Daily Tech Snippet: Monday October 26

• Big headlines from last week: Smashing earnings from  Alphabet (the new Google), Amazon and Microsoft. Markets loved Google for lower spending and a share buyback; and Microsoft and Amazon for gushers of cash from their cloud businesses. Amazon Posts an Unexpected Profit, and Its Shares Soar; Microsoft Earnings Climb, Lifted by Strong Growth in Cloud Computing; Google Announces Stock Buyback as Earnings Rise. 

• Twitter's Jack Dorsey gave back a third of his stock to Twitter employees to lift morale. 

• Google's first earnings amid a change of guard led to this headline: The New Google: ‘All the Assholes Have Left’

• Zuckerberg Flies to India, Where Facebook’s Web Access for All Has Been a Tough Sell: The Internet.org suite, rebranded last month as Free Basics, is now in 25 countries, from Indonesia to Panama. Facebook is investing heavily in other parts of the project, including experiments to deliver cheap Wi-Fi to remote villages and to beam Internet service from high-flying drones. Mr. Zuckerberg is also determined to win over the Indian public. Last month, he hosted a live-streamed chat with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And this week, Mr. Zuckerberg will be in New Delhi, where he will take questions from some of Facebook’s 130 million Indian users. Internet.org’s free services — which include news articles, health and job information and a text-only version of Facebook — are deliberately stripped down to minimize data use and the cost to the phone company. Facebook says the primary goal is to show people what the Internet is all about. But many Indians want more and complain that, contrary to its altruistic claims, the project is simply a way to get them onto Facebook and to sign up for paid plans from Reliance. Internet activists have also attacked Facebook, accusing it of cherry-picking partners to include in its walled garden rather than simply offering a small amount of free access to the whole Internet. Their concerns have struck a chord with the Indian government, which is considering new rules that would govern such free services. The magnitude of the task ahead was apparent during a reporter’s visit in August to Dharavi, home to as many as a million of Mumbai’s poor. Several billboards advertised Freenet, Reliance’s version of Internet.org. But in the neighborhood’s narrow alleys, where rivulets of raw sewage competed with sandaled feet, there was little evidence that anyone had taken notice. At Yahoo Mobilewala, a nearby phone shop named in honor of the American Internet company, the owner, Rizwan Khan, offered service from every major carrier. But his stack of Reliance chips — each in a blue Freenet envelope that said “Go free Facebook” — was gathering dust in its display case.

• Rumor: Uber Refueling Its Warchest Yet Again, At A Valuation Of Up To $70B: Another month, another billion for Uber… The ride-hailing business is reportedly raising yet again — planning to raise close to $1 billion in new investment according to the NYT citing “people close to the matter”, with investors looking at a valuation of between $60 billion and $70 billion for the six-year-old startup. If the NYT’s report is on the money, it comes mere months after the WSJ reported Uber had raised almost $1 billion in new financing, with a valuation then, in July, of more than $50 billion.

• Facebook updates its search feature to drive more conversation: On Thursday, Facebook announced that it's making a few updates to the way search works on the site to make it easier than ever to find conversations running through your social circle. In a company blog post, Facebook said that it wants to make search a better tool for sparking conversation on the social network. For example, public posts or posts made by your friends will begin showing up in search results, as will what Facebook calls "public conversations." Basically, that enables Facebook to become a place where people can more easily dip into discussions about the topic of the day. "When a link gets shared widely on Facebook, it often anchors an interesting public conversation," the company said in a post. "With one tap, you can find public posts about a link, see popular quotes and phrases mentioned in these posts, and check out an aggregate overview of sentiment." So if you found yourself completely perplexed by "pizza rat" or "pirate cat" or, you know, "Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearing," you should be able to hop into Facebook and look up what your friends and others are saying about it. The updates to search will start rolling out for its U.S. English users Thursday, Facebook said, with more plans for search  in the pipeline.

• YouTube has a new music service... What is YouTube Music? YouTube Music is a new app from Google that lets you specifically search for music on the site. That means you get more focused results — a search for "Prince," for example, won't bring up videos about royalty. Well, not of the non-musical variety, anyway. The app will also suggest other songs that you may like, based on your preferences. Doesn't YouTube already have a music service? You may remember that YouTube previously launched a service called YouTube Music Key, which was in an open beta, and seems to have been discontinued in light of the new service. how does this work with YouTube's new subscription service, YouTube Red? Subscribing to YouTube Red, Google's new ad-free subscription service, will get you access to ad-free versions of YouTube, YouTube Gaming and YouTube Music, plus Google Play Music. That will cost you $10 per month if you're an Android user and $13 per month if you're on iOS. You will be able to use the YouTube Music app for free, but those who don't pay will still see ads and not have access to some of the more advanced features. How does this stack up against other services? You could always listen to YouTube, with ads, for free, so why would you pay for that? There are a few perks that may convince you. For one, you no longer have to leave the soundtrack of your day up to the whim of the auto-play algorithm or take the time to actually make your own playlists. Plus, on mobile, you couldn't just keep it running in the background — if you wanted to listen to YouTube, that was all you were going to do. YouTube Music fixes all of these problems. Can I download it now? Not yet. You will have to wait a little while. Although YouTube Red will launch next Thursday, the Music portion of it is scheduled to be out only by the end of the year.

• ..and that caused Disney's ESPN to withdraw content from YouTube: Walt Disney Co's sports network ESPN said it will not make its content available on YouTube, due to the recently announced ad-free subscription-based offering coined YouTube Red. ESPN would not be part of the subscription service at launch due to "rights and legal" issues, a YouTube spokeswoman told Reuters.

• Microsoft Goes Upscale With Fifth Avenue Flagship Store: Most of the luxury brands on the storefronts of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, one of the world’s most famous shopping thoroughfares, seem to belong together, like the notes of a song. There are Tiffany & Company, Gucci, Armani, Valentino, Rolex and — cue the sound of a record needle sliding off vinyl — Microsoft? Yes, the company that brought us Windows and Office is opening a store on the street that brought us $5,000 handbags and $20,000 watches. The doors of the striking new flagship Microsoft Store will open to the public on Monday. It’s an expensive gamble on a retail strategy that is still a long way from paying off. It does not take a detective to see that the foot traffic is often light at the Microsoft stores the company has opened — the Fifth Avenue store will be its 113th — over the last six years. That’s a contrast with the jamborees usually found over at Apple’s stores, inevitably a few blocks away or across the mall from Microsoft’s electronics boutiques. I got a preview tour of the store last week. It’s clear the building renovation cost a fortune, though Microsoft executives wouldn’t say how much. The company gutted a building from the 1930s that was previously a Fendi store, replacing all but the top of its facade with huge sheets of glass. Walking into the store, what hits you first are the Microsoft devices arrayed on large open tables in the middle of the room. There is a collection of Surface Books, the company’s first laptop, which has received positive reviews and goes on sale Monday. Nearby is the Surface Pro 4, the latest version of the company’s popular tablet computer. An Xbox set up in the front corner of the store — an area Microsoft calls the living room — lets people play Halo 5: Guardians, the science-fiction shooter game that goes on sale Tuesday. Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, is showing more patience with the company’s stores than he has with other unfulfilled initiatives begun under his predecessor, Steven A. Ballmer. Mr. Nadella shut down a Microsoft group that made television shows for people with Xboxes, and he cut the staff working on Microsoft’s phone hardware to a fraction of its former size. Why do Microsoft Stores survive? The bricks-and-mortar alternatives for showing new Microsoft products in their best light are not great. The number of electronics stores has dwindled, leaving just one giant in the United States, Best Buy. And while the stores of wireless carriers are good for putting smartphones in front of the public, category-bending tablets and laptops often require explanations from more-trained specialists.

