Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 5, 20126

• India rejects Apple's plan to import used iPhones: India has rejected a plan by Apple Inc to import used iPhones, government officials said on Wednesday, a blow to the U.S. tech giant that has been seeking to revive waning sales of its flagship smartphones. Apple sells what it calls refurbished iPhones at a discount in some countries, including the United States. Extending this practice to India would have likely helped it increase its share in one of the world's fastest growing smartphone markets against competitors with much cheaper offerings. But India, which is pushing a 'Make in India' initiative to boost the competitiveness of its manufacturing sector, rejected the proposal citing rules against importing used electronics. Apple's proposal was opposed by domestic phone makers who claim selling refurbished iPhones - devices that have been returned by buyers or repaired to factory condition after damage - would breach India's anti-dumping rules. The Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association had written to India's telecom ministry to stall the move. The news comes at a time when Apple posted its first-ever drop in iPhone sales amid weakness in China, its most important market after the United States. In India, Apple only has about a 2 percent market share but its sales there surged 56 percent in the first three months, driven mainly by cheaper older-generation devices such as the iPhone 5S while demand for the new iPhone SE disappointed. "The 5S' success in India has more to do with affordability of a premium brand than a preference for smaller phones, and the move to the more expensive SE will discourage budget buyers," said Wilmer Ang, an analyst at research firm Canalys. The newly launched iPhone SE retails at 39,000 rupees ($585) in India - almost $200 higher than its U.S. price. To successfully tap into India's smartphone boom - where sales are expected to grow 25 percent this year - Apple will need a better retail presence and cheaper versions of the iPhone given the average smartphone in the country sells for less than$150, according to analysts. Apple, which currently retails in India through local partners, is already seeking government approval to set up its first store in the country.

• Tesla's Wild New Forecast Would Change the Trajectory of an Entire Industry - If Met: Tesla just took the most ambitious automotive production timeline since the Ford Model T and moved it up two years. The company now plans to produce 500,000 electric cars every year starting in 2018. That's 10 times the number of vehicles it produced in 2015, and enough to ensure that all 400,000 customers who put down a $1,000 deposit on the forthcoming Model 3 will qualify for a significant U.S. subsidy. Talk about doubling down—even the original 2020 goal was considered a long shot by Wall Street. This new target would pledge the carmaker to a faster production growth rate than Ford Motor Co. managed in the early 1900s. That's when Henry Ford pioneered the production line with the Model T, the first mass-market combustion-driven car. A century later, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk wants the Model 3 to be its electric grandchild. He's now aiming for close to a million sales by 2020.  BNEF tracked 234,000 electric car sales worldwide last year, of which Tesla made up a fifth of the market, Morsy said. For Tesla to stay on its new track, it would need to produce more cars next year than the entire global electric-car industry made in 2015. Tesla's first mass-produced car, the $35,000 Model 3, will need to come to market on schedule, and with great momentum, in late 2017. Telsa's battery factory in Nevada must flourish, costs must come down, and car-making capacity must scale up at an astonishing rate. For context: Tesla has never managed to hit one of Musk's timelines for a new product launch. Not once. 

• Fitbit shares tank after reporting a weak outlook amid rising competition: Fitbit is not having a good day, with the stock crashing more than 11 percent after reporting its first-quarter results. Here’s the rub: its guidance for the second quarter came in light. Very light. Industry watchers were expecting the company to report earnings around 26 cents per share, while the company put its outlook at earnings between 8 cents per share and 11 cents per share. That’s a pretty big miss, and another indicator that the company will be facing some challenges in the wearable market. Here’s the quick rundown of the report: Devices: 4.8 million units sold. Earnings: 10 cents per share, against analyst estimates of 3 cents per share. Revenue: $505.4 million, against analyst estimates of $443 million. In the past six months, Fitbit shares are down more than 50 percent. Fitbit is facing a ton of increasing competition, not only from Apple with the Apple Watch, but from international manufacturers like Xiaomi and the usual competition from Jawbone. Fitbit’s usual strategy has been to go after the fitness-tracking market with a portfolio of devices, but recently it’s somewhat diverged from that with the launch of a smartwatch. Naturally, given Fitbit’s previous success, a shift in strategy may not be very welcome to investors looking for continued growth in the company — and a strong return. All this has forced Fitbit to find more unique ways to prove to consumers that it is the best option when it comes to fitness tracking. One recent example was an integration with the Amazon Echo, in which users can ask with their voice how they are performing through their Fitbit devices. It’s novel use cases like these that might propel the company above the competition, but so far we haven’t seen any kind of dramatic success on that front.

• Flipkart valuation marked down by two more investors: Two small mutual fund investors at Flipkart have marked down the company’s valuation, joining other investors who believe that India’s largest e-commerce firm is overvalued. Valic Co 1 marked down Flipkart’s value by 29.4% as of February, compared with August 2015, according to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Valic valued Flipkart’s Series D stock at $98 a share in February, down from $139 a share in August.Fidelity Rutland Square Trust II marked down Flipkart’s value by as much as 39.6% as of February, compared with last August, according to a filing with the SEC. Fidelity valued Flipkart’s Series D stock at $82 a share in February, down from $135.8 a share in August. The Economic Times reported about the markdowns earlier on Wednesday. To be sure, Fidelity and Valic hold very small amounts of Flipkart stock. Their holdings together are worth less than $6 million. That’s a minuscule fraction of Flipkart’s overall value. The company last raised $700 million from investors in July last year at a valuation $15 billion. But taken along with other markdowns by Morgan Stanley and T Rowe Price, both of which together own hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Flipkart stock, it confirms the view that Flipkart’s own investors believe the company is overvalued by a significant amount. In late February, Morgan Stanley Institutional Fund Trust, another mutual fund investor in Flipkart, slashed the value of its holdings by as much as 27%. Then, last month, T Rowe Price disclosed in a filing that it cut the value of its stake in Flipkart by 15%.

