Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 22

• Apple is reportedly in talks to buy automaker McLaren: The auto industry and the tech world may about to get a new power player: Apple is reportedly in talks to buy the high-performance car company McLaren, according to the Financial Times. The two firms have been talking for several months about plans to have Apple make a strategic investment in the McLaren Technology Group or buy it outright, the article said, citing "three people briefed on the negotiations." Many Apple watchers have advocated for Apple to buy Tesla, but Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has called such a deal "unlikely." Musk has also scorned Apple's car efforts, telling a German newspaper that he refers to Apple as "Tesla graveyard" because the tech firm hires so many engineers that Tesla has let go. But Apple could be very attractive for McLaren, which has struggled to reach profitability. The British carmaker may be best known for its very high-end luxury supercars and its Formula One team, though it also has made forays into wearable technology, health care and electronics. It took the name McLaren Technology Group in 2015 to reflect its diversification strategy. The focus on technology could represent a good culture alignment for Apple and McLaren, although  McLaren is a much smaller manufacturer than could serve Apple's massive customer base. The firm said at the time of its renaming that it produces just more than 1,600 cars per year.

• The Trade Desk finishes strong at $30.10 per share after its first day on NASDAQ: Things are looking up for adtech companies on Wall Street — or at least for one of them. The Trade Desk debuted on NASDAQ today at a price of $28.75 per share, up nearly 60 percent from its IPO price of $18. And while there wasn’t a dramatic pop, it continued to climb and closed the day at $30.10 per share. That’s a good start, particularly considering that adtech companies have struggled recently on the public markets, which has made venture capitalists wary of the industry, as well. Ventura, Calif.-headquartered The Trade Desk, which offers tools for ad buyers, was probably helped by its financials — the company is profitable, with 2015 revenue more than doubling year-over-year, to $113.8 million.Chief Client Officer Brian Stempeck also argued that The Trade Desk stands out because it has built real self-serve technology: “A lot of our people are engineers, building products, and when someone works in client services, they aren’t managing ad campaigns — they’re teaching others how to run the software.” Looking ahead, Stempeck said The Trade Desk will continue to expand internationally while also building more products for programmatic buying of TV ads. After all, he noted that while most ad dollars are going to TV, most TV advertisers don’t have a way to learn how many times they’ve shown someone the same ad. “Advertisers can actually show fewer ads, they can be better targeted, the publisher or content owner gets a higher rate because it’s so targeted, and it’s a better experience for the consumer” because they aren’t bombarded repeatedly with the same ad, Stempeck said.

• Google Shows Up Late in Crowded AI-Based Digital-Assistant Field: Google unleashed its digital assistant for the first time, arriving late to the intensifying race among the largest technology companies to create a more personal and lucrative way for computers to interact with humans. The Google Assistant uses artificial intelligence tools, such as voice recognition and natural-language processing, to answer questions and satisfy other requests delivered verbally and in formats such as text messages. The first incarnation is as a digital buddy inside Google’s new Allo messaging app, which the Alphabet Inc. unit unveiled Wednesday. The assistant will also appear inside Google’s Home internet-connected speaker -- expected next month -- in new Android smartphones and in devices such as cars and watches made by other companies, Google executive Nick Fox said. Google’s Assistant also performs tasks that get it into e-commerce territory, taking on Amazon’s Alexa. Users will be able to book a restaurant through the assistant and buy tickets to a game or event. Anything that involves getting things done more easily will be addressed over time, Fox said. Google has nothing planned on the advertising side yet, he added.Google didn’t give the system a name -- a contrast to Siri, Alexa and Cortana. That’s in part because Google designed its assistant to learn and evolve to be a different helper depending on the user. You can say, "My favorite sports team is the San Francisco Giants," and it will reply, "OK I will remember that." Later, when you ask, "What’s the latest score for my team?" it will send the score of the latest Giants baseball game, Fox said. Google is aware of the limits of its AI and is trying not to promise too much from the Assistant, at least early on. It won’t automatically insert information into chats between friends on Allo, but will occasionally appear to say it has suggestions and wait to be summoned. It will also stay away from value judgments or sensitive subjects such as violent and adult material. In those cases, it will apologize and say it can’t answer, or send web results from Google’s search engine.Google’s Assistant already knows its rivals. When asked if it is better than Alexa, the system responded diplomatically. "I like Alexa’s blue light. Her voice is nice too."

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, July 15

• Line Rises in Initial Public Offering, Cheering Skittish Tech Industry: The Line Corporation, the owner of a Japanese instant messaging app with a colorful cast of cartoon characters, cheered the technology industry on Thursday when its shares jumped 30 percent in their American trading debut. The strong showing offers hope for tech firms and their financial backers that Wall Street investors are warming up to closely held technology start-ups. But experts say Line is an unusual case of an established company with operating heft and a proven way to gin up sales — something that many new tech companies lack. Line itself still faces considerable hurdles, such as slowing user growth and an untested plan to use advertising to help make it profitable. Line’s American depositary shares, priced at $32.84 each on Monday, jumped to $42.70 in early trading in New York on Thursday. The stock is expected to begin trading in Japan on Friday. Line’s debut coincided with another new high for the equity markets in the United States. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has surged 8 percent since June 27, after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union roiled stocks worldwide, as investors anticipated additional stimulus from central banks.

• Snapchat Geofilter Campaigns May Get a Boost From Yext: Snapchat Inc. may start to see more brands paying up for location-based advertising campaigns on its photo-sharing mobile app, thanks to the efforts of another startup, Yext Inc. Advertisers can already pay the social-media service to have branded geofilters -- a type of graphical overlay people can use to decorate photos or videos they’re sharing -- to show up in the app in specific locations. To run these campaigns, companies have had to manually provide Snapchat with the exact geographical details of where they want the filters to appear and the dimensions of each space. Yext, whose software helps businesses manage digital location data, has been working with Snapchat to make that process easier. The New York-based startup on Thursday is unveiling a new feature that lets clients give Snapchat all that information with a few taps.Last year, Snapchat started offering geofilters to brands as an advertising platform. In the U.S., a national geofilter campaign reaches 40 percent to 60 percent of daily users, according to Snapchat’s website. The company also unveiled a cheaper option for smaller businesses and individuals this year: on-demand geofilters. The starting price for one of these geofilters is $5 for up to 20,000 square feet of coverage. Companies including McDonald’s Corp., Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yum! Brands subsidiary KFC have already launched location-based ad campaigns on Snapchat. The fried chicken seller offered special KFC-themed geofilters at more than 900 locations in the U.K., resulting in a more than 23 percent lift in visitation within a week of a user seeing the filter in a friend’s Snap, according to a June presentation by KPCB partner Mary Meeker.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 27

