued debt three parts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The longest portion was $1.25 billion of 30-year notes yielding 1.55 percentage points above comparable government debt. That’s down from an initial offer of 1.7 percentage points, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. managed the sale.S&P Global Ratings gave the bonds an A+ grade, according to a statement on Thursday. Intel is the latest U.S. blue-chip company to offer notes in what’s poised to be second-busiest week for issuance this year. In its last multibillion-dollar deal, Intel sold $7 billion of bonds in July to finance part of its $16.7 billion takeover of Altera Corp. The company plans to repay its $1.5 billion of 1.95 percent notes due in October and a portion of the $3 billion of 1.35 percent bonds due next year. Investment-grade companies have sold more than $49 billion worth of bonds so far this week as they take advantage of low borrowing costs after posting earnings for the quarter ended March 31. Companies are also front-loading issuance before the summer slowdown, according to Ben Emons, a money manager at Leader Capital Corp. in Los Angeles.

• Apple invests $1 billion in Chinese Uber rival ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing: Apple said on Thursday it has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market. The investment comes as Apple is trying to reinvigorate sales in China, its second-largest market. Apple recently has come under pressure from Chinese regulators, with its online book and film services shut down last month, and Cook is traveling to the country this month. The investment gives Apple, which has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year, a sizeable stake in Uber Technologies Inc's chief rival in China. Cook said in an interview that he sees opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.

• Strong demand for graphics chips to boost Nvidia's revenue: Nvidia Corp forecast better-than-expected revenue for the current quarter as it sees robust demand for its chips that power complex computer graphics. Shares of the company, which also reported profit and revenue above analysts' estimates, were up 7.5 percent in extended trading. The chipmaker last week unveiled its GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics processors based on its Pascal technology.Revenue from its gaming business, which designs graphics cards such as GeForce for PCs, rose 17 percent to $687 million. The company has weathered a shrinking personal computer industry by focusing on game enthusiasts, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for processors used in playing graphically demanding games.Revenue from its data center business, which includes its Tesla processors, rose 62.5 percent to $143 million.Nvidia's net income rose to $196 million, or 33 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 1 from $134 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 46 cents per share, handily beating analysts' expectations of 32 cents. Revenue rose 13.4 percent to $1.31 billion, while analysts were expecting $1.26 billion. The company also said it intends to return about $1 billion to shareholders in fiscal 2017 through quarterly dividends and share buybacks. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 10

• Report claiming bias in Facebook 'trending' topics sparks social media outcry: Facebook workers have often omitted conservative political stories from the website’s "trending" list, the technology news site Gizmodo said on Monday in a report that sparked widespread comment on social media. An unnamed former Facebook employee told Gizmodo that workers "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers," according to Gizmodo, while "artificially" adding other stories into the trending list. Facebook told Reuters on Monday that there are "rigorous guidelines in place" to maintain neutrality and said that these guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in trending topics. Facebook did not respond directly though to questions about whether employees had suppressed conservative-leaning news. "These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another," a spokesperson for Facebook said. The report alarmed some social media users, with several journalists and commentators criticizing Facebook for alleged bias. "Aside from fueling right-wing persecution, this is a key reminder of dangers of Silicon Valley controlling content," tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald. Well, you go to Hell, Facebook," tweeted Kyle Feldscher (@Kyle_Feldscher), a reporter at the Washington Examiner, a conservative-leaning publication. "For anyone who cares about press freedom, this is frightening stuff," tweeted Bloomberg Editor Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin), with a link to Gizmodo's story.