• Hackers Demand Ransom From TalkTalk, British Telecom Firm ...BAE Hired to Investigate: The chief executive of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications provider, said on Friday that she had received a ransom demand from hackers who had claimed responsibility for stealing data on some of the company’s four million customers. TalkTalk, which offers cable and fixed-line services in Britain, said local authorities had opened a criminal investigation into the widespread data breach. The hackers may have gained access to personal data on the company’s customers, including sensitive information like credit card details, dates of birth and addresses. TalkTalk’s shares fell as much as 11 percent in morning trading in London, but recovered by the afternoon and were down 2.3 percent in midafternoon trading. Despite the claims of responsibility, it remained unclear whether the group that had contacted TalkTalk was behind the breach or whether the ransom demands were credible. Yet TalkTalk’s data breach — the third successful attack on the company in the past 12 months — is the latest in a number of online hackings that have affected a wide range of companies, including Target, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase. It also potentially represents a high-profile example of hackers’ efforts to ransom stolen online data to companies or individuals. Such tactics, commonly known as ransomware, have often involved hackers encrypting people’s computer data and holding it hostage until a fee is paid. In certain instances, hackers have also stolen data directly from companies and demanded payment for not publishing the material online.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 22

• Uber’s Carpool Version, UberPool, Lands in India Before Palo Alto: Uber’s taking UberPool global, testing it soon in Bangalore, India. This is one of the first times the company has offered its carpooling version in another country (it’s also in France). Funnily enough, India will have access to UberPool before many suburban Uber markets in the United States like Palo Alto and San Jose. It’s possible the company plans to focus UberPool in dense cities, where it’s more likely to find matches between passengers heading the same way, instead of sprawling suburbs. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said recently at the Salesforce conference that UberPool isn’t as profitable as its original UberX service. UberPool in India might face some major challenges. GPS and mapping tools are a different beast in the South Asian country, where the city landscape changes daily, roads start and stop in unexpected places and businesses launch and disappear unexpectedly. With a population of 4.3 million — by comparison, San Francisco is at 1 million — Bangalore is known for major traffic issues. UberPool requires picking up people from different destinations quickly and efficiently so carpooling doesn’t add too much more time to a person’s commute. It’s a tough enough problem in the U.S.; navigating the maze of streets and traffic in India might be even harder. Uber will also be taking on its competitors — sources tell Re/code that Ola Cabs is launching its carpool version, Ola Share, in five cities soon. Long distance travel app BlaBlaCar, which offers a more traditional form of carpooling, is already live in India.

• Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over Profit: Many technology start-ups aim to become “unicorns,” the companies that get valued at $1 billion or more on their way to probable vast riches. Yancey Strickler and Perry Chen have no interest in that. As co-founders of Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding website that lets people raise money to help fund all manner of projects, including cooking gadgets and movies, Mr. Strickler and Mr. Chen could have tried to take their company public or sell it, earning millions of dollars for themselves and other shareholders. Instead, they announced on Sunday that Kickstarter was reincorporating as a “public benefit corporation,” a legal change they said would ensure that money — or the promise of it — would not corrupt their company’s mission of enabling creative projects to be funded. Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013. Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the public (such as Kickstarter’s mission to “help bring creative projects to life”) and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact. Kickstarter’s move builds upon its decision last year to become a B Corporation, a voluntary designation certified by a nonprofit group called B Lab. To become a B Corp, companies must meet rigorous environmental and social-responsibility standards, which they report annually to shareholders — though taking on the status has no legal impact. Other companies, including the e-commerce site Etsy, which went public in April, and Warby Parker, the eyeglasses retailer, have also opted to become B Corps.

• China cyber espionage is more than an irritant, must stop: U.S. U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice on Monday issued a stern warning to China before President Xi Jinping's visit that state-sponsored cyber espionage must stop, calling it a national security concern and critical factor in U.S.-China relations. "This isn't a mild irritation, it's an economic and national security concern to the United States," she said during remarks at George Washington University. "It puts enormous strain on our bilateral relationship, and it is a critical factor in determining the future trajectory of U.S.-China ties." President Barack Obama and Xi are expected to have an intense back-and-forth about the issue when the Chinese leader comes to the White House this week. "Cyber-enabled espionage that targets personal and corporate information for the economic gain of businesses undermines our long-term economic cooperation and it needs to stop," Rice said.

• Zumper: One-Third Of San Francisco’s Rent Is Attributable To VC Funding: Zumper, a venture-backed startup that focuses on creating a more efficient and transparent apartment rental marketplace, ran a study of housing costs in tech hubs across the United States. They’re arguing that one-third of San Francisco’s rents are attributable to venture capital funding. Last year, venture firms invested $49 billion across the United States. The vast majority of it, or 78 percent, went to just 10 American cities. The company looked at 3 million active listings across the United States last year. The study, done by the company’s housing economist and MBA student Andrew Duboff, isolated for factors including population, median household income, median home values, rental housing vacancy rates, and impact of local rent control ordinances. The Zumper study did not account for zoning regulations. “It was tough to isolate an apples-to-apples comparison for zoning regulations, so we ended up not including it,” said Devin O’Brien, who heads up marketing for Zumper. “That being said, vacancy rates does include a lot of this as a secondary measure. However, at the end of the day, we had an adjusted R-squared correlation of 0.83 for venture capital investment. It’s very strong.” Another study last year from UC Berkeley economics professor Enrico Moretti and University of Chicago’s Chang-Tai Hsieh argued zoning regulations are incredibly costly to the American economy. They found that if highly-productive cities like New York City, Boston and San Francisco had a more elastic housing supply, it could add 9.5 percent to the U.S. GDP.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September, 21

• Apple's iOS App Store suffers first major attack: Apple said on Sunday it is cleaning up its iOS App Store to remove malicious iPhone and iPad programs identified in the first large-scale attack on the popular mobile software outlet. The company disclosed the effort after several cyber security firms reported finding a malicious program dubbed XcodeGhost that was embedded in hundreds of legitimate apps. It is the first reported case of large numbers of malicious software programs making their way past Apple's stringent app review process. Prior to this attack, a total of just five malicious apps had ever been found in the App Store. The hackers embedded the malicious code in these apps by convincing developers of legitimate software to use a tainted, counterfeit version of Apple's software for creating iOS and Mac apps, which is known as Xcode, Apple said. Palo Alto Networks Director of Threat Intelligence Ryan Olson said the malware had limited functionality and his firm had uncovered no examples of data theft or other harm as a result of the attack. Still, he said it was "a pretty big deal" because it showed that the App Store could be compromised if hackers infected machines of software developers writing legitimate apps. Other attackers may copy that approach, which is hard to defend against, he said. Researchers said infected apps included Tencent's popular mobile chat app WeChat, car-hailing app Didi Kuaidi and a music app from Internet portal NetEase. The tainted version of Xcode was downloaded from a server in China that developers may have used because it allowed for faster downloads than using Apple's U.S. servers, Olson said.