• Brexit Pounds Some Technology Companies: Online marketplace operator EBay sank as much as 8.2 percent on Friday, outpacing declines by the wider U.S. equity market as analysts singled it out for its large exposure to the U.K. and Germany. Chipmaker ARM, based in Cambridge, U.K., gained as much as 6.8 percent on calculations that a weaker British pound will make its repatriated earnings more valuable. The pound sank more than 8 percent against the U.S. currency Friday, to its lowest level in 30 years. The U.S. dollar rose 2 percent against a basket of foreign currencies tracked by Bloomberg. A strong dollar hurts mainly when proceeds from goods and services sold in foreign currencies are exchanged into dollars. That can also make it more expensive to buy U.S. tech products. EBay has the most significant exposure among U.S. internet companies to the U.K. and Europe, according a report by Needham & Co. The disruption caused by Britain’s exit from the EU and currency fluctuations could slow cross-border transactions on online marketplaces. "EBay gets 31 percent of revenue from U.K. and Germany, more than Google or Amazon," said Needham analyst Kerry Rice. "This really impacts cross-border trade more than anything. It could shift spending behavior if currency fluctuations make a purchase cost-prohibitive." ARM investors were quick to turn to its own calculations on the impact of currency moves and bet on an increase in profit. The company, which licenses chip technology and designs, gets more than a third of its sales from the U.S., 19 percent from China and another 25 percent from Taiwan and South Korea. Singapore and Switzerland supply it with more revenue than its home market at around 3 percent each, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. According to a company presentation from April, more than 95 percent of ARM’s sales are in dollars. A 10 percent move in the value of the pound against the dollar moves earnings per share by 15 percent, it said. That suggests the recent drop in the British currency could boost profit by about 10 percent for the rest of this year.

• China Tightens Internet Rules for Baidu and Other Search Engines: Chinese authorities will require Baidu Inc. and other search engines to report banned content and verify advertisers’ qualifications in its latest attempt at Internet regulation. Under rules to take effect Aug. 1, search engines operating in the country will be prohibited from providing banned information in various formats including links, summaries, cached pages, associative words, related searches and relevant recommendations, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement. They will also be required to report websites and applications that contain prohibited content when spotted, the regulator said. Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, has been criticized recently for misleading users with search results. The Cyberspace Administration launched aninvestigation earlier this year after the death of Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old computer science major, who sought out a controversial treatment advertised among search results. Baidu said it would restrict the number of sponsored posts to 30 percent of a results page and establish a 1 billion yuan ($151 million) fund to fight fraud after the death of the student.

• Line, the biggest tech IPO of the year, struggles to show its growth plan can work: In delaying its IPO by two years, Japanese messaging app company Line Corp bought time to correct weak financial reporting controls, work on its business plan, bolster staffing - and left billions of dollars on the table as its valuation shriveled. Line's initial public offering in the next three weeks is set to raise about $1 billion, which given a global drought of such deals could make it the biggest tech listing this year, but skeptical fund managers point to tepid growth in Line's home market and doubts about its prospects for regional expansion. They also question whether its advertising revenue strategy will work. Fund managers who have watched Line's growth slow in a crowded global messaging app market assess the plan with caution. "I'm not interested," said Yasuo Sakuma, portfolio manager at Bayview Asset Management, which manages 270 billion yen ($2.64 billion). "Its growth outlook is very poor." "Among the four countries that it's focusing on, only Indonesia has big room for growth in use," he added. "Even there, the business outlook is not that easy." Growth in Line's monthly active users has tailed off after tripling across the world over the past three years. Last year, user numbers rose just 13 million to 218 million at the end of March, the IPO filing showed. The company isn't providing much visibility about the future either - it says in its filing that limited operating history makes it "difficult" to forecast future results. "I went to the company's meeting with investors... but nothing moved me," said a fund manager at a major Japanese asset management firm who declined to be named because of company rules against discussing individual shares. "It's not clear how it can make money out of its advertisement business." Line's likely valuation is far less than the $10 billion-$20 billion that was expected by investors when South Korean parent Naver Corp previously talked of a Line listing in 2013-2014, although Line may not have had much choice but to wait.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 23

• Clash of Clans May Spur Tencent’s Marvel-Like Aspirations: Tencent is spending $8.6 billion to gain control of Supercell Oy -- the Finnish maker of mobile games including Hay Day, Clash Royale and Boom Beach -- from SoftBank Group Corp. To see how that portfolio may fit into Tencent’s emerging entertainment empire, look at how the Chinese company leveraged World of Warcraft and League of Legends into global powerhouses.League of Legend’s 67 million monthly users helped Tencent earn $9 billion in game revenue last year, and the Tencent-backed movie “Warcraft” is setting box-office records in China since this month’s release. Acquiring Supercell reinforces Tencent’s entertainment aspirations against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc., and comes after Tencent bought the rights to 300-plus Japanese anime franchises in a push to become a worldwide multimedia brand like Marvel, DC and Disney. “Tencent has taken on a strategy to convert good IPs into movies and anime,” said Mark Tanner, founder of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based research and marketing agency. “It’s creating a world of superhero characters for entertainment.” Supercell occupied the top spot on researcher App Annie’s rankings of publishers fortwo years running. Clash of Clans was named an “essential” app by Apple Inc. and was promoted during the 2015 Super Bowl in a commercial featuring Academy Award-nominee Liam Neeson. Yet the game hasn’t been among the 10 top-grossing apps in China and Japan’s iOS Store since 2015, which is where Tencent’s clout can help.The company’s QQ and WeChat instant messaging apps have more than a billion users combined, and it could use those apps to promote Supercell games, Tanner said. That distribution system helped Tencent’s mobile-game revenue increase 16 percent to 8.2 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in the quarter ending March 31, compared with the previous three months. China’s mobile gaming market expected to reach 68.8 billion yuan by 2018. “We do see there’s an opportunity for IPs of games and movies and video to cross and splice with each other, in the right way,” Martin Lau, Tencent’s president, said during a conference call Tuesday.