• As Lending Club Stumbles, Its Entire Industry Faces Skepticism: Renaud Laplanche and his crew steered a 105-foot racing boat through New York Harbor one day last spring, its towering sails ripping across the water at 30 knots. An accomplished sailor and founder of Lending Club, Mr. Laplanche was hosting executives from hedge funds, Goldman Sachs and other banks — part of his effort to win over Wall Street on his plans to upend traditional banking with a faster, more democratic form of lending. He already had endorsements from Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, and John Mack, the former chief of Morgan Stanley, who joined his board. At Lending Club’s initial public offering in December 2014, the company was valued at over $8 billion. But on Monday, Lending Club announced that Mr. Laplanche had resigned after an internal investigation found improprieties in its lending process, including the altering of millions of dollars’ worth of loans. The company’s stock price, already reeling in recent months, fell 34 percent. The company’s woes are part of a broader reckoning in the online money-lending industry. Last week, Prosper, another online lender that focuses on consumers, laid off more than a quarter of its work force, and the chief executive said he was forgoing his salary for the year. Marketplace lenders like Lending Club have created easy-to-use websites that match consumers and small businesses, hoping to borrow a few thousand dollars, with individuals or Wall Street investors looking to lend money. Freed from the costs of brick-and-mortar branches and federal regulations requiring that they reserve money against their loans, marketplace lenders have been able to grow quickly and with fewer expenses. The process is almost entirely online, with loans approved in days rather than the weeks a traditional bank might take. While marketplace loans account for less than 1 percent of the consumer loans in the United States, a recent report by the investment bank Jefferies said that in some segments — like installment loans — the new lending companies account for more than 10 percent of the market. But in the first quarter, lenders like Lending Club, Prosper and OnDeck Capital had difficulty convincing investors that their business models are sound. Wall Street’s waning demand for loans exposed the Achilles’ heel of marketplace lending. Unlike traditional banks that use their deposits to fund loans, the marketplace companies discovered how fleeting their funding sources can be.

• Researchers say computer screens change how you think about what you read: You probably spend a lot of time staring at screens -- but all that computer time may be making you miss the big picture, new research has found. Reading something on a screen -- as opposed to a printout -- causes people to home in on details and but not broader ideas, according to a new article by Geoff Kaufman. a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Mary Flanagan, a professor at Dartmouth.  "Digital screens almost seem to create a sort of tunnel vision where you're focusing on just the information you're getting this moment, not the broader context," Kaufman said. The article is based on a series of studies involving a total of more than 300 participants that were carried out while the two researchers worked together at Tiltfactor, a Dartmouth game design lab. The studies covered in the latest article were prompted by earlier research from Kaufman and Flanagan that found players using the iPad version of a disease prevention strategy game struggled with long-term strategy much more than those playing a physical copy of the game.

• Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup. Then It Self-Disrupted: Zenefits makes online software that automates health insurance, payroll, and other essential office drudgery—kind of a human resources version of TurboTax. It’s not a sexy idea, but with 6 million small businesses in the U.S., it’s enormously useful. The company was founded in 2013 by Parker Conrad, who realized he could streamline small businesses’ managerial needs, saving them hundreds of hours of mind-numbing paperwork—not to mention the cost of staffing an HR department—by putting everything online. Conrad was known to be a little frenzied and disorganized but fiercely intelligent. “From an investment philosophy … we look for the magnitude of the genius, as opposed to the lack of issues,” says Andreessen’s founding partner Ben Horowitz. “And in a way, [Conrad] was like the prototype.” Conrad had no background in health insurance but quickly learned the intricacies of the business as well as any veteran. “If you’re an insurance broker,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2013, “we’re going to drink your milkshake.”  Then In California, they found, some of the sales team used Conrad’s macro to systematically cheat on the state’s training course, which included a section on ethics. “As far as a company doing what Zenefits has done, I don’t know that we have seen this before,” says Nancy Kincaid, press secretary for the California Department of Insurance, which has also opened an investigation. In March, Massachusetts’ division of insurance opened a third. Zenefits confirms that other states have since followed but won’t say which ones or even how many. Sacks became CEO and is guiding Zenefits through its crisis cleanup. He has banned alcohol at the office and changed the company motto from “Ready. Fire. Aim.” to “Operate With Integrity.” In February the company laid off 250 employees, including the enterprise team. Sales Vice President Blond, Semaan’s boss, and any executive or manager known to have helped disseminate the macro are also gone. Zenefits says it has self-reported the findings of its internal investigation to all 50 states and is working with those that have opened formal inquiries. Fidelity Investments, which owns a stake, has slashed its valuation of Zenefits from $4.5 billion to less than $2 billion. There are rows of empty desks at the San Francisco office; the company plans to downsize from four floors to three. The Star Wars-themed conference rooms will soon be renamed after inspirational entrepreneurs. Kegs have been replaced with cold-brew coffee. The stairwells are condom-free. Zenefits might also survive for the one reason that made its product so appealing to business owners in the first place: Shopping for health insurance remains really frustrating. The company says it now has 20,000 accounts. “As long as their problems don’t affect our company, we’ll stay,” says Todd Harmond, vice president for finance and operations of the e-book service Scribd, which uses Zenefits to offer Kaiser Permanente and Anthem health insurance plans to its 85 employees. “Unless something else goes really wrong with Zenefits, we’ll stick with them for a while,” says BlogMutt’s Yates. “It’s too much of a hassle to switch.”