- 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.)
- 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.
- Uber Valuation Put at $62.5 Billion After a New Investment Round - Tiger Global, Investor in Uber's Rivals, Joins In: Uber’s fund-raising efforts are showing no signs of slowing down. The company, based in San Francisco, is close to completing the raising of a $2.1 billion round of venture capital, according to people briefed on the company’s plans, the company’s single largest round to date. Once completed, the investment will value the company at $62.5 billion, according to three people briefed on the plans, securing Uber’s place as the world’s most valuable private start-up. Tiger Global Management participated in the newest round, led by its partner Lee Fixel, as did T. Rowe Price, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the terms are still private. Talks of the funding plans were previously reported by The New York Times in October. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported the $62.5 billion valuation. Competition is intensifying in the global ride-hailing market, as rivals like Lyft, Didi Kuaidi and other companies raise billions of dollars in to expand as quickly as possible. Lyft, another ride-hailing start-up, is in talks to raise a further $500 million in funding, according to four people briefed on the round, which could value the company at roughly $4 billion. Didi Kuaidi, to date, has raised more than $4 billion in private investment. The participation of Tiger Global, however, is particularly interesting. Tiger Global is an investor in Ola and GrabTaxi, two of Uber’s largest competitors in India and Southeast Asia. It is perhaps the first time a major institutional investor participated in the rounds of both Uber and its major competitors. And on Thursday, Ola and GrabTaxi announced a strategic partnership with Lyft, which is also based in San Francisco and is Uber’s major competitor in the United States.
- Why would anyone want to buy Yahoo? Now, that question may be the key to understanding the parlor game of rumor and conjecture currently swirling around the company. Depending on which speculating analyst you talk to, Verizon, Microsoft, Time Inc., Comcast, AT&T, and even IAC — the company that owns Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com — could all jump in as potential buyers.To be specific, what we're talking about is a possible sale of Yahoo's "core business," but even that term belies the dizzying range of things that Yahoo actually does. Is it a search company? A media company? An advertising company?In truth, it is all of those things, which is one reason we've seen so many names come out of the corporate woodwork. But it turns out there's one metric that makes Yahoo really attractive here: The number of eyeballs that Yahoo commands on a monthly basis.This might seem obvious in an era where clickbait and traffic seem to rule with an iron grip. But if you take Yahoo apart piece by piece, you start to understand why snapping up the company would benefit some firms more than others.Take Microsoft, for instance. It actually tried to buy Yahoo before, in 2008.Microsoft was worried about Google dominating a new market, search. Microsoft tried to build its own competitor, Bing (then known as Windows Live Search), but it didn't take off with users. So Microsoft figured it would buy the No. 2 player, Yahoo, and combine its search and search ad business with Microsoft's.Fast-forward to today, and Bing is no longer lagging behind Yahoo. In fact, what you have is a market where Bing actually covers more than 20 percent of search, compared to Yahoo's 13 percent. Both have been helped, no doubt, by a joint partnership on search.Combining the two might get Microsoft a bit closer to Google (which commands 64 percent of the market), but it still wouldn't be within striking distance. And Microsoft would also be inheriting all of Yahoo's other Internet businesses, potentially slowing the company down as it tries to execute a shift toward offering more cloud services, especially for corporate clients.But let's shift to some of the other names that have been floated. Three are providers of fixed or mobile Internet — four, if you count Softbank, the Japanese parent company of Sprint. That isn't a coincidence; Internet providers increasingly view original online content as the way to turn their networks into cash cows. Carrying data over simple pipes is no longer as lucrative as before.
- Lyft Joins With Asian Rivals to Compete With Uber: The anti-Uber global alliance of ride-hailing companies has now officially taken shape. On Thursday, Lyft, a ride-hailing start-up based in the United States, announced a coalition with GrabTaxi, Ola and Didi Kuaidi, three of the largest ride-hailing companies in Asia. Under a partnership, the companies can operate in one another’s home countries, forging new pathways for each in markets they have yet to tap into. Many of Uber’s competitors are far smaller and operate in just one or two markets. Lyft, which is currently seeking $500 million in funding at a valuation of $4 billion, operates in more than 60 cities in the United States, for instance. By banding together, the companies aim to achieve more scale and more service adoption in relatively short amounts of time. Partnerships are less expensive than having to spend to establish operations in multiple markets. The companies declined to reveal financial details of their partnership. The alliance has been forming over the last few months. In September, Lyft teamed with Didi, the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth, to provide service to Chinese Didi Kuaidi app users who enter the United States. The move also lets Lyft users find rides in China using the Lyft app; the requests are fulfilled by Didi Kuaidi drivers. Ola is a ride-hailing company in India, and GrabTaxi operates in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Under the partnership, Lyft users traveling to India will be able to open the Lyft app there and have local rides supplied by Ola. In Southeast Asian countries, Lyft will have a similar arrangement with GrabTaxi.