• Cheap robots may shift car making from China to U.S.: Magna CEO. The falling cost of intelligent robots may help repatriate some car manufacturing work away from low-cost locations like China back to factories in Germany and North America, Donald Walker, Chief Executive of auto supplier Magna told Reuters. Rising wages in China and the cost of importing heavy components like electric car batteries into Europe may lead established car makers to introduce more highly efficient automated manufacturing closer to home, Walker told Reuters in an interview at the Frankfurt auto show. "If you have a high labor, easy-to-ship part, it has already gone, for the most part, to a low-cost jurisdiction," Walker said about the evolution of assembly work in the car manufacturing business. "A bigger issue is how fast do you have intelligent robotics replace manual labor everywhere in the world," Walker said. By 2025 the total cost of manufacturing labor is projected to fall between 18 and 33 percent in countries which already deploy industrial robots, including South Korea, China, the U.S. Germany and Japan, a study on advanced manufacturing technologies by the Boston Consulting Group showed.

• Amazon Wins First Emmy for 'Transparent': Jeffrey Tambor and Jill Soloway delivered Amazon.com its first major Emmy awards for the show “Transparent,” as the online retailer went toe-to-toe with Time Warner’s HBO in the comedy categories. Tambor plays the patriarch of a Los Angeles family who reveals to his children that he has long felt he’s a woman and is going to begin to dress like one. Soloway created “Transparent” and won an award for directing, one of 11 nominations the show received.

• From EyeEm, Technology to See and Tag Photos:  A little-known German start-up may have just made it a lot easier to search for photos online. EyeEm, a photo-sharing service started in 2011 that has drawn parallels to Instagram, announced new technology in Brooklyn on Friday that uses a sophisticated algorithm and machine learning to analyze the details of online photos. The technology, called EyeVision, automatically scans images and tags them with certain keywords, from “landscape” and “New York” to the perceived emotions of people in each photo, which makes them easier to find through web searches. While other companies have tried similar techniques to categorize online images, the German start-up’s efforts — which comes after roughly three years of development — are based on analyzing millions of photos already shared on EyeEm’s photo-sharing social network. The company has roughly 15 million users compared to about 300 million on Instagram. Combined with the company’s machine-learning techniques, EyeEm’s search algorithm adapts over time to better understand what is part of each uploaded image, making it easier to find specific photos online, according to the company’s chief executive.

• Gentex transforms rear-view mirror into high-tech vision system: Gentex Corp is broadening its role from a traditional Michigan-based auto parts maker to a supplier of high-tech vision systems that eventually could be integrated into self-driving cars. General Motors Co will be the first automaker to use a new rear-view mirror developed by Gentex, on the 2016 Cadillac CT6 sedan. The car goes on sale early next year and the mirror will be offered at extra cost. At the flip of a switch, the full display mirror converts into a video display that provides a panoramic view behind the vehicle. Called the Gentex Full Display Mirror, it incorporates a rear camera and software that transforms a prosaic piece of hardware into a platform for more advanced safety technology, marketing director Craig Piersma said. While relatively young tech-focused suppliers such as Mobileye NV have become investor favorites as the auto industry ramps up development of advanced driver assistance systems - the building blocks for future self-driving cars - Gentex has quietly been turning out 30 million rear-view mirrors a year. Founded in 1974, Gentex is one of the world's largest suppliers of auto-dimming automotive mirrors, but it also has steadily beefed up its capability as an electronics manufacturer, expanding its expertise in cameras and displays. Among its products is the camera-based SmartBeam system that automatically switches headlamps from high to low beam. It also provides collision and lane departure warnings and vehicle and pedestrian detection.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, September 2

Google will Penalize App-Install Ads in Search Rankings: Google is on a mission to clean up the mobile Web and make it comport to its vision of the world. In April, the search engine tweaked its search algorithm to favor sites it deemed “mobile-friendly” — a shift the industry dubbed “mobilegeddon”. Now Google is adding another metric for mobile friendliness: The absence of ads that take over a screen and push an app. Starting today, those ads will be included in the mobile test Google gives publishers. Then, starting Nov. 1, sites that carry those ads will be punished in search rankings. Daniel Bathgate, a Google search engineer, explained the rationale in a post: “Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the Web page.” For Google, the changes are geared specifically at search results, part of its ongoing effort to make querying on mobile better. The changes will only affect sites pushing app-install ads in search results, so they don’t restrict the ads within apps. Also, the tweak won’t hit full-screen blasts that promote other publisher treats, like email newsletters or the ‘Like us on Facebook’ pages that digital publications such as Vice and Fusion use. Thus far, there’s some evidence that Google’s attempt to improve the quality of mobile websites has improved its ability to make money from them.

How Does Amazon Choose Which Listings get the Buy Box?: Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t release the algorithm it uses to award the Buy Box, and there’s no way to buy your way into that spot. Yes, maintaining a low price contributes to earning that precious real estate, but a few other strategies can increase your chances of getting there: Become a High-Rated Seller: Demand a high level of customer satisfaction from yourself and your team, and keep your seller metrics high. Maintain Available Quantity: Monitor your quantity levels and always keep enough inventory to meet demand. Build a Successful Sales History: Develop a track record of converting sales and providing quality customer service. Lower Your Refund Rate: Fulfill orders quickly and efficiently, and ensure your product descriptions are accurate. Earn Positive Customer Feedback: Solicit feedback and resolve any negative responses immediately. Reduce A-to-Z Guarantee Claims: Manage each claim quickly, and issue refunds where necessary. Participate in Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA): FBA can handle your fulfillment and customer service elements, so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

Offline Viewing of Video From Amazon Prime Streaming: Amazon said it would allow members of its $99 annual Prime loyalty program free downloads of some shows and movies from its streaming video service to watch offline, or when no Internet connection is available. The programs will be available via the Amazon Video app for iOS or Android. Shows will be downloadable to Apple and Android phones and tablets, including Amazon’s Fire devices — but not to desktops or laptops. Available programs include “Downton Abbey” and “The Good Wife,” HBO shows including “Girls” and “Veep” and movies including “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Amazon has been expanding services for Prime members, including its Prime Instant Video service, to attract more subscribers to the annual program. Netflix said it had no plans to follow suit.