• Okta hires Goldman Sachs to lead IPO or sale: Okta Inc, a U.S. cloud identity management company valued at $1.2 billion in its latest private fundraising round, has hired Goldman Sachs Group to lead an initial public offering or outright sale, people familiar with the matter said. Okta's exploration of both an IPO and a sale underscores the dilemma faced by several technology companies this year, as frothy stock market valuations of many of their peers begin to come down, prompting potential buyers to enter the fray. Okta could file for an IPO as early as the second half of this year, the people said this week. However, the San Francisco-based company has also held talks with technology peers about being acquired, and could pursue a sale if it believes it can fetch a significantly higher valuation than in an IPO, the people added.Okta helps companies organize passwords and authenticate the identity of employees who log into work applications made by other software firms. Its customers include satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp and hospitality company MGM Resorts International. Okta has raised a total of roughly $230 million to date with investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures, Janus Capital Group and Altimeter Capital.

• Twilio prices its IPO at $15 per share, above its previous target: Twilio today said it would price its initial public offering at $15 per share, which would value the company at around $1.23 billion. That would value Twilio above its previous $1 billion valuation from its last financing round. With the pricing, the company expects to raise around $150 million, with an option for another 1.5 million shares to be purchased. It’s also a higher price than the $12-$14 per share price that the company previously targeted. Twilio’s IPO will be an important one given the drought of tech IPOs this year. Anxiety has gripped many startups that have hit unicorn status given the complete lack of tech IPOs for 2016 (Twilio will only be the third of the year). The hope, for many startups, is that Twilio will re-open the tech IPO window with a strong showing after trading begins tomorrow. If that happens, it might convince investors that many startups that have hit frothy valuations have come back in line with reality, and these companies could be good investment targets if they choose to go public. Twilio is not profitable, with the company reporting a net loss of $35.5 million on $166.9 million in revenue last year. But it’s showing strong revenue growth, with the company bringing in $88.8 million in revenue from 2014. In total, Twilio has raised more than $200 million in venture financing, with Bessemer Venture Partners owning the largest chunk of the company at 28.5 percent per its last IPO filing. Twilio is expected to start trading tomorrow, and we’ll see whether or not the appetite for tech IPOs will be coming back with its performance.

Daily Tech Snippet: 3 June 2016

• Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage: Snapchat has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users. Snapchat has been growing quickly, boosted by its popularity among young people. The app had 110 million daily users in December, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak about the numbers. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc. but has since been surpassed by Facebook’s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Twitter has 310 million monthly active users, according to its most recent earnings report. The company doesn’t disclose how many of those people check in daily, but in the third quarter, it said about 44 percent of monthly users are active each day in the service’s top 20 markets. Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said at the time that the percentage had been stable but that “we’ll be sure to disclose” if there was a significant change. The company hasn’t given an update since then. This implies a daily active user count of 136 million. Snapchat has made communicating more of a game by letting people send annotated selfies and short videos. It has allowed people to use its imaging software to swap faces in a photo, transform themselves into puppies, and barf rainbows. (In March, Facebook said it acquired the startup behind an app called Masquerade, which offers similar photo-manipulation tools.) Snapchat encourages people to visit the app frequently with features such as the "Snapstreak," which counts the number of consecutive days they’ve been communicating with their closest friends. Snapchat’s other content, such as news and Live Stories, disappear after 24 hours.

• The incredibly brilliant way people are now paying for things in Asia: When Apple first rolled out Apple Pay in 2014, it was billed as a simpler way to buy goods and services. You take your phone out, tap it to the credit card reader, and off you go. Seems convenient, right?  But some consumers in Asia think there's an even better way to pay. In recent years, millions of people have grown accustomed to using messaging apps to communicate. Some of these apps now support person-to-person digital cash transfers. So the next step is pretty logical: Asian retailers have begun using these same messaging platforms to sell everything from clothing to hamburgers to train tickets. And as a consumer, you never have to leave the app to pay. On the surface, this alternative sounds a lot like Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay, or Android Pay, etc.). But conducting real-life and online transactions through messaging apps stands to change retail like none of these other services have. What we're seeing in Asia is the rise of mobile payments that run primarily on software, not hardware as we've tried to implement here in the United States. And that simple distinction may be the key to everything from accelerating the spread of mobile payments to unlocking deep, digital interactions with customers in brick-and-mortar stores to democratizing e-commerce away from giant online businesses like Amazon.To buy a meal with WeChat, which in China goes by the name Weixin, customers simply pull up a QR code in the app that's connected to their credit card or other financial account. Once the cashier scans the code, that's it — no further action is needed. Retailers in China will typically offerdiscounts to WeChat users as an incentive to pay with the app.

• No Uber IPO in Sight After $3.5 Billion From Saudi Arabia: Once upon a time, Silicon Valley startups raised money from venture capitalists and then, with some luck and a promising business, held an IPO to cash in and expand. Uber has no need for such traditions. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2009 and valued at $62.5 billion, has now raised $11 billion as it spends heavily to expand globally and battle well-funded rivals such as Lyft Inc. and China’s Didi. The ride-hailing company’s latest infusion of cash -- a record $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund -- means Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has the finances to continue avoiding a listing of his company any time soon. "I’m going to make sure it happens as late as possible," he told CNBC earlier this year. The money from Saudi Arabia is a new wrinkle in the shifting way the world’s largest technology startups are being funded. The $3.5 billion raised by Uber Technologies Inc. this week is far larger than what most companies are able raise when they hold public offerings: Twitter Inc. netted $1.82 billion during its 2013 IPO and First Data Corp. raised $2.56 billion in the largest technology IPO of the past 12 months. In 2004, Google raised $1.67 billion during its stock-market debut.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, May 27

• Google Prevails as Jury Rebuffs Oracle in Code Copyright Case: A jury ruled in favor of Google on Thursday in a long legal dispute withOracle over software used to power most of the world’s smartphones. Oracle contended that Google used copyrighted material in 11,000 of its 13 million lines of software code in Android, its mobile phone operating system. Oracle asked for $9 billion from Google. Google said it made fair use of that code and owed nothing. The victory for Google cheered other software developers, who operate much the way Google did when it comes to so-called open-source software. Unlike traditional software created by corporations and tightly held, open-source products are released, often with some restrictions, for anyone to use and modify. “Great news for progress and innovation,” Chris Dixon, a technology investor with Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, posted on Twitter after the verdict. Android relies in part on Java, an open-source software language that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010. Oracle argued that Google executives violated Oracle’s copyright by using aspects of Java without permission. The courtroom fight was something of a watershed for technology and could offer clarity on legal rules surrounding open-source technology, which is used in everything from smartphones and digital recording devices to the software that runs many of the world’s biggest data centers. People who work with open-source technology worried that a victory for Oracle would have led other companies to make similar demands of open-source products. “It does give a lot of breathing room to other companies and individuals trying to do a lot of innovative activity,” said Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.