• Free Code Camp survey reveals demographics of self-taught coders: If you’ve ever wondered who exactly is signing up for all these free learn-at-home coding classes and tutorial websites, Free Code Camp (which is one of them) has kindly surveyed 15,624 users with regard to various basic demographics and some more code-centric items. Some of the stats are expected (few women — around 1 in 5 surveyed) and a few are surprising — for instance, only 18 percent said they’d like to work for a startup. Thirty-eight percent don’t plan on specializing in UX, backend stuff or other specific disciplines, which they might want to revisit later. And they’re all over the world — mostly the U.S., with India a close second — but the long tail comprises 167 more countries.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 23

A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D.: While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls. “It’s remarkable what they can do,” said Blair Hull, a founder of an electronic trading firm who relies on Jane Street to make a market for his recently started E.T.F. “If you look at who provides this kind of liquidity these days, it’s fewer and fewer firms.” It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion. And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital. In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop. Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon). Jane Street was founded at the beginning of the previous decade, when a couple of option traders and a computer expert left Susquehanna to start their own business. Harnessing Ph.D.-toting mathematicians to the most powerful computers money can buy has become the accepted way for hedge funds and banks to get a trading edge these days, but Jane Street takes this marriage of high tech and high intellect to a new level. Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm’s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders. Indeed, new traders must complete a monthlong OCaml boot camp before they start trading. And to the degree that the super-shy Jane Street does has have a public face, it belongs to its chief technology officer, Yaron Minsky, who givesfrequent lectures at Harvard, M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, promoting the firm’s ability to manage risk by developing the best software around.

• A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care: John Costik got the call at the office in 2012. It was his wife, Laura, with terrible news: Their 4-year-old son, Evan, was headed into the emergency room. His blood sugar reading was sky high, about 535 mg/dl, and doctors had discovered he had Type 1 diabetes. The first three days in the hospital were a blur during which the Costiks, engineers in Rochester, received a crash course in managing the basics of diabetes care.For starters, they were told to log their son’s numbers on paper forms. It was their first hint that diabetes management did not occupy a place on technology’s bleeding edge. The methods for guesstimating carbohydrate intake also seemed imprecise, Mr. Costik found, and the process generated a lot of wasted data.“The last thing you want to do is find some form and fill it out,” he said. “You’re really just emotionally trying to cope with it, and that data in that book isn’t necessarily useful to the people with diabetes.” Several months later, Mr. Costik fitted his son with a Dexcom G4 continuous glucose monitor. A hair-thin sensor under Evan’s skin recorded an exact blood sugar reading at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day.But all that data left with Evan every morning when he headed off to day care. Mr. Costik wanted something better: continuous access to his son’s glucose readings.So he examined the device’s software code and wrote a simple program that transmitted the monitoring data to an online spreadsheet he could view on a Web browser, Android mobile phone or, eventually, his Pebble smartwatch. Now, as consumer gadgets weave themselves ever more tightly into everyday life, patients and their families are finding homespun solutions to problems medical-device manufacturers originally did not address. Industry executives say the pace of user-driven innovation was one reason the Food and Drug Administration recently reclassified remote glucose-monitoring devices, hastening approval for new models by big companies like Dexcom and Medtronics. James Wedding, a civil engineer who lives outside Dallas, saw Mr. Costik’s Twitter post and used his code to set up a remote monitor system for his daughter, Carson, who is now 12. Lane Desborough, an engineer in California, got in touch with Mr. Costik after seeing his tweet, ultimately creating an open-source system based in part on Mr. Costik’s code. It allows anyone to hack existing glucose monitors so they transmit readings to the cloud, where they can be read by patients and caregivers.Mr. Desborough called the project Nightscout. The Nightscout group onFacebook, known as CGM in the Cloud, provides free tech support for users trying to improve on monitoring devices.About two dozen users have even started a project called Open APS, in which they are pairing insulin pumps with glucose monitors in an effort to create an open-source artificial pancreas system. These wearable devices, which automate insulin delivery, are being tested in academic settings, but these early adopters are not waiting for the results of those continuing clinical trials.Mr. Costik now works at the Center for Clinical Innovation at the University of Rochester, where he works to improve management options for all patients; Mr. Desborough is now the chief engineer at Bigfoot Biomedical, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that plans to create an artificial pancreas.