New iOS malware should make you think twice about jailbreaking your iPhone: Information about the Apple accounts of more than 200,000 iPhone users who "jailbroke" their phones has been stolen by cybercriminals who could use the data to lock the phones and hold them for ransom, according to Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity research firm. The malware behind the digital theft, dubbed "KeyRaider," has "successfully stolen over 225,000 valid Apple accounts and thousands of certificates, private keys, and purchasing receipts," Palo Alto researchers said in a blog post. The stolen data appears to have been downloaded to an insecure server where hackers can easily gain access to it, the researchers said. The problem appears to be isolated to phones that were altered to bypass Apple's attempts to keep users safe. Apple keeps tight control over what apps are allowed on iPhones, running basic security tests before allowing them to be downloaded. But some iPhone users have bristled at such restrictions, and to escape them, some people "jailbreak" their phones -- taking steps to get around restrictions built into the devices so can they install things not available in the official App Store.

Indian woman who sued Uber over rape accusation ends lawsuit: A woman who sued Uber after accusing one of its drivers of raping her in India has voluntarily ended her lawsuit against the company, according to a court filing on Tuesday. The passenger, who reported being raped and beaten after hailing a ride with the Uber driver in Delhi last year, sued the online car service in a U.S. federal court in January, claiming the company failed to maintain basic safety procedures. The driver was arrested by Indian police and appeared in court in December. Uber's Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick at the time called the incident "horrific" and pledged to help "bring this perpetrator to justice." However, Uber also argued in court filings that the woman sued the wrong corporate entity as the driver had a contract with Uber B.V., a Netherlands-based entity with no U.S. operations. The court filing did not disclose any details on how the case was settled, and representatives for Uber and the woman declined to commen

This Company Is Still Making Audio Cassettes and Sales Are Better Than Ever: The audiocassette tape is not dead. In fact, one Springfield, Mo., cassette maker says it has had its best year since it opened in 1969. “You can characterize our operating model as stubbornness and stupidity. We were too stubborn to quit,” said National Audio Company President Steve Stepp. NAC is the largest and one of the few remaining manufacturers of audiocassettes in the U.S. The profitable company produced more than 10 million tapes in 2014 and sales are up 20 percent this year. “Probably the thing that has really enlarged our business at a faster phase than anything is the retro movement,” Stepp said. "There's the nostalgia of holding the audio cassette in your hand.” NAC has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company’s sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes. “There was a drive from the independent bands to get that warm analog sound again, and it just continued to grow and grow,” said NAC Production Manager Susie Brown. The company still uses machines built in the 1970s in its production lines.

Google Launches Native Ads In Gmail To All Advertisers: Google is rolling out a new ad format in Gmail to all advertisers today. A few years ago, Google launched a new kind of native ad in Gmail that sat at the top of the inbox and mostly looked like a regular email. For the most part, that was a pretty unobtrusive way of displaying ads (though some people were rather annoyed by them). Starting today, Google is making it easier for all advertisers to buy these ads. Advertisers can now buy these new Gmail ads directly from AdWords. For Gmail users, these ads will work very differently from the type of ads Google first introduced for Gmail and they will appear both in the mobile versions of Gmail and on the web. The native ads are collapsed by default and will expand to full-page native ads when you click on them. Google says the idea here is to “recreate the informational and visual richness of a landing page.” It looks like Google will charge advertisers every time a user expands one of these ad units (and all subsequent clicks from there are then free). What’s interesting is that these ads are made for forwarding, too, with a “forward” and “Save to Inbox” link underneath all of them. When you click on “Save to Inbox,” the ad will move into your inbox and you can then treat it just like any other regular email.

Why Lyft Should Go Public Before Uber: It’s no secret that Lyft is far smaller than Uber. It’s in 65 cities in the U.S. compared to Uber’s 60 countries around the world. A 2014 study done by financial firm FutureAdvisor, which analyzed U.S. credit and debit card transactions, said that Uber’s American revenue was 12 times that of Lyft. Uber’s aggression has resulted in its American dominance; even its name has become common slang for “ride-share.” If Lyft was to go public before Uber, it would steal some of the black car company’s thunder. Consumer tech IPOs are regularly big marketing events. Given that few on-demand companies have gone public, the first IPO of a ride-hailing service would attract a lot of attention. By going public first, Lyft would also be able to grab early dollars, attracting investors that didn’t have the opportunity to access Uber’s big private funding rounds. Just like Uber injured Lyft’s private fundraising efforts by snapping up a huge array of potential investors for itself, Lyft could try a similar tactic with the public market. Not everyone will have the money or risk-taking appetite to back multiple ride-hailing companies. Lastly, a comparatively early IPO would give Lyft more money for its battle with Uber. At this point, the former has far less cash reserves — $1 billion — than the latter, which has more than $5 billion. Going public is primarily a way to raise a lot of money and fuel the business’s growth, and Lyft could use that. Despite the reasons it would make sense for Lyft to go public before Uber, its investors and advisers warned that they weren’t sure that was likely to happen. One said that since Lyft’s founders, John Zimmer and Logan Green, were “conservative” in their endeavors they might not take the risk of paving the ride-hailing IPO way. Another said that the company wouldn’t want to preempt a public offering if its finances and growth numbers weren’t strong enough for the quarterly scrutiny of the market (see Twitter as an example of why an early IPO doesn’t always end well).

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, September 1

Apple and Cisco Team Up on iPhone and iPad Sales: Apple Inc. is teaming up with Cisco Systems Inc. to make its mobile devices work better with corporate networks using Cisco’s equipment, part of a push by Apple to expand sales to business customers. The partnership, announced on Monday by Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers and Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook at Cisco’s annual sales meeting in Las Vegas, will make it easier to use iPhones and iPads together with Cisco’s products, including videoconferencing systems and the WebEx online meeting service. Last year, Apple and International Business Machines Corp. set aside a three-decade-old rivalry to create business software for iPhone and iPad users, seeking to cater to an increasingly mobile workforce. While Apple is pursuing a bigger slice of the market for corporate users of smartphones and tablets, IBM and Cisco are looking for opportunities in the mobile-computing boom. Engineers from both companies have been working together for 10 months, and Cisco and Apple salespeople will go on joint sales calls, he said. For example, iPhone users could click on a calendar appointment, and immediately start a videoconference or Cisco’s Spark chat application, instead of having to pull up each separately. IPhone users’ personal contacts can be integrated with directories on their desk phones. And since workers are increasingly mobile, calls from work colleagues would automatically ring on both the desk phone and iPhone.Apple and Cisco are also working on behind-the-scenes networking enhancements. Using a feature called Fast Lane, a videoconference that’s critical to closing a deal can be given more bandwidth priority over YouTube video streams to desktops. Cisco is also developing ways to help companies prevent network slowdowns when Apple releases updates to its iOS software, by storing parts of Apple’s software code so that iPhone owners on Cisco networks won’t have to download it from a far-off data centers.