Uber Gets Investment From Tata Fund to Expand in India: Tata Capital said a fund it advises will make a “significant investment” in Uber. to help the ride-sharing service expand in India. The investment by Tata Opportunities Fund will allow Uber to benefit from its network in the country, Tata Capital said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday, without elaborating. Tata Capital is part of the $109 billion coffee-to-cars conglomerate with over 100 group firms. The fund typically invests up to $100 million in its deals, its managing partner Padmanabh Sinha said. Uber in July said it would spend $1 billion to fan out to more Indian cities as the ride-hailing company targets to reach 1 million trips per day in the next six to nine months. Microsoft Corp. is said to have agreed to invest about $100 million in Uber valuing it at about $50 billion.
Taxi app GrabTaxi raises $350 million from CIC, others: Taxi-booking app GrabTaxi said it raised over $350 million from investors including sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation, in the Southeast Asian company's largest ever fundraising round. Other investors include hedge fund Coatue Management LLC and China's mobile car-ride hailing company Didi Kuaidi, GrabTaxi said in a statement, adding that it would use the funds to expand its private vehicle hire and motorbike booking services and invest in technology. Singapore-headquartered GrabTaxi competes with the likes of Uber and Rocket Internet's Easy Taxi in the city-state and some of the other Southeast Asian markets in which it operates.
Hacker's Ashley Madison data dump threatens marriages, reputations: Love lives and reputations may be at risk after the release of customer data from infidelity website Ashley Madison, an unprecedented breach of privacy likely to rattle users' attitudes towards the Internet. Hackers dumped a big cache of data containing millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations late on Tuesday, the latest cyber attack to raise concerns about Internet security and data protection. The hacker attack has been a big blow to Toronto-based assignation website firm Avid Life Media, which owns Ashley Madison and has indefinitely postponed the adultery site's IPO plans. The data dump began to make good on the hackers' threat last month to leak nude photos, sexual fantasies, real names and credit card information for as many as 37 million customers worldwide of Ashley Madison, which uses the slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair." The hackers' move to identify members of the marital cheating website appeared aimed at maximum damage to the company, which also runs websites such as Cougarlife.com and EstablishedMen.com, causing public embarrassment to its members, rather than financial gain.
Chinese Consumers are skipping straight from cash to mobile finance: Financial innovation is bubbling up around the globe, but China is where digital banking, investing, and lending have gone mainstream. Technology companies armed with financial apps are challenging banks and other intermediaries for a market with 1.3 billion people and $7.8 trillion of deposits. Tencent’s WeChat (called Weixin in Chinese), Alibaba’s Alipay arm, and Baidu are leading the way with digital wallets that let consumers manage their money via their phones. Traditional banking in China is balky, backward, and inefficient—creating ample opportunities for nimble tech companies such as Alibaba and Baidu. The huge, state-owned banks do some lending to consumers and private businesses, but they typically prefer making loans to state-owned enterprises that provide implicit government guarantees. For consumers, the government banks offer low interest rates on savings accounts, making new online funds and financial products with higher rates attractive. Regulators have indicated they are open to innovation. For one thing, digital banking leaves a trail that cash doesn’t. And it might help the Chinese government get a clearer snapshot of economic activity.
Mood-based playlists: How Spotify reinvented the playlist: Increasingly, music listeners are shifting away from genre labels like Hip-hop, R&B and Jazz, according to Spotify. What they really want is a set of tunes to fit their mood. It took Spotify a great deal of testing and data-crunching to arrive at that revelation. And it isn't stopping there. It's taking what it's gleaned from millions of users' listening habits to craft a new kind of song entirely: One that intensifies along with your running workout, matching its beats to your precise pace. When you speed up, it speeds up. When you slow down, it does, too. When Spotify began mixing its own playlists and tagging them ("Focus" for people who needed music to work to, or "Dinnertime Acoustic" for unwinding) it noticed a big uptick in interest, particularly when mood-based playlists were displayed right beside a traditional genre, according to Mark Silverstein, Spotify's head of product, tech and policy. Mood-based playlists aren't just different collections of songs; in the case of Spotify's commuting playlists, the company will occasionally mix in news, weather reports, even audio clips of Jimmy Fallon for some comedic diversity. As a result, fewer people began selecting genre playlists, and many more began opting for the mood-based playlists. And that carried over into the playlists people were making for themselves. That prompted Spotify to begin thinking about running more closely. For years, scientists have theorized about a link between music and exercise. One 2007 study suggested that fast, loud music was associated with faster running speeds and an increased heart rate. Another found in 2011 that music helped triathlon runners stave off exhaustion and run nearly 20 percent longer than their peers who ran in silence.