• Fitbit Forecasts Miss Estimates on Global Rollout of New Devices: Fitbit's current-quarter profit forecast missed Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, as the wearable fitness device maker aggressively invests in new products, sending its shares down more than 16 percent in after-hours trading. The lackluster guidance overshadowed the company's comfortable quarterly revenue and profit beat in the holiday shopping season. Fitbit has been diversifying its portfolio of colorful wristbands and clippable devices that track calories, sleeping patterns and heart rate, to better compete with rivals as well as to tap new markets and demographies.The company last month unveiled its $200 smartwatch, Blaze, to mixed reviews. Earlier this month, Fitbit announced a new wristband, Alta, to appeal to the more fashion-conscious customer.  Fitbit's net income attributable to common stockholders rose to $64.2 million, or 26 cents per share, in the quarter, from $11.9 million, or 19 cents per share, a year earlier.On an adjusted basis, the company earned 35 cents per share. Revenue nearly doubled to $711.6 million from $370.2 million.Analysts on average had expected a profit of 25 cents and revenue of $647.8 million. Fitbit's revenue forecast of $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion and adjusted profit of $1.08-$1.20 per share for 2016 was largely in line with expectations.Shares of the San Francisco-based company were down 15 percent at $14.04 in after-hours trading on Monday after closing up 5.9 percent.The stock, which has lost nearly 70 percent of its value since hitting a high in August, has been trading below the June IPO price of $20 all this month.

• Amazon Raises Minimum Order Size as It Seeks More Prime Buyers: Amazon.com Inc. is increasing the minimum order size for free shipping to $49 from $35, a step that could encourage more consumers to sign up for Prime, the online retailer’s annual service that includes two-day deliveries. The benefit of getting more people to sign up for Prime services -- for $99 a year -- is that they tend to shop more frequently and spend more money, while access to other perks such as online movies, music and other content helps to keep customers within Amazon’s shopping ecosystem. By encouraging non-Prime customers to spend more on a single order, Seattle-based Amazon is also aiming to reduce costs while boosting profits on each sale. The new threshold follows a 33 percent jump in fulfillment costs -- warehousing, packaging and shipping -- in the fourth quarter, which outpaced a 15 percent increase in product sales. Monday’s price increase is the first since 2013, when Amazon raised the threshold to $35 from $25. Amazon’s new minimum order size for free shipping brings it in line with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s online store, which has a threshold of $50, or free pickup in stores. Target Corp. has a $25 minimum, while it’s $35 at startup Jet.com Inc.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, January 6

• Apple falls on Nikkei report of ~30% iPhone production cuts: Apple is expected to cut production of its latest iPhone models by about 30 percent in the January-March quarter, the Nikkei reported. As inventories of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have piled up since they were launched last September, production will be scaled back to let dealers go through their current stock, the business daily reported. Apple's shares were down 2.2 percent at $102.97 in afternoon trading. The stock has lost about a quarter of its value from record highs in April, reflecting worries over slowing shipments. "This is an eye-opening production cut which speaks to the softer demand that Apple has seen with 6s out of the gates," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said. "The Street was bracing for a cut but the magnitude here is a bit more worrisome." Apple shares fell on the report. Tepid forecast by Apple suppliers such as Jabil Circuit, which manufactures casings for iPhones, and Dialog Semiconductor GmbH in December stoked fears that iPhone shipments could fall for the first time. Wall Street has also tempered its view on the high-flying stock in recent months. Since early December, about a third of the analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters have trimmed their estimates on Apple.

• Stuff from CES that you may actually want to buy: CES, the largest consumer electronics show in the world, kicked off Monday with a sneak peek at what some companies will be exhibiting on the show floor this week. Even with a smaller sampling of exhibitors, there was a dizzying amount of tech to take in -- everything from drones to laser-powered gizmos that promise to regrow your hair. We walked the floor and picked out five items that might be worth buying if they ever get to the market. There is a catch: Like so much of the gadgetry on display at CES, all of these items aren't for sale yet. They also don't have some of the finer details, such as price, worked out yet either. Parrot drones have been a highlight of CES for many years, and this year is no different. The company is showing off a new model called the Parrot Disco, a fixed-wing drone that you can launch by hurling it into the air like a Frisbee. Ili, the wearable translator: This little translator is about the size of a thumb drive, has one button and is described as the world's first wearable translator. The idea is that users speak into the device while holding down the button, let go, and then have the Ili translate into another language in real time. The whole thing is designed to work offline -- so no connection needed. It instead draws on a database of words and phrases stored locally in the device. Stabilo Digipen: Moving from the high-flying to the everyday, Stabilo's Digipen promises to be the modern notetaking instrument of my dreams. Made by an established German pen company, this souped-up ballpoint reads and learns the way you write and converts it into digital text for you. Unlike other smart pens, the Digipen is designed to work with any kind of paper.

• India’s most funded hyperlocal startup Grofers shuts shop in 9 cities: Hyperlocal grocery and fresh food delivery startup Grofers India Pvt Ltd, which ran a massive expansion drive four months ago, has shut down its operations in nine cities. The cities where it has stopped services are Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana, Bhopal, Kochi, Mysore, Nashik, Rajkot, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam. Grofers reportedly withdrew from the nine cities as it didn’t see much uptake even after running massive marketing campaigns. A company spokesperson told Mint that all the employees in these cities are being relocated to other centres. The company’s founder Albinder Dhindsa did not respond to Techcircle.in calls to confirm the development.