• Bessemer-Backed Twilio Files for Initial Public Offering: Twilio Inc., the San Francisco-based company that helps clients including Uber Technologies Inc. build web and mobile applications, filed for an initial public offering. The software developer, backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, filed with an initial offering size of $100 million, a placeholder amount used to calculate fees that will probably change. Twilio had more than 28,000 active customers at the end of March, according to the prospectus filed Thursday. They include enterprise-software company Box Inc., department-store chain Nordstrom Inc. and rideshare company Uber. Twilio said in the filing its communications software is embedded in Uber’s mobile app, helping it update riders in real-time about their ride requests as well as helping the company scale its business. Bessemer holds a stake of 28.5 percent in Twilio, according to the prospectus. Union Square Ventures holds 13.6 percent and Fidelity owns 6.1 percent. Twilio has yet to make a profit. It posted a net loss of about $36 million in 2015, on sales of $167 million, even as revenue grew 88 percent that year after a 78 percent bump in 2014. The company said that it expects its growth rate to decline over time. WhatsApp Inc. contributed a significant chunk of that revenue. The messaging tool owned by Facebook Inc. uses Twilio’s technology in its applications to verify new and existing users. WhatsApp accounted for 17 percent of Twilio’s sales last year and 15 percent in the first three months of 2016.

• Snapchat raises $1.81 billion in new funding round: Messaging app Snapchat has raised $1.81 billion in funding, the company reported in a U.S. regulatory filing on Thursday, a sign that investor interest is strong despite concerns among some venture capitalists that the platform is struggling to attract advertisers. Venture capital database PitchBook estimated the company's valuation after the financing at $17.81 billion, up from $16 billion at it most recent financing in February.Snapchat, headquartered in Venice, California, has faced concerns from big investors familiar with the company that its estimated valuation is not justified because of an uneven revenue stream. Its advertising business, which began last October, is the company's only significant revenue source. But, with a strong user base of 13- to 24-year-olds, the app provides an attractive platform to reach millennials and hook young consumers on brands. The company has more than 100 million active users, about 60 percent of whom are 13- to 24-year-olds. Snapchat early this year raised $175 million from Fidelity Investments in a "flat round" of financing that did not adjust the company's valuation. The mutual fund bought shares at $30.72 each. Fidelity has repeatedly adjusted the estimated valuation of its stake in the company, slashing it by at least 25 percent last year only to boost it by more than 60 percent in February. Investors in this latest round include General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine, among others, tech blog TechCrunch reported on Thursday. TechCrunch also reported that Snapchat's revenues in 2015 were $59 million, according to a presentation to investors that was seen by the news site. That's up from $3.1 million for the first 11 months of 2014, sources told Reuters last year.
• InMobi grapples with senior, mid-level attrition amid concerns about future: Online advertising startup InMobi , one of India's early 'unicorns,' is struggling to retain senior executives amid questions about whether new strategic initiatives are working as well as worries about the future of the company. InMobi, which was founded by Naveen Tewari in 2007 and was the first startup in which Japan's SoftBank invested, now has some 1,500 employees compared to twice that number at its peak. The Japanese conglomerate, which has since backed Snapdeal and Ola, poured $200 million into InMobi in 2011 but wrote down most of that amount in 2014. The exits also come during a time when InMobi is struggling to raise funds and chart out a sustainable business model that can adapt to the massive changes that are taking place in the online and mobile advertising space, according to both current and former executives at the company. According to these executives, InMobi, which was estimated to be valued at $1 billion, now generates between around $300 million in annual revenue. InMobi has not registered profits since its founding in 2007. InMobi's challenges have been compounded by the fact that its flagship product Miip -- that targeted global retailers like Walmart -- hasn't taken off. Miip also took much longer than expected to scale and customers found the product underwhelming, according to at least two customers who have used the product.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 23

• Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face: For years, there has been a limit to the success of American technology companies in China. Capture too much market share or wield too much influence, and Beijing will push back. Apple has largely been an exception to that trend. Yet the Silicon Valley company is now facing a regulatory push against its services in China that could signal its good relations in the country may be turning. Last week, Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies were shut down in China, just six months after they were started there. Initially, Apple apparently had the government’s approval to introduce the services. But then a regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, asserted its authority and demanded the closings, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.The about-face is startling, given Apple’s record in China. Unlike many other American tech companies, Apple has succeeded in introducing several new products — like its mobile payments system Apple Pay — in China recently. New resistance from the Chinese government to that expansion could potentially hurt the Cupertino, Calif., company. To a degree more than many tech companies, Apple relies on the smooth operation of its software — including its App Store and services like iTunes, which are tightly integrated with the iPhone and iPad — to keep customers coming back to its devices. Apple, which is facing a slowdown in sales of its iPhones, is also reliant on China for growth, so further moves by Beijing to curtail services could crimp sales. The company counts China as its second-largest market after the United States. Its China numbers will be dissected on Tuesday, when it reports quarterly earnings. China’s pushback against Apple shows that the company may finally be vulnerable to the heightened scrutiny that other American tech companies have faced in recent years. That scrutiny was spurred by revelations from the former United States National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden in 2013 of the use of American companies to conduct cyberespionage for Washington. China has sweeping goals in its move against Apple, said Daniel H. Rosen, founding partner of Rhodium Group, a New-York based advisory firm specializing in the Chinese economy. “They are interested in protecting the content that the Chinese people see, policing its national security and favoring indigenous giants such as Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent,” Mr. Rosen said. In this new era, he added, China “is strongly disinclined to accept the dominance of foreign players on the Internet, not least those from the United States.” Sales in China for those companies, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm, have slid as government oversight has increased. Some have grappled with raids, investigations and fines. Some have also been pressured to sell off holdings, hand over technology and work with local partners to expand their China businesses. Though Apple is one of the eight, it has had a much easier time - so far.

