Motorola Challenges Apple With a New Moto 360 Smartwatch: With the second generation collection of Moto 360 smartwatches, Motorola is doubling down on design while claiming that it has drastically improved on the technical side, too. The new Moto 360 isn't a single watch with a few small variations, as the first edition was. This watch comes in three basic variations, each with a number of customizable details. Two watches are intended for men, one that's 46 millimeters across and a second that's 42mm. They take 24mm and 20mm straps, respectably. Because the watches have lugs this year (the bits that jut out to hold the strap), all 360 models can use any properly sized watch straps, not just those from Motorola. There is also a special women's watch, which is still 42mm but uses slimmer 16mm straps to give the illusion of a smaller size. The watches have premium look that comes with a premium price tag: from $299. By comparison, the 2014 Moto 360 currently starts at $149. Since Android Wear now works with the iPhone, Motorola seems to be positioning this smartwatch in direct opposition to the Apple Watch, and doubling the price now puts the Moto 360 in the same bracket as the Apple Watch Sport—and still well below the tariff for the standard Apple Watch.
Twitter CEO Search Gains Urgency as Stock Slips, Executives Exits: Pressure on Twitter’s board is mounting. In the three months since the company started searching for a new chief executive officer, the stock has slipped 22 percent and several product executives have left. A leading internal candidate, according to people close to the board, is interim leader and co-founder Jack Dorsey -- who’s already CEO at a company on the verge of an initial public offering. Twitter’s board didn’t have a succession plan in place when former CEO Dick Costolo departed, even though it wasn’t a surprise exit. That means they’re doing the search with the public knowing it’s happening, opening themselves up to scrutiny about their every move, Pozner said. “The board needs to take some action and communicate it to shareholders,” she said. “There’s a huge amount of uncertainty, which creates a really uncomfortable feeling for shareholders and internal stakeholders.” Twitter’s share price has been lingering for the past month around the $26 price investors paid in its initial public offering in November 2013. Part of the selloff was triggered by Dorsey, who bluntly stated after the company’s second-quarter earnings report in July that it will take a while before Twitter is able to reverse a slowdown in growth. He called its product performance “unacceptable.”
Amazon's 'Dash' button now effectively free: Amazon said its 'Dash' button, which allows customers to place orders instantly, will now be effectively free. The company's Prime members can now buy the button for $4.99 and get the amount discounted on their first purchase using the button, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday. The button will now be available to all Prime members - those paying $99 a year for two-day delivery and other benefits. The company said it will add 11 more brands to the button, bringing the total to 29. The 'Dash' button, launched earlier this year, allows Amazon's Prime members to order a product with just a push, using a WiFi connection, and can be hung or hooked anywhere in the home.
Twitter announces global expansion of self-service ads platform: Microblogging website operator Twitter Inc said it had expanded its self-service ads platform to more than 200 countries and territories from 33 countries. Small and medium-sized businesses can now reach their target audiences on Twitter in 15 languages, Twitter said in a blog post on Wednesday. The company said it had about 100,000 advertisers.
Capillary raises $45M from Warburg Pincus, others: Bangalore-based Capillary Technologies, a SaaS-based CRM solutions provider, has secured around $45 million in a fresh round of funding led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Its existing investors Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners have also participated in the round. It added that the fresh round of investment has more than doubled the valuation of the company to about Rs 1,200 crore and that Capillary has already used the funds to acquire two startups: MartJack, a digital commerce solution company owned by Reasoning Global eApplications and machine learning startup Ruaha Labs. The company had also picked up a minority stake in customer satisfaction management firm CloudCherry recently. Capillary was set up in August 2008 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Reddy, Krishna Mehra and Ajay Modani. It is into cloud-based software solutions that help retailers engage with customers through mobile, social and in-store channels.