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Shows Users Why 10,000-Character Tweets Aren’t So Crazy: Show, don’t tell. It’s a general rule for writers and it was a helpful tool for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Tuesday afternoon just a few hours after Re/code reported that the company is working on a feature that would allow people to send tweets that are 10,000 characters long. (The current limit is 140 characters.) As expected, Twitter users freaked out, so Dorsey tweeted an explanation for the potential change, and he did so in many, many characters. Because Twitter can’t accommodate more than 140 characters in a single tweet, Dorsey shared his much-too-long explanation as a photo instead. This is the closest Twitter has ever come to speaking publicly about the feature, referred to internally as “Beyond 140.” The product could launch as early as March, according to sources, but Dorsey didn’t acknowledge a launch date in his post. It’s clear, though, that Twitter isn’t afraid to make drastic changes to the product in its effort to jump-start user growth and its sagging stock price.

• In reversal of strategy,  Verizon launches auction to sell data centers - sources: Verizon has started a process to sell its data center assets, hoping to fetch more than $2.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, as the U.S. telecommunications conglomerate focuses on its core business. A sale would represent the latest effort by Verizon, the No. 1 U.S. wireless carrier, to streamline its portfolio following a divestment last year of a chunk of its landline business and a portfolio of wireless towers. It would also mark a reversal of its strategy to expand in hosting and colocation services after it acquired data center operator Terremark Worldwide Inc in 2011 for $1.4 billion. The so-called 'colocation' portfolio up for sale includes 48 data centers, and generates annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of around $275 million, one of the people said.

• Fitbit Takes On the Apple Watch With the Blaze - Stock Falls 18% on News: The fitness tracking leader goes for a full-on, fashionable smartwatch. Fitbit has come out swinging by introducing the Blaze, the company's first smartwatch with some fashion sense.  The Blaze isn't a smartwatch that you can weight down with apps or customize to organize your entire digital life. It is primarily meant to be a detailed fitness tracker that can be worn all the time, offering a few additional features for convenience. Apart from interacting with Fitbit's own fitness app, the Blaze can push calendar appointments, calls, and texts, but it doesn't get into the weeds with such things as e-mail or Twitter notifications. The Fitbit Blaze will set you back $200 for the tracker and the rubber strap that's included. Additional rubber straps will cost $30, leather options are $100, and the steel bracelet is the most expensive, at $130. The Fitbit Blaze is now available for pre-order via Fitbit and will go on sale January 6 via Fitbit's larger retailers such at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target in the United States. Global availability isn't yet set, but the Blaze will start rolling out outside the U.S. in March.  After the announcement, shares fell throughout the day before ending down 18 percent. The Fitbit Blaze, starting at around $200, represents not only new competition with smartwatch makers, but also potentially a lack of focus for the company — which investors may be punishing. Fitbit had carved out a strong niche in the fitness tracking market, setting itself up for one of the strongest stock performances from companies that went public last year.

• Expanding push into ad-tech, Oracle Buys Audience Tracking Firm AddThis For Around $200M: Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech. Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories or follow accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and audience tracking technology for online publishers and marketers. AddThis says it currently covers activity data for 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors and over 15 million mobile and desktop web domains. Oracle and AddThis are not disclosing the terms of the deal, but we have been digging around, and sources with knowledge of the company tell us that it was in the region of $100 million to $200 million, closer to the latter. The acquisition underscores a couple of bigger developments in the world of advertising and marketing tech. The first of these is the growing role that Oracle is playing in this area. Oracle says that it will continue to serve existing clients of AddThis, but it is currently evaluating the future product roadmap. More concretely, AddThis will become a part of Oracle’s Data Cloud business, a division that also includes assets from two other recent Oracle acquisitions: BlueKai (advertising data) and Datalogix (marketing data). Taken together, the technology and big data portfolios that Oracle has amassed in this division give the company a strong play for more business from brands and ad firms, as well as from online content companies that want better tools to make better sense of their audiences and to monetise them more effectively. Secondly, the deal points to a wider trend for consolidation in marketing tech and ad tech. While AddThis has been around for more than a decade, it’s interesting to see that it finally made the leap to join a bigger company. On its own, AddThis had developed some interesting, but also somewhat controversial, technology. One example, “canvas fingerprinting,” was being tested by AddThis last year as a potential replacement for cookies, by way of a digital image created by each browser to follow users wherever they went online. As Pro Publica described it, canvas fingerprinting was “extremely persistent” and nearly impossible to block, raising concerns from privacy advocates. It’s not clear whether canvas fingerprinting is something that AddThis uses today, or whether Oracle plans to market the tech in future. AddThis is Oracle’s 96th acquisition.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 3

• Snapchat’s new Terms of Service freaked people out because no one reads them: Snapchat updated its Terms of Service last week, and the Internet freaked out a little bit. Some users interpreted changes to mean the company could now hang on to users' private messages, broadcast them publicly and sell them to third parties. The pushback grew so loud that Snapchat took to its blog Sunday to explain itself, saying that private Snaps and Chats are still automatically deleted from its servers once viewed or expired. But, Snapchat said, its new Terms of Service granted the company "broad license" to user content. The company said those clauses are meant to apply to images and videos users share publicly for its "Live Stories" feature, which may be syndicated across other platforms. The new policy was also expanded to account for its Replay feature, which charges users who want to rewatch videos more than once, the blog post said.