• Dell’s SecureWorks stumbles in first tech IPO of the year: It has been a dry year for tech IPOs. Up until today’s SecureWorks offering, there had been zero in the U.S. in 2016. Zero. This compares to seven in the same period last year and 24 in that timeframe the year before. So tech investors and late-stage private companies were watching SecureWorks closely, to see if the tech IPO window would reopen. It is one of the few indications we have right now to assess public investor appetite for tech IPOs. Unfortunately, SecureWorks faltered.The unicorn-sized security company split from Dell, although the computer manufacturer remains its majority owner. SecureWorks raised $112 million in the offering, after pricing its IPO at $14 per share. But the company was expecting the initial price to be between $15.50-$17.50. SecureWorks closed the day at $13.88, beneath the $14 IPO price. The offering certainly did not assuage concerns about the current environment for tech IPOs.

• Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired for $18 million: Hackbright Academy, the San Francisco-based coding school for women, has been acquired by Capella Education for $18 million as the publicly traded education company looks to expand its efforts to train more women in technical careers.Hackbright, which was started in 2012, has graduated 364 women from its 12-week full-time fellowship programs. Another 279 women have graduated from its part-time program. Capella, meanwhile, is based in Minneapolis and specializes in degree programs for working adults, three quarters of whom are women. The deal closed Friday, the companies said, with all of Hackbright’s 25 employees joining Capella. Hackbright CEO Sharon Wienbar will continue to lead the team, reporting to Gilligan. Hackbright will continue to focus its efforts on in-person trainings exclusively for women, Wienbar said.

• In Asia, Netflix trips on regulation, content, and competition: Months after its global rollout, Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) is facing problems in several major Asian markets as it struggles to provide enough strong content to attract consumers amid tough local competition, and also faces many regulatory hurdles, underlining concerns about disappointing subscriber numbers reported this week. From complaints that programming libraries offered in many countries are far smaller than in the United States to delays in offering its signature "House of Cards" series in some markets due to rights issues, the U.S. video streaming giant's January launch into 130 new markets worldwide, including a slew in Asia, has been bumpy. When it launched in Indonesia in January, for example, Netflix ran afoul of the film censorship board for carrying content deemed inappropriately violent or sexual. The communications ministry also demanded that Netflix set up a local office and pay Indonesian taxes.Netflix is still available in Indonesia via wifi connections and other carriers.In South Korea, where local content is popular and consumers have numerous streaming options, the Netflix site offers fewer than 20 local TV shows or movies."Korean Netflix's library in terms of content is pretty thin," said Jung Dong-yoon, a 29-year-old Seoul office worker and subscriber since January.Netflix had an explosive start in Australia, counting nearly 3 million Australians as viewers, OUT OF A population of 24 million, within nine months of its March 2015 launch. But growth has slowed just as dramatically, from a 55 percent leap between April and May to a rise of 4 percent between September and October, according to Roy Morgan research.

• Tipping Is Coming to Uber, and It’s Going to Be Awkward: Uber's mega settlement of as much as $100 million helps it solve a major legal liability around workforce classification, but another piece of the agreement could make for some uncomfortable situations in the near future. As part of the settlement with drivers in California and Massachusetts, Uber has agreed to notify customers more clearly that tips are not included in fares and give tacit approval for optional gratuity. Drivers can now solicit cash tips by asking passengers or posting signs in their vehicles. Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing the drivers, said riders should start seeing gratuities as a major part of an Uber driver's income. In other words, more like a cabbie. “I believe that, with this information, many riders will begin tipping their drivers, which will increase drivers’ pay substantially,” she said in a statement to the court. In the past, Uber tried to discourage tipping. During the company’s early days, its website said in 2011 that tips were included. Drivers complained that Uber was making its fares seem lower than they really were by rolling in a tip. In any case, they argued that Uber shouldn’t take a cut of the portion of the fare that was classified as a tip. The company eventually changed the way it described the cost of the ride. It currently says there’s no need to tip.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, April 12

• Apple Watch verdict a year later: Half of those surveyed think it’s a dud: More than half of those surveyed by the advertising technology company Fluent said they considered the Apple Watch a flop. That sentiment — expressed by the majority of the 2,578 adults in the U.S. who responded last week to an online survey — reflects how the device is perceived by the tech press and industry insiders, many of whom have been pessimistic about the Apple Watch from the start. Asked whether they considered the Watch a successful product for Apple, 53 percent responded “no.” But Fluent’s survey also offers a more nuanced picture of Apple’s first wearable device,which launched on April 24, 2015. A significant majority of Apple Watch owners — 77 percent — consider the smartwatch a success and about two-thirds said they plan to upgrade when the next version comes out. Those owners surveyed said they take advantage of a range of the smartwatch’s features, including monitoring their activity and receiving notifications (79 percent), listening to music (75 percent) and checking email or chat (66 percent). This survey supports the more comprehensive findings of Wristly’s “Pulse on Wristware,” released earlier this year. The research group, which surveys some 2,500 smartwatch and fitness band owners every week, says that despite some views of the Apple Watch as a “mediocre novelty,” it enjoys “astoundingly high customer satisfaction ratings.”

• Israel to Levy New Taxes on Google, Facebook in Policy Shift: Israel has expanded its definition of who must pay taxes on commerce, targeting digital multinationals such as Facebook Inc. and Google that critics say get a free ride. Because much of today’s trade is carried out on the Internet, a foreign firm may now be considered a “permanent establishment” and subject to tax even if most of its presence is virtual, the Israel Tax Authority said in an e-mailed statement. The authority said Internet multinationals will be required to pay value-added tax, which is 17 percent for Israelis. The new taxes, which take effect immediately, will eventually add hundreds of millions of shekels a year to state revenue, the authority said. A Google representative in Israel couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Facebook “pays taxes according to the law in every country it operates, including Israel,” a spokeswoman said via e-mail. Although Israel’s relatively small population of 8.5 million means the new taxes won’t clobber the international giants, they build on broader efforts worldwide to level the playing field between foreign Internet companies and local commerce. Russia is pushing to raise taxes on U.S. Internet companies to help its local industry and governments across Europe and beyond are trying to extract more revenue from Google, Apple Inc. and other multinationals with increasingly complex billing and ownership structures.