Will GIF-Powered Emails Get More People RSVP'ing for Events? Splash and Giphy say the numbers point to yes: GIFs have already overtaken brands' social media and online video. Next up: Email marketing. Event-planning platform Splash and Giphy—a GIF library and search engine—are teaming up today to let marketers plug GIFs into the emails and landing pages that Splash uses to organize gatherings and RSVP lists. Crafting perfect email and event campaigns that get someone's attention is tough these days, and Splash CEO Ben Hindman said the partnership will shake up the dry and un-personalized campaigns marketers are known for sending clients. Adding GIFs to emails isn't particularly new (Giphy also plugs into Gmail and MailChimp's software) but it does show how event marketers are pulling in all kinds of bells and whistles to cut through the massive clutter of emails. Giphy's software is baked into Splash so that users upload a GIF to an email or landing page template like they would add a photo. Then they type in a keyword to find an animated loop. The partnership is the latest in a surprisingly long list of ways that brands can plug Giphy loops into their marketing. Here are four other ways digital marketers can add GIFs to their campaigns through Giphy's tools: 1. Mobile messaging: Giphy powers the animated loops inside apps like Kik, Facebook Messenger and Verizon Messages. 2. Wordpress and RebelMouse: Giphy's technology plugs into blog posts. 3. TV: Brands can turn on Giphy TV to stitch loops together so that they take over an entire browser window to scroll endlessly. 4. Twitch: Game-minded marketers can talk to fans in chat rooms with animated videos.
As Employees Flee Twitter and Shares Continue to Slump; Drop to Lowest Since IPO May Lure Takeover Offers: Shares slumped 5.6 percent on Monday to $29.27, the lowest price since the company’s November 2013 initial public offering. The move pushed Twitter below $20 billion in market value, making it more attractive to potential acquirers like Google, investors said. Last week, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s interim chief executive officer and co-founder, and Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto warned that it will be a while before the social media company stems a slowdown in user growth. They also noted that demand from advertisers missed their expectations. Meanwhile, Twitter is conducting a search to replace former CEO Dick Costolo. “Their comments could be suppressing the stock price for a reason, because their strategy is to be acquired,” said Jeff Sica, president of Sica Wealth Management, who has clients who hold Twitter. “I’m advising anyone that owns Twitter to hold, because I do think at this point there’s going to be an acquisition.” Even at these levels, Twitter with a small premium would probably be the largest acquisition ever for Google or Facebook Inc. Facebook last year acquired WhatsApp Inc., a messaging application, for $22 billion. Twitter has been increasing its ties with Google, making a deal earlier this year to display tweets in search results and partnering with Google’s Doubleclick ad product. Twitter’s price would have to drop to $11.16 a share, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For Facebook’s earnings to benefit, Twitter shares would only need to drop to $20.78. Competitors are looking at some of Twitter’s assets: its employees. Two product executives announced their departures on July 28, the same day the company reported earnings. Todd Jackson, who helped Twitter debut its Highlights product, left for Dropbox Inc., while Christian Oestlien, who helped drive growth, is going to Google’s YouTube. Trevor O’Brien, also in product leadership, announced his departure a few days later. Without a clear path to a leader who can help Twitter accelerate user growth, “the only strategy that will work for them is if they’re acquired”.
Alibaba Declines as Chinese ADRs Retreat on Economic Slowdown; Down 35% from Post-IPO High: Alibaba, China’s biggest online retailer, slid for an eighth day as fresh data highlighting China’s weakening economy stoked concern that the company’s sales growth is slowing. The American depositary receipts retreated 0.4 percent to $77.99 in New York on Monday, capping the longest slump since the company’s September debut. The drop pushed Alibaba’s decline from its high in November to 35 percent. Alibaba sold ADRs for $68 apiece in a record $25 billion initial public offering on Sept. 18. They had climbed as much as 75 percent in the following two months to a record high of $119.15 in November. The company will probably report a 34 percent increase in sales for the June quarter, down from 46 percent in the same period last year, according to the average estimate of 26 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. LightInTheBox, a web-based retailer of China-made goods to overseas markets, tumbled 9.3 percent to $3.63, the lowest since its U.S. listing in June 2013. Jumei International, which sells beauty products online, sank 6.7 percent to $17.46, dropping the most in four weeks.
Apple Falls Below Its 200-Day Moving Average for First Time Since 2013: The bull market’s base just lost another brick. Amid a collapse in breadth and the threat of falling earnings, add a correction in Apple shares to the concerns facing investors. The iPhone maker slipped 2.4 percent to $118.44 today, extending its decline since February to 11 percent and dropping below another chart threshold, its 200-day moving average, for the first time since 2013. The iPhone maker’s shares had spent 471 sessions above the 200-day threshold, last falling below it in September 2013. It entered a correction territory today after coming within 40 cents of one on July 9 before rallying.