Snapchat’s leaked financials show just how big a bullet Facebook dodged: Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.: People are all abuzz about Snapchat's financials, which were leaked online Wednesday. If you haven't seen them, the outlook isn't good: Snapchat lost $128 million during the first 11 months of 2014. And it took in just $3 million in revenue over the same period, according to records obtained by Gawker. It's clear whom the leaked numbers hurt the most: chief executive Evan Spiegel and his investors. But if there's a winner in all this, it's Mark Zuckerberg. Snapchat, of course, was the company that famously rebuffed Facebook's offer of a $3 billion acquisition. Spiegel could have walked away with a huge sum of money. Instead, he's managing a struggling business that — almost four years, a big data breach and a Federal Trade Commission settlement later — still lacks a clear road to profitability. There's also nothing particularly surprising about a startup losing money; it would be unreasonable to expect massive profits right out of the gate. But of course, Snapchat has been out of the gate for some time now, and it's part of an ecosystem that's only grown more crowded and less compelling as a representation of The Future. Snapchat is also struggling because it's working in a market that's grown increasingly commoditized. There's an app for everything these days. Tell the average consumer you've come up with a hot new app and they're as likely to roll their eyes as to download it. Snapchat may be valued at $15 billion, but it's also part of a recent explosion in so-called "unicorns" (companies valued at $1 billion or more) that some venture capitalists think is unsustainable. Snapchat may be the best $3 billion Facebook never spent.
Adoption of ad blockers is rising steeply, and could have serious consequences for the online advertising industry: Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.But in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail. In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast, increasing 41 percent globally in the last year. Today ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to see ads on the iPhone’s version of Safari and possibly in other apps that open web links. PageFair also sells technology that allows web publishers to determine if users are running blocking software — and then serves them ads anyway, going around the blockers. PageFair’s software, which Mr. Blanchfield said is currently being tested with a number of large websites, circumvents ad blocking by using “low-level networking” technology that he declined to detail in order to stay ahead of ad companies. Showing ads to people who have downloaded ad blockers sounds a little spammy. But in a twist, it may also lead to better ads. Here’s how: PageFair’s canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. That means the ads won’t feature animations, they won’t block content, and they won’t load “trackers” that monitor and report back to some unknown server what you do on a web page.
Saavn partners with Twitter - will play requests tweeted to @SaavnRadio, other social features coming: Saavn is upping its social game after it partnered with Twitter to introduce a tweet-powered radio station for its users. Saavn launched its radio mode one year ago, and now it is taking requests from users who tweet to the @SaavnRadio account. The station will also mix in tracks that Saavn users are sharing to Twitter from the service, although the company said specific requests will be prioritized over social shares. Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra told TechCrunch in an interview that the radio feature already accounts for over half of all activity on the service and, since a large number of users are already active on Twitter, the union was a no-brainer for him. “Music streaming has always been an inherently social service, we [at Saavn] already see lots of activity from users worldwide and identified a natural opportunity to create a radio station. This puts the power of programming into our users’ hands,” he said. Malhotra also hinted that Saavn is preparing more social features next year, but he said that these new releases will be within the Saavn service itself, such as collaborative playlists.
Amazon maybe on the hook for in-app purchases made by kids without parental authorization - burden of proof rests with Amazon: A federal judge won't dismiss the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Amazon over the company's practice of billing parents for in-app purchases their children made without parental approval. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon failed to stop children from spending millions of dollars of their parents' money for virtual items in online games and other apps on devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. Some of these individual purchases cost as much as $100 each. Amazon argues that it adequately warns customers when an app allows for in-app purchases. It also says that the FTC couldn't prove that the bills that the kids racked up were "unauthorized" by parents. But Judge John C. Coughenour disagreed with that reasoning Monday, saying Amazon may still have violated federal laws against unfair billing, whether the charges were authorized or not. In any event, Coughenour added, it's Amazon's responsibility to prove that the charges were authorized, and it has not done that.
SoftBank Invests $250M In GrabTaxi, Uber’s Archrival In Southeast Asia; valuation > $1B: Neither party has confirmed what the deal values GrabTaxi at, but the company’s valuation is likely to exceed the $1 billion mark. The duo did confirm that SoftBank has become GrabTaxi’s largest investor. The round is the highest raise for a startup in Southeast Asia to date — Rocket Internet companies aside — and it is GrabTaxi’s fourth funding activity this calendar year, taking it past $320 million in capital from investors. GrabTaxi’s previous $65 million round closed in October and was led by Tiger Global — which also invested in Uber rival Ola — while GGV Capital led a $15 million raise in May. Its $10 million-plus Series A was announced in April. GrabTaxi was founded in Malaysia in 2012, has over 500 staff and is live in 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Its core offering is a service that connects registered taxis with would-be passengers via its app — thus working with the existing industry rather than against it — but it also offers an Uber-like private car service and is trialling motorbike taxis in Vietnam.
Uber's take on hiring tech talent: tie up with a collective - then hire the team and open an engineering office around them: To spearhead its mobile growth, Uber is setting up a mobile development shop in Amsterdam, led by one of its earliest employees and staffed by a set of new hires: a team of Dutch developers who originally worked on Uber’s Spotify integration and have served as advisors to the company since 2009. Uber has effectively taken on 10 former employees from Dutch firm Moop.me, which effectively functions as a collective of engineers and designers. Uber has not acquired the whole agency, because Moop’s people have also taken on other projects that have very little synergy with what Uber is today. Those projects, and Moop, will continue.