• Instagram is jumping into the curation business, too: Over the weekend, Instagram took a page from the playbook of social media competitors and made a curated stream, based around Halloween videos, that pulled together clips submitted by its users. As Twitter and Snapchat have done before it, Instagram used the stream to highlight unique content on its network that users may not catch if they were just scrolling through their own apps. The trend toward curation makes quite a bit of sense. Sure, part of the fun of being on a real-time social network is being able to jump into the stream at any time and get plugged in to whatever's happening at that moment. But that can be overwhelming for new users, and even more experienced ones who want to zero in on a particular topic. On days such as Halloween — where everyone is posting similar videos for comparison — it seems like a smart thing to do to briefly bring the whole network together.

• Dell eyes $10 billion asset sales ahead of EMC merger: Dell Inc is preparing to sell around $10 billion in non-core assets, including software and services, to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy EMC Corp (EMC.N), according to people familiar with the matter. Dell, which will assume $49.5 billion of debt once the merger with EMC is completed, has communicated the plan to credit rating agencies in recent days, the people said on Monday. Assets Dell could sell include Quest Software, which helps with information technology (IT) management; SonicWall, an e-mail encryption and data security provider; back-up solutions unit AppAssure; as well as IT services provider Perot Systems, the people said. The divestitures will not include Dell's hardware assets such as servers, which are crucial in its quest to dominate the large enterprise market through its merger with EMC, as well as compete more effectively with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), the people added.

• Fitbit Crushes Expectations In Q3, But A Follow-On Equity Offering Drags Its Shares Down: Following the bell, Fitbit announced its third-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $409.3 million, and earnings per share using normal accounting methods of $0.19. The company’s adjusted profit totaled $0.24 per share. The results are notably strong. Investors had expected the company to report a far-slimmer $0.10 adjusted per-share profit off of revenue of just $350.97. Shares in the company, however, are sharply lower in after-hours trading, off nearly 9 percent as of the time of writing. What is going on? Despite a smashing quarter, Fitbit’s equity is getting whacked by what, so far as TechCrunch can tell at current tip, is planned liquidity for current shareholders, a newly announced follow-on offering, and legal friction. Starting with the legal point, Jawbone and Fitbit have a legal back and forth going, with the latest news being a counterclaim filed by the former. Fitbit has a pending patent infringement case on the books, but Jawbone has denied all allegations…using the fun word “frivolous.”

• Google Says Chromebooks and Chrome Operating Systems Aren’t Going Away: Rumors of the demise of the Chrome operating system have not just been exaggerated but are simply untrue, Google said on Monday in a rare public response to an earlier report. A report on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal claimed Google is preparing to merge its Chrome OS, which powers the Web-centric Chromebook laptops, with its mobile OS Android. After the story landed, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s SVP who runs both Android and Chrome, pushed back on it, tweeting that the company is “very committed” to the desktop operating system.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 6

Facebook launches feature to allow businesses to privately message users: Facebook rolled out features Wednesday that enable businesses to privately communicate with customers through messages as part of the social networking company's push to make its Messenger app a stand-alone platform. Businesses can now include a "send message" button in ads that appear in Newsfeed that allow Facebook users to click a button and send messages, which are private. If users post a comment on a business' Facebook page, then the business can privately message that person The features are part of Facebook's efforts to convince more small and medium-sized businesses - especially those in emerging markets, such as India, Brazil and Indonesia - to advertise on its platform. By giving them direct access to customers, the world's largest social network hopes to show that advertising on Facebook directly leads to increased sales. To encourage quick responses, Facebook will award "very responsive to messages" badges on business pages that respond to 90 percent of messages and respond on average within five minutes. People will, however, still be able to block private messages from businesses. The features will be especially valuable in southeast Asia, Facebook wrote in a blog post. About twice as many Thai and Singaporean users use Facebook messages to communicate with businesses each month and most Southeast Asia users follow some company pages.

Twitter Will Offer ‘Buy’ Buttons to as Many as 100,000 Merchants With New Shopify Deal: The social network is in the process of integrating with Shopify and other e-commerce software companies to offer its Buy buttons to a much wider range of businesses, big and small, according to multiple sources. Shopify alone has somewhere around 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that use its software to run their online shops. With a Twitter deal, those businesses would be able to sell their wares within tweets using Shopify’s software. Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have all been adding Buy buttons to their platforms over the last year, as they try to build new revenue streams from their giant audiences and take advantage of people’s interest in buying items through their platforms. But since those three giants don’t — or can’t — integrate directly with every business that wants to sell goods on their platforms, they are turning to companies like Shopify to help. Pinterest is working with Shopify as well as Demandware, which runs online shops for some bigger brands and retailers like Michael’s and Cole Haan. Facebook, too, is working exclusively with Shopify merchants in the beta tests for its own Buy button. When Twitter’s Buy button initiative first launched last year, the company was working with smaller e-commerce software providers like Fancy and Gumroad. So a deal with Shopify at this point has essentially become table stakes for these platforms. But it certainly does not guarantee success. It’s not proven that people want to shop on these social platforms, nor that all these merchants want to sell on social media platforms. And small merchants without strong followings on these networks may have to turn to advertisements to promote their products more broadly.