India’s Antitrust Commission Accuses Google Of Rigging Its Search Results: Less than a week after it responded to anti-competition claims laid down by the EU, Google is under-fire once again for its business practices. This time in India. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has charged the U.S. company with rigging search results to benefit its many businesses, as The Economic Times reports. Google copped a $166,000 fine last year for failing to cooperate with this probe, but this time around, the worst case scenario could see it fined up to 10 percent of its revenue — the company posted a net income of $14 billion on $66 billion in revenue for 2014 — according to reports. TechCrunch understands that the CCI’s document is over 600 pages in length, although the chief concerns center around how Google positions and uses its own services with its search engine. Like the initial European investigation, Indian authorities appear to believe that its search engine is favoring the company’s maps service, travel sites, and advertising products, at the expense of competitors and those that use its advertising services. As part of its probe, the CCI sought out industry opinions on Google’s position. Economic Times reported that a bevy of high-profile technology companies — including Flipkart, Facebook, and Nokia — corroborated the complaint, which was initially filed by matrimony service Bharat, nonprofit Consumer Unity and Trust Society. TechCrunch understands from sources, though, that it wasn’t all one-way traffic. Other companies had voiced no complaint in response to the various accusations levied against Google, and those include Times Internet, Make My Trip, Group M, and Rediff.

U.S. developing sanctions against China over cyberthefts: The Obama administration is developing a package of unprecedented economic sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals who have benefited from their government’s cybertheft of valuable U.S. trade secrets. The U.S. government has not yet decided whether to issue these sanctions, but a final call is expected soon — perhaps even within the next two weeks, according to several administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Issuing sanctions would represent a significant expansion in the administration’s public response to the rising wave of ­cyber-economic espionage initiated by Chinese hackers, who officials say have stolen everything from nuclear power plant designs to search engine source code to confidential negotiating positions of energy companies. Any action would also come at a particularly sensitive moment between the world’s two biggest economies. President Xi Jinping of China is due to arrive next month in Washington for his first state visit — complete with a 21-gun salute on the South Lawn of the White House and an elaborate State Dinner. There is already tension over a host of other issues, including maritime skirmishes in the South China Sea and China’s efforts to devalue its currency in the face of its recent stock market plunge. At the same time, the two countries have deep trade ties and the administration has sometimes been wary of seeming too tough on China.

Hotels Fight Back Against Sites Like Expedia and Priceline: For years, travelers have been drawn to online sites like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline to find and reserve hotel rooms, flights and rental cars. Hotels welcomed the system — or at least learned to live with it — even though the business came at the cost of substantial commissions. But now they are fighting back. With the online giants consolidating and potentially tightening their hold on travel bookings, major hotel chains are offering a host of benefits to lure travelers to book with them directly: digital check-in, free meals, Wi-Fi and even the ability to choose a specific room. At the same time, the industry has been outspoken with regulators this year in an attempt to block a merger of two of the largest online booking companies, Expedia and Orbitz. Hilton has introduced a number of services for guests who book directly, including a digital check-in option that eliminates waiting in line. Quickly adopted by its customers, the app is now used by over one million people each month, according to Geraldine Calpin, who oversees Hilton’s worldwide digital efforts. Hilton also offers direct-booking guests the ability to choose their exact room, a feature similar to an airplane’s seat-map function. “The guest can see the plan of each floor and click on the room they want,” Ms. Calpin said. Loyalty programs also help steer consumers toward booking directly with hotels, with rewards points and “elite” level benefits like concierge lounges, free meals and upgrades. Some chains are also trying to beat online travel agencies at their own game. Marriott has arranged for some rooms to be booked directly through the travel review site TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor gets a commission, but only about half what Expedia would charge. Expedia has been on a takeover binge this year: In January, it snapped up Travelocity, for $280 million, and last year it acquired a popular Australian site, Wotif.com. Its proposed takeover of Orbitz would give the combined company control of roughly 75 percent of the entire domestic market for third-party online booking, according to the research firm Phocuswright, potentially giving it enormous leverage over the commissions that hotels pay for their listings.

Russia’s Fist Just Clenched Around the Internet a Little Tighter: Global Internet firms operating in Russia wake up on Tuesday to a new era in Kremlin regulation. A law now forces tech firms with Russian customers to operate local servers to handle Russian personal data. It’s the latest in a string of about 20 laws tightening government control of the Internet, all put into place since President Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2012. Taken at face value the new program is aimed at protecting the privacy of Russian citizens. It’s not a uniquely Russian idea, and is something Brazil and Germany are also exploring in the post-Snowden era. Yet human rights activists fear the regulation will be misused, allowing officials to spy on citizens and suppress political activists. It comes into force days after Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted because of an article about cannabis. All eyes are now on Facebook, Google and Twitter, which have been meeting with the Kremlin in private to make sense of the law. At this stage it’s not clear whether they will agree to comply.

Venture capital cash surfers may see waves recede in market turmoil: The waves of cash surfed relentlessly by some of Silicon Valley's largest venture-backed businesses are showing signs of receding amid concern the companies may already be worth more than their likely valuations once they finally go public. Investors have created 132 privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more each, according to tracker firm CB Insights, including ride-hailing service Uber [UBER.UL], accommodation service Airbnb and messaging app Snapchat. After a turbulent week for equities, prompted by worries about the faltering Chinese economy, it may take longer for companies aiming to join their ranks to raise multimillion-dollar funding rounds, and they may not get the investment terms they want. "Many companies in the market for funding right now are struggling to meet their valuation expectations and are going to have to reassess," said Jon Sakoda of venture firm NEA. "Investors are now being much more selective identifying which companies can succeed under the scrutiny of the public markets," said Roger Lee, an investing partner with Battery Ventures. One indicator could be GSV Capital, a Nasdaq-traded fund that buys shares of private companies from early employees and others. The fund, which as of June 30 held 12.5 percent of its assets in data-analysis company Palantir and 7.7 percent in storage company Dropbox, has dropped 6 percent since Aug. 20. One late-stage venture investor said that five to six startups he declined to fund last quarter - because of what he considered pricey terms - came back willing to re-enter negotiations after being turned down elsewhere.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, August 31

The CEO of the company behind Ashley Madison is resigning: The chief executive of the parent company of Ashley Madison, a dating site targeting people looking for extra-marital affairs, resigned Friday after a massive hack exposed the personal information of millions of its users. Earlier this month, personal information about millions of Ashley Madison customers, including e-mails, member profiles, credit-card transactions and other sensitive information, showed up online. A group known as Impact Team took credit for the hack, which is now under investigation by the FBI and Canadian authorities.The information was initially only accessible on the dark Web, where users must use anonymous browsing tools. But soon after the hack, databases showed up on the broader Web allowing people to search some parts of the data. Analysis of that data seemed to suggest that most of the female profiles on the site were fake. Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison. When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.