• Cloud-based video production platform 90 Seconds lands $7.5M Series A led by Sequoia India: Despite the increasing ubiquity of online videos, making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. 90 Seconds wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of the video production process in one place. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Sequoia India. Other investors in this round include pay television provider SKY TV New Zealand, Airtree Ventures, Beenext and Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of stock image agency Fotolia.com. Now based in Singapore, 90 Seconds was launched in Auckland in 2010 by CEO Tim Norton after he struggled to find an online video production service for shoots in different places. 90 Seconds started with online production tools before launching its marketplace, which now lists 5,000 video professionals from 70 countries. The company plans to continue adding to the mobile version of its software until clients can manage every part of the production process — from commissioning a video to reviewing footage and uploading to YouTube and social media platforms — on their tablets or smartphones. Timeliness is important for 90 Seconds’ users, who have included Visa, Samsung and Microsoft, because they need to take advantage of trending topics and search terms. More companies are also using the platform to handle longer shoots, like TV spots. Hooking up companies with creators and giving them all the software tools they need to produce a video is how 90 Seconds differentiates from other video production sites (which include Visually, Userfarm and SmartShoot) and also what it hopes will future-proof its business model from new competitors as demand for online videos grows.

• Dell's SecureWorks valued at $1.42 billion in year's first tech IPO: Dell's cyber security unit, SecureWorks Corp, could be valued at up to $1.42 billion in its initial public offering, the first major U.S. listing of a technology company this year. Atlanta, Georgia-based SecureWorks said on Monday its offering was expected to be priced at $15.50-$17.50 per Class A share, raising as much as $157.5 million.  The share issue market worldwide plunged to a seven-year low in the first quarter, more than halving from a year earlier to $106.6 billion, as worries over slowing economic growth kept investors wary, according to Thomson Reuters data. In the past few years, several cyber security firms such as FireEye, Rapid7 and Mimecast have gone public to take advantage of growing investor interest in them after a spate of hacking attacks on companies including major banks and retailers. However, shares of Rapid7 and FireEye, which popped 70-80 percent in their debut, are now trading way below their IPO prices. Mimecast, which jumped 20 percent on its listing day, has also slipped below its offering price. Ritter warned against premium pricing for stocks of cyber security firms, saying that these companies were fighting for market share, which would keep their profit growth muted.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 6

• WhatsApp completes end-to-end encryption rollout: It’s a security project that’s taken around a year and a half to complete, but messaging giant WhatsApp has now fully implemented strong end-to-end encryption on its platform and across all mobile platforms for which it offers apps. This means users of the latest versions of the messaging app will have their comms and media end-to-end encrypted by default. And there are a lot of WhatsApp users; earlier this year the Facebook owned company announced it had passed a billion active users. Securing cross-platform video comms was the last piece of the puzzle, according to a WhatsApp spokesman. End-to-end encryption means the content of communications are not stored in plaintext on WhatsApp’s servers. Nor is the company able to decrypt users’ messages to access them since it does not hold the encryption keys. So WhatsApp will be unable to be compelled to hand over messaging data — even if served with a warrant by authorities demanding access.

• Virtual Reality Check: Rating the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift: JUST a week after Facebook released the Oculus Rift, the first high-powered virtual reality device for consumers, a less publicized contender has arrived: the HTC Vive. Similar to the Rift, the Vive — a joint development by the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and the video game distribution company Valve — is a virtual reality headset that connects to a powerful computer. The Vive is even more expensive than the Rift — it costs $799 for the headset and $1,000 to $2,000 for a compatible computer. Facebook’sOculus sells the Rift headset for $599, or $1,500 when the system is bundled with a computer. The main advantage of the HTC Vive headset is that it comes with motion controllers, which let you effectively reach out and grab objects in virtual reality. This kind of interaction feels much more natural for virtual reality than the game controller included with the Rift. Also, the Vive’s motion-sensing base stations capture richer movements, enabling people to walk around in a larger space or crouch and grab something while using virtual reality; the Rift’s camera can detect movements, too, but the Rift was primarily designed to be used while standing or sitting. Another benefit of the Vive is that the headset fits better. With the Rift, I could always see a small gap in the space beneath the nose. The Vive headset completely blocks the outside world. HTC also includes a piece of foam that can be inserted into the Vive for a better fit for a narrower face. But a major downside of the Vive is the setup, which is more demanding than the Rift’s. HTC recommends that you drill mounts into the ceiling to install the motion-sensing base stations to ensure that the sensors have a clear line of sight with the headset and your body. In other words, to take full advantage of the Vive, you probably need to dedicate a room to virtual reality; to use the Rift, you can get away with clearing out a bit of standing space. The other obvious downside of the Vive is the higher cost. With a computer and accessories included in the total price, the Vive will cost roughly $300 more than the Rift. Then again, if you are willing to spend more than $1,000 for virtual reality, that extra $300 might not matter much. This is Year 1 of powerful and capable virtual reality systems coming to the mainstream. Over time, the content that will become available for these devices will define their worth. There isn’t much to do with either system yet, and consumers would be wise to wait to see if any killer virtual reality apps or games emerge for the systems.

• After a Pause, Nutanix Signals IPO Plans Are Back on Track: Nutanix, a supplier of storage products for data centers, just updated its paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling that its plans for an initial public offering may no longer be on hold. The new filing shows that Nutanix, based in San Jose, Calif., nearly doubled its revenue in the six-month period ended Jan. 31, to $190 million from $102 million in the year-ago period. It ran a net loss of nearly $72 million, which increased from $56 million a year ago. Operating expenses rose to $190 million from $112 million previously. The company first filed for an IPO in December, but was reported to have put those plans on hold in February after markets turned south. After the Dell-owned security company SecureWorks, which is expected to offer about 20 percent of its shares in an IPO later this month, Nutanix would appear to be on track to be the second tech IPO of 2016.