GoDaddy forecasts current-quarter revenue below estimates: Web-hosting company GoDaddy Inc forecast current-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates after a comfortable beat, sending its shares down 5 percent in after-market trading. GoDaddy on Wednesday forecast revenue in the range of $405 million-$410 million for the third quarter ending September 30. The company, which manages about 60 million Internet domains, or about a fifth of the world's total, has been investing heavily to expand into new markets. GoDaddy's revenue rose 16.5 percent to $394.5 million, beating the average analyst estimate of $392.9 million. Total costs and operating expenses rose 20 percent to $428.1 million. General and administrative expenses included about $30 million in IPO-related costs, Wagner said. GoDaddy had a blockbuster debut on April 1, with investors snapping up its shares betting that the company can grow further by providing tools to small businesses. The net loss attributable to the company narrowed to $29.8 million from $37.6 million. GoDaddy's shares closed at $29.47 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. The shares had risen about 47 percent since the market debut.

Tesla Falls on Sales Target Cut to as Few as 50,000 Vehicles: Tesla Motors fell in extended trading after the electric-car maker backed off its full-year vehicle sales forecast. Tesla said it now aims to deliver 50,000 to 55,000 vehicles this year, compared with a previous target of 55,000. The company sees third-quarter production and deliveries of just more than 12,000 vehicles including just a few Model X sport utility vehicles. Reaching the initial target may be a stretch because some interior suppliers might not be able to increase the flow of high-quality parts fast enough to meet the Model X production plan, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on a conference call with analysts. Because the SUV and the existing Model S share the same assembly line, a shortfall by one Model X supplier could slow output of both vehicles. Tesla stock fell 5.8 percent after tumbling as much as 9.3 percent following regular trading. Tesla had gained 21 percent this year through Wednesday’s close, outpacing the 2.4 percent increase by the Russell 1000 Index. Some analysts had been skeptical about Tesla’s plans to increase deliveries by 74 percent this year, especially with so much of the increase coming late in the year.

Fitbit Declines on Margin Concerns in First Post-IPO Report: Fitbit shares dropped as much as 16 percent in late trading after the company, which makes wearable fitness trackers, posted narrower margins in its first earnings report following an initial public offering. Second-quarter gross margin, a measure of profitability, narrowed to 47 percent in the second quarter from 51 percent a year earlier. Revenue more than tripled to $400.4 million, and profit before certain items was 21 cents a share, San Francisco-based Fitbit said Wednesday in a statement. The company, which dominates the market for fitness bands that monitor health data such as activity and sleep patterns, said it sold 4.5 million devices in the quarter. Costs to boost manufacturing capacity as well as slimmer profits on fast-selling newer products led to the gross margin decline, said Dougherty analyst Charles Anderson. Fitbit shares slipped as low as $43.25 following the report, after initially jumping as high as $56.48. They rose 3.9 percent to $51.64 at the close in New York. The company went public on June 17 at $20 a share. “This is a stock that had reached nosebleed levels,” he said. “But it’s hard to argue with a company that’s growing 250 percent.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 18

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• Profitable and Growing Fast, Fitbit Prices I.P.O. at $4.1 Billion Valuation, Above Top of Its Range: Fitbit begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the symbol FIT. The company, which sells popular wearable fitness-tracking devices like the Fitbit Surge bracelet, priced its initial public offering at $20 a share on Wednesday, a dollar above its already heightened price range of $17 to $19 a share. At that level, the company will raise $732 million for itself and its selling stockholders after increasing the number of shares to be sold to 36.6 million from 34.5 million. The price values Fitbit at $4.1 billion. Its debut is a bet that consumers will continue to buy fitness bands as other, more complex smartwatches like the Apple Watch and various Android competitors hit stores. In addition to tracking users’ heart rates and steps, the newer devices offer access to email, text messages and other applications. Fitbit faces another challenge in the form of legal fights from a rival, Jawbone, which filed two lawsuits over the last month. One accuses the company of patent infringement, which could lead to a ban on importing Fitbit devices or important parts. The other accuses Fitbit of poaching employees who then illicitly stole confidential information from their former employer. Fitbit has denied those accusations. Investors for now appear undaunted by those challenges. Last year, Fitbit earned $131.8 million, reversing a nearly $52 million loss in the previous year. Its sales more than tripled during that same period, to $745.4 million.


• GitHub to Seek $2 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round: GitHub, a startup that helps companies and developers build software, is seeking to raise about $200 million in a new Series B round that may value San Francisco-based GitHub about $2 billion. The company works as a social coding platform, where a software developer can display a project and others can contribute. The company says more than 8 million people use the service, and it charges monthly subscriptions to store programming source code.


• Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, California regulators say: California's Labor commission has ruled that an Uber driver was an employee, not a contractor, a potentially costly precedent for the ride-sharing company. Uber unsuccessfully argued to the commission that drivers on its ride-hailing smartphone platform aren't employees, because it doesn't set their hours or force them to pick up riders. The commission ruled that Uber was more than a passive platform connecting drivers and riders. Instead, the commission said in its ruling, Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation,” vetting drivers, setting standards and establishing non-negotiable rates. The company can also kick drivers off the service if customers give them a low rating. Currently, Uber drivers take an 80 percent cut of fares, but they cover their own costs and pay their own taxes. The ruling could set a broad precedent if it is upheld. For Uber, the implications of counting its drivers as employees rather than contractors are substantial. It would suddenly have to pay for employees' health care benefits, worker’s compensation and payroll taxes, and be on the hook for costs like gas and car maintenance.