Uber hires two security researchers who hacked a moving Jeep to improve car technology: Uber has hired two top vehicle security researchers, the company said on Friday, high-profile additions that come as the ride-hailing service ramps up its work on technology for self-driving cars. Charlie Miller, who had been working at Twitter Inc, and Chris Valasek, who worked at security firm IOActive, have resigned from their jobs and will join Uber next week. Miller and Valasek won wide attention this month after demonstrating that they could hack into a moving Jeep. Uber on Tuesday announced a partnership with the University of Arizona, offering the school grant money to fund research into the mapping and safety technology needed for autonomous vehicles, which Uber will test on the streets of Tucson, Arizona. This partnership follows the more tumultuous effort earlier this year at Carnegie Mellon University that resulted in Uber hiring away more than 40 of its top scientists and researchers, leaving one of the world's top robotics research institutions reeling.

Jet.com CEO: We May Have the Lowest Prices, but Many Shoppers Can’t Figure That Out: Jet.com may have the lowest prices on the Web, but a lot of people who visit the site still don’t realize it. That is something CEO Marc Lore acknowledged when asked about confusion among people who hear about Jet.com’s low prices but don’t see them displayed clearly when they visit a Jet.com product page. “Believe me, we have this discussion every single day,” Lore said in an interview Thursday evening. “We keep tweaking the [user experience] to make it more clear and are bringing in research groups. But you’re right, it’s still frustrating to [some].” Before we get to the confusion, a reminder about how Jet works: Jet marks down most of the products it sells below the lowest price elsewhere on the Web. How? The retailers that sell goods through Jet give Jet a fee for each sale, but Jet doesn’t pocket that fee, as competing online marketplaces do. Instead, it gives a large portion of it back to shoppers in the form of discounts on each item they buy. Lore has said the company will simply break even on the actual sale of goods, and then generate a profit through the $50 membership fee Jet shoppers have to pay each year. Many smart people in the industry are skeptical that Jet can become big enough to make this model work.The confusion among potential shoppers stems from how Jet displays these discounted prices. Lore said the reason it doesn’t show the fully discounted price is straightforward: Some of the product brands that sell on Jet have asked Jet not to display the discounted price because it is angering other retailers they sell their products to. Lore didn’t name these brands, but said the company wanted to do good by them even if it led to some short-term confusion among shoppers. For now, Jet has opted for a uniform design strategy even though it has only heard complaints from some of the brands they sell. That said, Jet is considering making a change so that the fully discounted price will be shown for brands that don’t object and leave the pricing display as is for the brands that do, Lore said.

Is the Tech Market Hitting Middle Age?: First it was PCs. Now it’s tablets. And very soon, it will be smartphones. Each of these markets has — or will — hit its peak in both revenue and unit shipments in short order. Each has moved (or will soon move) from the soaring grandeur of youth and young adulthood to the dowdiness of mature middle age. As these inevitable market developments occur, important shifts are starting to happen. Not only will device manufacturers and their key component suppliers have to evolve their businesses — as many have started to do — but very soon, so will companies offering software and services used by those devices. While some argue that these software and services companies are taking over the world, it’s naive to think that their growth can be maintained completely independent of the devices. At a fundamental level, the two are linked, and when the device numbers peak, so too do the potential users of any software or service. Admittedly, there’s more of a growth opportunity over the short term for these software and service companies, but that won’t last forever, either. As with any major industry transformation, this means that some of the biggest industry players may not survive in their current form (or at all), while others are likely to go through some dramatic transformations. This also means that there will be tremendous opportunities for today’s smaller or even yet-to-be started companies. The tech industry’s transition to a more mature market does bring with it the opportunity for some potentially boring baggage when it comes to things like stagnant unit-growth rates. However, instead of viewing this as a midlife crisis, smart, innovative companies will figure out ways to see these developments as a midlife celebration that can open up new opportunities.

Your First 10 Customers Can Make Or Break You: Early in a startup’s life, the main focus is building the right product for the right market. For most B2B startups, this is the period when you start winning your first 10 customers. These 10 customers are unlike any others you’ll have over the course of your company. You’ll sell to them differently, charge them differently and try to get different things out of the relationship than you will from those that follow. This is the group that will teach you how to refine your product, whether or not you are targeting a large enough market and how to craft a scalable sales process that will help you land your next 100 customers. You’re The First Head Of Sales. It will be tempting to hire an experienced sales veteran when you’re busy trying to get the product right and grow the company, but there is a strong argument against that. The first 10 customers should be sold by you, the CEO or founder. Look For Young And Ambitious Customers. While it’s admirable to target big-name customers, the chances are unlikely that they’ll take a meeting or make a bet on a brand new product. Similarly, a potential customer who is far along or at the end of his career may not have a high tolerance for risk or change. Focus On Engagement, Not Revenue. As you land more customers and add them to your client roster, it is essential that each initial customer uses your product at the engagement level to be considered an active user. Engagement levels — not revenue numbers — are often a stronger indication of long-term product adoption. This should be your top priority. Your first set of customers will inevitably serve as reference accounts — and the more engaged users are, the better references they’ll provide. Know Who To “Sign” And When To Walk Away. Focus your initial sales efforts on prospects who aren’t your friends. To be scalable, your product will need validation outside of your network, and you need the type of honest feedback that friends don’t often provide.

IZettle, a Swedish Payments Start-Up, Begins a Lending Program: Jacob de Geer, who is a Swedish entrepreneur and the co-founder of iZettle, a payments service that offers merchants a device for processing credit card transactions, says banks don’t meet the needs of many small businesses. “Financial institutions focus more on their large clients than on the small ones,” he said. “Most of them were founded way before the invention of the Internet or the smartphone.” But he thinks he has a solution. On Friday, iZettle announced a program to lend money to small businesses that use its service, providing cash advances to companies for a one-time fee. IZettle, which operates in 11 countries from Britain to Brazil, raised a further $67 million from its existing backers, including Intel Capital and American Express, to take its total fund-raising to roughly $180 million. The steps by iZettle follow similar announcements from Square, the six-year-old American payments start-up, that also has expanded from its payments roots to offer additional financial products for its small-business customers. Square also offers a device to process credit card transactions. For iZettle, the new lending program will initially be available only in Europe, and the company will charge small businesses a flat fee ?equivalent to roughly 10 to 15 percent ?of each cash advance. To recoup the money it lends to businesses, the start-up will take a small percentage of each transaction that small businesses process through its payments system. To reduce defaults, the company says it will crunch data from businesses’ existing transactions to determine their credit risk.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 20