• Amazon Acquires Image Analysis Startup Orbeus: The acquisition took place in the fall of 2015, said the person who asked not to be identified because Amazon hasn’t announced the deal. Orbeus developed photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of AI called neural networks and made this available as a consumer application, as well as a service for other companies and developers called ReKognition. It automatically categorized and identified the contents of photos. Orbeus’s app, PhotoTime, came out before Google launched its successful AI-based Photos app. "ReKognition API is no longer taking new customers," Orbeus says on its website. "But we’re up to new/exciting things." Other startups applying neural networks to image-recognition and related computer-vision tasks include New York-based Clarifai Inc. and Palo Alto-based MetaMind. Big technology companies are interested in this field, and other areas of AI. Salesforce.com Inc. said Monday it acquired MetaMind, while Apple Inc. said in January it purchased Emotient Inc., which specialized in facial-recognition technology.

• Medium Chases Revenue With Promoted Stories; Adds Subscriptions: Medium, the 4-year-old online publishing platform from Twitter Inc. co-founder Ev Williams, now has a plan to pay the bills. The company will make money in much the same way Twitter and Facebook Inc. do -- by allowing brands to post stories and pay for them to be promoted to a wider audience through prominent placement in the news feed. Alphabet Inc.’s Nest and Intel Corp. are among the first advertisers taking this approach to reach Medium’s 25 million unique readers. The blogging site also plans to extend its tools for media publishers, so they can host their entire website within Medium, helping the companies save money on technology costs. The Awl and Pacific Standard are among new publications coming to Medium starting Tuesday. Publishers can also choose to put some stories behind a members-only paywall. On Medium, people can publish and annotate long-form articles and follow networks of authors. The company, backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Google Ventures, last raised $57 million in September at a $400 million valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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• Twitter Built a New Button So You’ll Send More Private Messages:  Reply. Retweet. Like. And now Send. Twitter is adding a new button to the bottom of each tweet so that it’s simpler to send that tweet to another user within a private message. The new icon, a small envelope right next to the heart-shaped Like button, automatically attaches the tweet to a private message which you can then address to another user.  But the fact that Twitter is putting a new button onto each tweet is a pretty good indication of how important direct messaging is to the company. Twitter was late to building out its messaging service and as a result has always lagged behind other messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger or Snapchat. But Twitter DMs are increasing in popularity — Twitter claims that 60 percent more messages were sent in 2015 than 2014. Adding a new button to encourage more private messages should bump that number even higher. It should also make it easier for users to send tweets to brands or retailers, a customer service use case Twitter is starting to build features for. It’s one of the reasons the company removed the 140-character text limit for direct messages last summer; it’s hard to have a conversation with a customer service agent when you can’t send more then two sentences at a time. The customer service use case was also one of the reasons Twitter has considered spinning DMs into its own app. It ultimately decided against the idea.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 18

• Big IPO, Tiny Payout for Many Startup Workers: Side deals and volatile shares make stock options a bigger gamble for startup employees.The frustrated expectations of early employees have become a common thread in the latest round of technology IPOs. It used to be “the get-rich story happened for people who joined in the early days,” says Saar Gur, general partner at Charles River Ventures. Now they can be among the few left behind. Many executives, early investors, and even later investors are able to cash out before the rank and file, or bargain for guarantees that help ensure a bonanza. Whatever happens with an IPO, executives tend to hang on to enough equity to guarantee huge payouts when they sell their shares. Most early investors get a chance to sell options on secondary markets before a company’s IPO. Later investors increasingly demand preferential treatment, including agreements that if an IPO underperforms the terms of their investment, they’ll be made whole with an equivalent amount of additional shares. Late-stage investors in both Box and Square had such so-called ratchet agreements in place, further devaluing locked-up employee equity. When those kinds of deals are in place, employees often find their payouts disappointing because they’re so diluted, says Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution Ventures. Box and Square declined to comment for this story. Ordinary employees are typically without meaningful financial protections or even a clear sense of what their equity stakes mean, says Chris Zaharis, who’s worked at startups for about 20 years and as a volunteer teaches people about their equity rights. Options grants often don’t come with information on strike prices (discounts on shares), preferential treatment, or even the total number of shares outstanding. “People on average overestimate what they are going to make by about 10X,” he says.

• Driverless Cars Have A Crash Rate Twice As High As Regular Cars - Because They Always Follow The Rules. They  The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. The glitch? They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google  and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble? “It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. Turns out, though, their accident rates are twice as high as for regular cars, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution. Last year, Rajkumar offered test drives to members of Congress in his lab’s self-driving Cadillac SRX sport utility vehicle. The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head toward the Pentagon. The car’s cameras and laser sensors detected traffic in a 360-degree view but didn’t know how to trust that drivers would make room in the ceaseless flow, so the human minder had to take control to complete the maneuver.

• Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service: A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered the lifting of a 48-hour suspension of the services in Brazil of Facebook Inc's WhatsApp phone-messaging application, overturning an order from a lower court. The ban, which went into effect at midnight Wednesday, lasted about 12 hours until an appeals court judge overturned it. The interruption of WhatsApp's text message and Internet telephone service caused outrage in Latin America's largest country, where the company estimates it has 100 million personal users, and led to angry exchanges on the floor of Congress. WhatsApp is installed on 92.5 percent of Android devices in Brazil, making it the most installed app in the country, according to SimilarWeb, an internet intelligence and marketing company. Rival messaging system Telegram said on Twitter that it received 1 million downloads in Brazil in one day due to the outage. Telegram was installed on 2.35 percent of android devices before the blackout and Facebook Messenger on 74 percent, SimilarWeb said. A judge in Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo, had ordered the suspension of WhatsApp's services from midnight on Wednesday (0200 GMT Thursday). The order was made after the California-based company, despite a fine, failed to comply with two judicial rulings to share information in a criminal case. 