• Oracle sales, profit miss estimates; shares fall: Shares of Oracle, often seen as a barometer for the technology sector, fell 6 percent to $42.15 in extended trading after the company's earnings report.Revenue fell 5.4 percent to $10.71 billion. Revenue rose 3 percent on a constant currency basis. Net income fell to $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $3.65 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales from Oracle's cloud-computing software and platform service, an area keenly watched by investors, rose 29 percent to $416 million.


• Location Intelligence firm AdNear expands into Europe: Bangalore and Singapore-based AdNear Pte Ltd, which helps brands reach out to audiences by analysing time-bound location data, has ventured into Europe by establishing a beachhead in London. The company has appointed Ken Parnham, former managing director of data privacy management company TrustE, as general manager of Europe. AdNear was founded by Anil Mathews, who is also the company’s CEO, back in 2009. The company’s advertising platform is built on a proprietary hybrid geo-location platform, which helps to provide location awareness on mobile phones without GPS or operator assistance. It serves clients in India, Singapore, Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. AdNear leverages real geo-location, combined with consumer behaviour, to target relevant users within a geo-fence. All ads are displayed within mobile apps and they ensure further engagement as users can find their way to the advertised stores and use coupons among other things. Recently, the company had raised Series B funding of $19 million from Telstra Ventures, Global Brain, Sequoia Capital and JPM Private Equity Group. In November 2012, Adnear had raised $6.3 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners.


• 4 Microsoft Executives to Leave in Top-Level Shake-Up: Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under Satya Nadella, its chief executive. Mr. Nadella said that three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into fewer groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, former chief executive of Nokia, who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, head of its business solutions group. While Microsoft has a long history of bureaucratic reshufflings, they do not typically involve the departure of so many executives at once. Mr. Nadella’s decision to merge several groups into others effectively left a handful of Microsoft executives without clear roles. By far, the most significant of the changes is the merging of devices, which includes Xbox, Surface tablets, smartphones and other hardware products, with the Windows organization under Mr. Myerson. By grouping hardware and operating systems under one leader, the move undoes part of the reorganization by Mr. Ballmer.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday February 27

• Google story#1: Finally, Google will test ads on the Google Play Store: More coverage here and here : Google Inc. plans to show search ads targeting customers who use its application and media store for Android devices under a pilot program, as the company looks for new ways to generate revenue from mobile devices. In the next few weeks, Google will let application developers buy advertising spots that consumers can see when they search for software in the Google Play store, Michael Siliski, a product management director, said in a blog post Thursday. So, a query for coupon or travel options in the marketplace may show a sponsored result at the top of the query page, the Mountain View, California-based company said. Google, grappling with competition from Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., is looking for new ways to boost interest from businesses in advertising on wireless devices, where prices for promotions often are less than they are on desktops. The company’s share of the mobile ad market dropped to 41 percent last year from 46 percent in 2013, according to recent research by EMarketer Inc. “We’ve seen how search ads shown next to organic search results on Google.com can significantly improve content discovery for users and advertisers, both large and small,” Siliski said. “Search ads on Google Play will enable developers to drive more awareness of their apps and provide consumers new ways to discover apps that they otherwise might have missed.” Google, the world’s biggest Internet services company, is looking to expand its mobile ad presence as users favor applications such as those from Priceline Group Inc.’s Kayak on handheld devices, which bypass browser-based ads. The new service aims to bolster its appeal to developers that are looking for new ways to attract new consumers. Smartphones using Android dominate the global market with more than 80 percent of the share in 2014, according to IDC. Separately, the company also announced today it has paid out more than $7 billion to developers of games and apps on Google Play in the past year.

• Quantity and value of data is an overlooked benefit to delaying an IPO: It’s taking longer for startups to get to IPO, but that’s not necessarily bad news for investors in private companies. Why? Because startups today aren’t just valuable for their future exit potential, but for the proprietary data they produce while still private. Market statistics clearly show companies are staying private longer. The average time to IPO has doubled to nine years today from four in 1999, and the median amount raised prior to IPO has increased steadily from $48 million in 2008 to $101 million in 2013. Of the 100 largest VC rounds in history, 90 have occurred in the last five years. There are several reasons startups are staying private longer, including volatile public markets, healthy secondary markets, and a preference by some for mega-M&As. Whatever the reason startups don’t seek IPOs early, there is a real and often overlooked benefit to investors when startups stay private longer – the value of their data.

• Google story#2: Google moifies Search algorithm to increase weight of mobile-friendliness, expand indexing of app deep links: Google today announced two notable changes that will affect the rankings of search results for users accessing Google search on mobile devices. It will now take into consideration a site’s mobile-friendliness as one of its ranking signals, and information from indexed mobile applications will also begin to influence ranking for signed-in users who have the app installed on their smartphone. “As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns,” explains Google in its announcement. The changes follow a number of previous efforts Google has made to improve its search results for mobile users. In 2013, for example, it rolled out ranking changes that would affect sites that were misconfigured for smartphone users, including those frustrating situations where a specific URL would redirect all smartphone users to the website’s mobile homepage instead of their preferred destination. This was common among news sites, in particular, as users would often click a link to read a certain story and would end up landing on the site’s main webpage, the story nowhere to be found. Last summer, meanwhile, Google began flagging sites that wouldn’t display on mobile devices due to the technology they used – like those built with Adobe Flash, which meant they wouldn’t display on iOS devices or Android 4.1 and higher. And in November, Google began adding a “mobile-friendly” label to its search results accessed on mobile devices to indicate they would display well on your smartphone’s small screen, after first testing “warning labels” earlier in the year. It noted at the time it was also testing the use of the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal. In a blog post detailing the changes, the company points website owners to a number of resources that can help them prepare for this shift, including its guide to mobile-friendly sites, its Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, and its Mobile Usability Report. In addition, the company also said it will begin taking advantage of its efforts with deep-linking technology to begin to surface information from mobile apps higher in its search results. Deep links, for those unfamiliar, point to specific pages within mobile applications themselves. That means developers who implement these links in their apps allow Google to index their apps in a similar way as it does websites today.