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.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, July 1

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Facebook is testing a more conservative definition of video views, but is still far more aggressive than YouTube in charging advertisers: While Facebook charges advertisers for videos the second they appear in a news feed, views are defined differently since users can easily scroll past the ads. Facebook considers a view to last three seconds compared with YouTube's 30-second rule. This has resulted in marketers' clips uploaded to Facebook to amass a wealth of views compared with those published on YouTube in recent months. But those views don't necessarily mean people are watching ads. Now, advertisers can start paying for videos with a cost-per-view rate that kicks in after a user watches for 10 seconds, making the ad seemingly more valuable to advertisers who want to pay for qualified views. Until now, advertisers have paid for videos immediately after they show up in a news feed—something akin to a cost-per-impression model. When Twitter launched autoplay video earlier this month, it tried to address concerns by promising brands 100 percent viewability: promising only to charge on video ads that have been seen 100 percent in full view of the user..


• Xiaomi Continues International Push, Starts Selling $160 Redmi 2 Phone in Brazil: Xiaomi made its expected move into the Brazil market on Tuesday, announcing plans to sell its affordable Redmi 2 smartphone for 499 Brazilian reals ($161). To avoid hefty taxes placed on foreign imports, Xiaomi is working with Foxconn to have the devices built in Brazil, with additional products coming soon.


• Online recharge and mobile wallet app MobiKwik targets $700M GTV in 2015-16, profits by 2016-17: MobiKwik.com, is gunning for a nearly four-fold jump in gross transaction value to $700 million (Rs 4,270 crore) this year. “We don’t have the audited numbers right now, but I can tell you that we have crossed the 2014-15 target of Rs 1200 crore ($190 million) sales and are looking forward to $700 million sales this year,” Upasana Taku, co-founder of the company told Techcircle. The Gurgaon-based company aims to turn profitable by financial year 2016-17. “We expect to meet our goal of 100 million users for the mobile wallet by 2016-17 and so next year we anticipate to start generating profits,” she added. Profitability is the holy grail for India’s fast growing consumer internet firms. MobiKwik’s competitor, the Alibaba-backed Paytm saw the gross value of the transactions conducted on its network rise to around Rs 4,000 crore by 2014-end from around Rs 1,000 crore the year before. Paytm is said to be targeting gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of $3-4 billion by March 2015. MobiKwik plans to spend about Rs 100 crore on marketing this financial year. Most of the money will be deployed on television and online campaigns. MobiKwik is also betting big on joining hands with offline service provider. It started a service for offline players in March 2015 and has the likes of quick service restaurants, grocery stores and coffee stores on its platform. It has tie ups with Big Bazaar, Cafe Coffee Day and other players for the same.


• Apple Music First Look: Rich, Robust — But Confusing: Paid streaming music has arrived on Planet Apple, where it was regarded as unworthy for years. Today, the tech giant has entered the streaming music business with its much-anticipated Apple Music subscription service. Like other streaming services, it offers access to tens of millions of tracks for a monthly fee. Would I pay $10 a month — $120 a year — to use it? My answer is a tentative yes, with some caveats. Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods. But it’s also uncharacteristically complicated by Apple standards, with everything from a global terrestrial radio station to numerous suggested playlists for different purposes in different places. One of the most confusing aspects of Apple Music is that it moves all your iTunes Music to the cloud, along with the streaming catalog. On the other hand, the service has three big strengths, in my view. First, it smoothly integrates the existing library of iTunes songs you own with the much larger catalog of music you are merely, in effect, renting. Second, while the service does use some algorithms, it suggests numerous playlists, albums and songs curated by 300 human editors, based on your tastes. Third, while Apple’s $10 monthly fee per user is both standard — and for some, pricey — the company is offering a family plan that cuts the price dramatically.


• LTE-U versus WiFi: The future of mobile data pits cellphone carriers against cable giants: To cellular providers, WiFi represents a huge missed opportunity. Internet consumption on cellular data networks — your 3G or 4G connection - could've grown by a whopping 84 percent last year, according to Cisco. But because consumers shunted so much traffic to WiFi, that figure was much lower, at 69 percent. Carriers could charge you for all that extra access to the mobile data network. Instead they're losing out when you hop onto WiFi at your home or office. And LTE-U is the industry's solution. The cable industry, on the other hand, wants to keep you on WiFi as much as possible. This is the math they fear: By 2019, Americans are expected to consume nearly 10 times more mobile data than they did in 2014. By then, 77 percent of all Internet traffic will be sent and received over mobile devices rather than stationary PCs. That's not good for cable, an industry that built its reputation on running fast (but fixed) Internet service into people's homes and businesses. You're probably familiar with 4G LTE, the current cutting edge of mobile data technology. Under ideal conditions, it provides download speeds that rival what you can get on a wired connection — fast enough to download a song in less than a minute. LTE-U is virtually identical to LTE, but with one key difference: It runs on the same frequencies that WiFi does. Unlike regular LTE, which piggybacks on airwaves owned exclusively by your carrier, LTE-U travels on public airwaves that are free to anyone. Garage door openers, cordless phones, WiFi routers — all also transmit over these open channels. Interference between the two technologies can slash WiFi transmission rates by 75 percent, according to a Google white paper filed last month to the federal government. The cable industry's top trade group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, argued the technology could be "disastrous" without further protections and "will severely degrade consumers' Wi-Fi experience, rendering unusable many services that are widespread today, to say nothing of the innovative new uses currently on the horizon."


• Google's Local Search, unlike Google's Organic Search, Favors Google+ Results, Yelp Claims: According to a highly critical new paper out from legal scholar Tim Wu, Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca and data scientists at Yelp, many of us are totally missing out on the information that’s most relevant, and critical, to our lives. In a statement to The Washington Post, Yelp vice president of public policy Luther Lowe uses this example: If a parent searches “pediatrician NYC,” he or she will, in a prominent first-page listing, see the names of seven pediatricians who happen to have Google+ or Google+ Local pages. “The Google organic ranking algorithm does a great job at identifying helpful content on the Web,” Lowe said. “But it’s sadly not being deployed in the most common user behavior on Google: local search.” According to Yelp, from one-third to one-half of all Google searches are local. They primarily involve something called the “Local OneBox” — the special, extra-prominent list of seven links that Google displays at the top of local search results. Local OneBox takes up a big chunk of first-page real estate, frequently at the very top of the page, which means people are disproportionately more likely to click into it than they are into regular links. Local OneBox also pulls exclusively from Google’s versions of specialized search sites, such as Google+ Local.