For Mobile Messaging, GIFs Prove to Be Worth at Least a Thousand Words: Just as smartphones drove the rise of emoji, mobile devices are propelling GIFs into a more widespread form of instant visual-messaging. Tumblr, the blogging site, said it had 23 million GIFs posted to its site every day. In March, Facebook began supporting GIFs, with more than five million of the animations sent daily through its messaging app. Slack, the workplace collaboration start-up, says it counts more than two million GIF integrations each month. In total, online searches for GIFs have risen by a factor of nine since mid-2012, according to Experian Marketing Services, an industry research firm. While the brief animations are not new — GIFs were created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite, a programmer at CompuServe, and have been omnipresent on desktops — major improvements in mobile technology and a surge of messaging applications are pushing GIFs to break out beyond the web forums of old. They have become a mainstream form of digital expression, a way to relay complex feelings and thoughts in ways beyond words and even photographs, making them hugely popular with young audiences who never leave home without their smartphones. The animated snippets are being spread on mobile devices by a new generation of GIF start-ups, which are backed by venture capital. Riffsy, which makes the GIF keyboard for smartphones, just raised $10 million. Giphy, which provides a search engine for a vast library of GIFs, has raised more than $23 million. And there are numerous other companies, like Imgur, PopKey and Kanvas, all eager to snip and remix video clips into short, ready-to-share packages. For now, few of these companies are profiting from GIFs as they focus on propagating the use of the clips. But the start-ups see potential for profit, especially as brands increasingly integrate the animations into advertising and other marketing. GIFs are marked by certain characteristics. They are typically a few seconds long, soundless and play in a loop. They are often culled from movie and TV clips and can include text on top of the animated image. Their use has seeped into professional venues, frequently replacing text. Google recently sent a reporter a GIF of a toddler throwing her hands up in response to a question. Digital publications like BuzzFeed regularly use GIFs as a storytelling method. And office workers like Jerrod Howlett, an employee at Google, regularly respond to email with GIFs. “I’m not that great with words,” Mr. Howlett said. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.”
German Carmakers Buy Nokia’s Here Mapping Unit for $3 Billion: Nokia said that it had sold its Here digital mapping unit to a consortium of German automakers for 2.8 billion euros, or about $3 billion. The announcement signals the latest chapter in Nokia’s transformation, as the company tries to rebound from the demise of its once world-leading mobile phone unit, which was sold to Microsoft last year for about $7.6 billion. As part of the changes, the Finnish company has pared its operations to focus almost entirely on its telecom network infrastructure business, which provides communications equipment to some of the world’s largest carriers. The members of the German consortium said that they would use Nokia’s digital mapping unit for their own autonomous driving plans, but that they would be willing to license the technology to other companies. The sale of Nokia’s mapping unit comes as the Finnish company is close to completing its $16.6 billion acquisition of the French-American telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent. Nokia has received regulatory approval from United States and European antitrust authorities for that deal, but it is still waiting for the go-ahead from Chinese officials. By agreeing to a sale price of roughly $3 billion, the Finnish company is essentially writing off years of research and development, and a series of multibillion acquisitions that had turned Here into a global mapping champion. Those deals include the $8.1 billion purchase in 2007 of Navteq, the maker of digital mapping and navigational software based in Chicago, as Nokia tried to keep pace with other handset makers and mobile operating systems. As digital maps are becoming a crucial focal point of many emerging industries, a number of bidders had expressed interest in Here, including the ride-booking service Uber, which submitted a $3 billion bid for the business before dropping out last month. Other tech giants, including Amazon, the Chinese search engine Baidu and Facebook, also rely on Nokia’s geospatial data for their mapping services. These companies had turned to Here to reduce their reliance on Google — a company that they increasingly compete with for users, engineers and advertising revenue. It will now be up to the German automakers to convince these tech companies that they can continue to offer the same level of digital mapping services that had made Nokia’s unit the main global rival to Google Maps.