• The future of health care is a dongle attached to your smartphone: app-based diagnostics are taking off The latest development in this new direct-to-consumer health model is a new breakthrough from a team of biomedical engineering researchers at Columbia University in New York City that makes it possible to test for both HIV and syphilis in 15 minutes after hooking a plastic dongle into your smartphone’s headphone jack. You simply insert a pinprick of blood onto a disposable plastic collector, connect the plastic collector to a microfluidic chip used to analyze the sample and insert the chip with the blood sample into the dongle. Once you’ve logged into an app, your smartphone can start to determine the presence of HIV or syphilis in your blood and display the results on your smartphone’s screen 15 minutes later. More than its ease of use, the cost factor of the dongle is what makes it possible to speculate that this type of smartphone diagnostics could one day lead to a new direct-to-consumer model for health care. The equipment needed to perform a laboratory-quality HIV test can cost upwards of $18,450 apiece. Contrast that to the cost of a cheap plastic dongle, which costs an estimated $34 to make. That makes it possible to imagine a future where tests are faster, simpler and cheaper than anything available today. What makes the lab-on-a-smartphone so innovative is that, even though you’re significantly reducing cost, you’re not sacrificing power. The results delivered by the new device suggest that a full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory. Moreover, in a small field study in Rwanda, the team of researchers found that patient preference for the dongle was 97 percent compared to laboratory-based test

• Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability: Downloading a high-definition movie takes about seven seconds in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, Bucharest and Paris, and people pay as little as $30 a month for that connection. In Los Angeles, New York and Washington, downloading the same movie takes 1.4 minutes for people with the fastest Internet available, and they pay $300 a month for the privilege, according to The Cost of Connectivity, a report published Thursday by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The report compares Internet access in big American cities with access in Europe and Asia. Some surprising smaller American cities — Chattanooga, Tenn.; Kansas City (in both Kansas and Missouri); Lafayette, La.; and Bristol, Va. — tied for speed with the biggest cities abroad. In each, the high-speed Internet provider is not one of the big cable or phone companies that provide Internet to most of the United States, but a city-run network or start-up service. The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem — the lack of competition in the broadband industry. “It’s just very simple economics,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust and communications and was an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission. “The average market has one or two serious Internet providers, and they set their prices at monopoly or duopoly pricing.”

• India Startup Action: Five startups showcased at Techcircle E-commerce Forum 2015: Pumpkart.com: It is an online store for agricultural and domestic pumps. It offers a variety of pumps that include basement toilet pumps, booster pumps, car cleaning pumps, drainage pumps, hydropneumatic pumps, borewell pumps, rainwater pumps, waste water pumps, monoblock pumps, high pressure pumps, solar pumps etc. Crunch Commerce: It extends a layer of m-commerce tools to traditional e-commerce backend. Its flagship product is Crunch Adaptive, a mobile-web platform which works across mobile devices and brings an app like experience in mobile web browser. NGA Technologies Pvt Ltd: It has developed AUTOnCAB, an Android/iOS based mobile application which provides on demand one tap hailing of autorickshaws. The app also calculates distance/fare for a ride. It has the ability to monitor all drivers and rides in real time. Voconow Enterprises: Voconow’s mobile ad-tech product makes static print ads interactive and transactional and transforms them into a sales channel and a revenue centre. It connects the offline print media to the online digital media. In that sense, it operates at the intersection of print and digital. Retail Labs: It has developed Getnow.at which seeks to change how people shop in India by bringing local shopping online. Consumers can order products from stores in their city with guaranteed delivery in six hours. Local stores list their products on our marketplace and the firm handles distribution for them.

• Google story#3: Google Acquires Mobile Startup That Manages Facebook Ads: Google Inc. agreed to acquire Red Hot Labs Inc., a mobile startup that helps companies manage advertising on rival Facebook Inc., bolstering its marketing tools on wireless devices. Red Hot Labs, which provides the Toro service for application developers, will join the mobile ads team at Google, the search giant said, declining to disclose terms of the deal. San Francisco-based Red Hot Labs helps software makers boost their user numbers through Facebook, owner of the world’s largest social-networking service. “With greater resources and distribution now available at our disposal, we’re excited to join Google and continue our mission of making the lives of app developers easier,” the start-up said on its website. Google, expanding beyond its desktop-based tools, is investing in new ways to help companies market on smartphones and tablets as users increasingly access digital services via wireless devices. The Mountain View, California-based company last month reported fourth-quarter sales and profit that missed estimates as its advertising business faced more competition on mobile gadgets.