• Samsung, HTC suffer blowback from phone financing schemes of years past, as consumers turn slow to upgrade: It’s payback time for handset makers that long profited from Americans’ tendency to upgrade their mobile phones early and often. U.S. consumers got a taste for phone financing two years ago and never looked back. They bought fancy new devices for a few more dollars a month with no service contract attached. Now they’re holding on to their old smartphones longer than they did when they signed two-year contracts and got freebies, spelling further trouble for manufacturers like Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. that have struggled with declining sales. “When people spend $600 to $700, they are not in the mood to upgrade every year,” said independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma. Thrifty consumers are starting to buy devices every 20 to 24 months instead of every 15 months when carriers subsidized all of their devices and made up the cost through higher service charges, he said. While iPhone maker Apple Inc. -- whose customers tend to be less price sensitive -- has remained largely unaffected, Samsung and HTC may see the most impact, analysts said. In a sign that the end of subsidies is on the horizon, Dallas-based AT and T asked in May that retail partners like Apple and Best Buy stop offering subsidized phones with two-year contracts and to sell them on its Next financing program instead. Verizon, which has been slower to move to phone financing, expects 50 percent of new sales to be on its Edge installment payment plan this year.


• Cisco to buy OpenDNS for $635 million to boost security business: Cisco said it would buy OpenDNS, a privately held cloud-based security firm, for $635 million, the latest move to boost its security business as cyber attacks increase in number and sophistication. Cisco has been buying a number of security companies, which has made its relatively tiny security business one of its fastest growing areas in the past two years. OpenDNS uses predictive intelligence to block malware, botnets and phishing threats that antivirus and firewalls miss. Cisco was a minority investor and was one of the backers that invested $35 million in OpenDNS in May last year. When Cisco buys stakes in startups, it often receives defensive rights that give it an edge to acquire companies it has invested in ahead of competitors. Cisco, whose security business is known for its firewalls, expanded into intrusion detection and prevention systems with the $2.7 billion acquisition of Sourcefire in 2013. Cisco, which has acquired dozens of companies over the years, is transitioning towards high-end switches and routers and investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers. It bought malware analysis company ThreatGRID in 2014 and security advisory firm Neohapsis this year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 22

• An MP3 version of this snippet is here

• Amazon Upgrades Its Review Software: Amazon is giving its reviews system an overhaul, using new software it says will surface more helpful commentary from buyers. The company says it is using machine learning to provide more frequent, more useful updates to reviews on its U.S. site. Among other things, that means that more recent reviews will show up near the top of a product listing, and a product’s five star review score may change more often. Via CNET: “The new system will give more weight to newer reviews, reviews from verified Amazon purchasers and those that more customers vote up as being helpful. A product’s 5-star rating, which previously was a pure average of all reviews, will also become weighted using those same criteria.” While Amazon doesn’t mention this, it’s also reasonable to assume that the company hopes the overhaul will help push down bogus reviews, a problem that has long-plagued the site but which it usually doesn’t want to talk about.


• Twitter Expands Shopping Experience With Product Pages: Twitter is finally taking advantage of its massive amount of tweet data to encourage its users to shop.The social network is rolling out product pages and what the company calls Collections on Friday, distinct pages within the service where you can see info on specific products or places and actually make a purchase. A product page will include things like tweets about the product, user reviews, pricing and, in some cases, a buy button. Collections are more of a browsing experience, which include a handful of recommended products and places selected by a brand or high-profile curator. For example, Ellen DeGeneres has a Collection highlighting the “Best of the Ellen Shop,” where you can browse Ellen-branded products or others she has featured on her show. The new feature is a pretty expansive change to Twitter’s previous shopping experiments. Those were limited to promoted tweets that included a buy button for a single item. The Collections and product pages aim to take advantage of the fact that Twitter already has lots of information about products and services from its user base. It’s now collecting that info to help educate a potential buyer. For now, Twitter is simply getting the product off the ground and isn’t taking a cut of sales revenue from most partners, but taking a slice off the top seems like a logical next step.


• How Oculus and Cardboard Are Going to Rock the Travel Industry: Relegated to geeky fantasy for years, Virtual Reality hardware is suddenly cheap, portable, and there for the travel-brand taking. Travel companies such as Thomas Cook, Qantas Airways, and Destination BC in Canada are also creating their own promotional VR videos. Currently, in 10 select Thomas Cook store locations in the U.K., Germany, and Belgium, you can strap on a Gear VR headset and try your tour before you buy: Walk through the billowing blue curtains of a Santorini hotel balcony, ride a helicopter above Manhattan's skyline. This year Cook has seen VR-promoted New York excursion revenue increase 190 percent. The next step, according to Ryan, is to go beyond brick-and-mortar stores and deliver VR brochures into homes.


• China to promote cross-border e-commerce as incomes rise: China will increase support for cross-border e-commerce as the world's second-largest economy shifts from manufacturing to higher-value services, the government said. The government released policy guidelines on Saturday that include tax policies aimed at boosting domestic consumption and pilot projects to ease overseas payments. Chinese e-commerce firms will be given state support on international projects while credit insurance services will also be introduced. Customs will streamline clearance of goods and quality supervision agencies will allow collective declaration, examination and release of goods. There will be tax sweeteners on e-commerce retail exports and settlement of payments in yuan will be promoted, it added. The policy document followed Friday's announcement that China will allow full foreign ownership of some e-commerce business to boost competitiveness.


• Chinese firms pour money into U.S. Research and Development in shift to innovation: Surging investment by Chinese companies in U.S. research labs is yielding a fast-growing trove of patents, part of a push to mine America for ideas to help China shift from being the world's factory floor to a driver of innovation. Largely absent from American research hubs a decade ago, Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE Corp are now using U.S. researchers to create patents ranging from new software to internet infrastructure, according to an analysis of Thomson Reuters' global intellectual property database. Patented inventions by Chinese firms that involved at least one U.S. researcher roughly doubled worldwide in each of the last three years, reaching 910 in 2014.


• Attack Gave Chinese Hackers Privileged Access to U.S. Systems: Undetected for nearly a year, the Chinese intruders executed a sophisticated attack that gave them “administrator privileges” into US government networks. The hackers began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China, investigators told Congress last week in classified briefings. The hackers’ ultimate target: the one million or so federal employees and contractors who have filled out a form known as SF-86, which is stored in a different computer bank and details personal, financial and medical histories for anyone seeking a security clearance. “This was classic espionage, just on a scale we’ve never seen before from a traditional adversary”


• US carrier Sprint bows to net neutrality, saying it won’t throttle data anymore: To make sure it stays on the right side of net neutrality, Sprint will no longer slow down its customers' mobile data when its cell sites are congested, the company says. The decision is an early sign that the federal government's new rules for Internet providers are having an effect. Sprint's policy, which it said lasted for less than a year, was to slow down mobile data temporarily for data hogs in a congested area. The throttling affected the heaviest 5 percent of data users covered by a given cell site, and when the congestion eased, the restrictions were lifted.