• Apple names Jeff Williams COO, a job once held by Tim Cook: Apple Inc promoted longtime executive Jeff Williams to the role of chief operating officer, reinstating the title previously held by Chief Executive Tim Cook, as part of a series of changes to the company's leadership team. Williams, who joined Apple in 1998, previously served as senior vice president of operations and oversaw development of the Apple Watch, the company's first new product since the iPad. "Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I've ever worked with," Cook said in a statement. While it was unclear if the appointment meant Apple was grooming Williams to be Cook's successor, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source, that the move did not necessarily signal that.

• Yelp, OpenTable part ways amid heightened competition: Review site Yelp Inc and restaurant reservation service OpenTable have quietly ended a long-running partnership, the companies confirmed on Thursday, as the one-time allies increasingly eye each other's businesses. The companies parted ways in April under mounting competition, with OpenTable facing new rivals to its reservation business and Yelp dogged with questions about stalling growth. Both companies are trying to take charge of the entire customer experience, said an analyst. "If they have to share that customer with someone else, it threatens their long-term viability," he said. The companies halted a deal that since 2010 had allowed users to make OpenTable reservations through Yelp, home to a trove of reviews from diners.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 14

• Is Acqui-Hiring Dead? Tech Startups Long for the Days of Yahoo’s Binge Acquisitions: Under Marissa Mayer, Yahoo used to be the top company making “acqui-hires,” but such talent acquisitions have fallen out of favor throughout Silicon Valley this year. In 2013 and 2014, Yahoo was the top technology company conducting acqui-hires, an industry term for acquisitions done primarily for the talent, according to research firm CB Insights. Yahoo was tied for third in 2012, Mayer's first year at the company. In 2015, Yahoo has disappeared from the list entirely. When Mayer joined from Google, she was looking for an infusion of technical and entrepreneurial talent to improve the company's mobile and Web services. The fresh blood failed to revive the staid Internet portal, and now Yahoo is considering a spinoff of its core Web business to address investors' tax concerns. "They made acquisitions, and nothing came out of it," said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. "The focus has shifted over the last few quarters to integrate, rather than acquire." Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, declined to comment. The excitement surrounding talent acquisitions has dissipated throughout Silicon Valley, not just at Yahoo. Active acquirers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have started to pull back on buying for talent, CB Insights said. U.S. talent acquisitions have declined 48 percent this year from a peak in 2013, the firm's data show. CB Insights compiled the information from company reports, which wouldn't include undisclosed purchases or those not classified as talent acquisitions. Instead of pursuing costly acqui-hires, many companies have returned to old-fashioned recruitment, said Ben Narasin, a general partner at Canvas Ventures. "All of these top firms need more people, but are you really willing to pay a million-dollar cost of acquisition for a whole bunch of people?" he said. "I think acqui-hiring is dead."

• 2015 Was The Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009: With just 28 technology companies entering the U.S. public markets, 2015 was the worst year for IPOs since 2009, according to Dealogic. This compares to 62 last year and 48 the year before, with 131 “unicorns” opting to remain private longer. The performance of the tech IPOs has also been subpar. Half of the tech companies that have gone public this year are trading below their IPO price, including Etsy which fell 41%. And both Box and Square, went public at market caps that were beneath the valuation of their last private rounds. Companies which had strong fundamentals, like Atlassian, were able to hit the ground running. Fitbit is up 56% since its June IPO and GoDaddy, which is on the verge of profitability, has risen 68%. “2016 may see 2 types of companies go public,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. “One are the good companies with solid fundamentals. The other set of companies are those that get pushed into going public because the private markets close up on them.”

• Adidas’s ‘speedfactory’ hints at the future of shoe manufacturing:  Adidas announced this week that it is setting up what it calls a “speedfactory” in Ansbach, Germany, in an attempt to be at the forefront of manufacturing and offer individualized products that get in customers’ hands quicker. Its goal is to use the latest manufacturing innovations to produce a largely automated process. (From a business perspective, it’s not appealing to shift factories to areas with higher labor costs, unless the operation runs with minimal human labor.) By leveraging recent developments in robotics, Adidas may be able to better serve its customers. In the long run, the model could potentially expand beyond shoes to all goods. For example, after a big sporting event the conversation among sport fans in a given city might center around an athlete’s latest touchdown celebration dance, or a clever quip to reporters. If a company such as Adidas had a factory located near that city, it could rapidly produce and sell related merchandise before the conversation had cooled off.  The first step for Adidas is to produce 500 pairs of concept shoes in the first half of 2016. Those initial pairs will all be one type of running shoes. Down the line Adidas envisions custom-made shoes that might have a sole designed to fit an individual customer’s foot.

• Alibaba Buys Prominent And Vocal Hong Kong Newspaper For $266M In Bid To Influence Media: The Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet giant, is making an ambitious play to reshape media coverage of its home country, taking aim at what company executives call the “negative” portrayal of China in the Western media. As the backbone of this effort, Alibaba agreed on Friday to buy the media assets of the SCMP Group, including one of Hong Kong’s most influential English language daily newspapers, The South China Morning Post. Alibaba is acquiring an award-winning newspaper that for decades has reported aggressively on subjects that China’s state-run media outlets are forbidden to cover, like political scandals and human-rights cases.Alibaba said the deal was fueled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it calls the biased lens of Western news outlets. While Alibaba said the Chinese government had no role in its deal to buy the Hong Kong newspaper, the company’s position aligns closely with that of the Communist Party, which has grown increasingly critical of the way Western news organizations cover China. This coverage, the company said, influences how investors and others outside China regard Alibaba. The company said its shares, which are listed in New York, were being affected by all the negative reports about China. For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth $266 million, the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue. The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning The South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organization that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls. As speculation of a deal began in recent weeks, some critics in Hong Kong had already started to worry about whether Alibaba was seeking to tame the paper’s coverage in order to curry favor with the Chinese leadership. The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland like covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

• Singapore Post, Like Amazon, Tests Package Delivery by Drone: Singapore Post Ltd. is testing package delivery by drone, echoing attempts by Amazon.com Inc. to extend the commercial capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The company known as SingPost said a drone it developed with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore carried a packet containing a letter and T-shirt on a five-minute, two-kilometer (1.2 miles) flight. This marks the first time any postal service has successfully used a drone for “point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery,” it said in a statement Thursday. SingPost is looking to such unmanned aircraft as online transactions increase in the Asia-Pacific region and as Singapore plans to develop itself into a so-called Smart Nation through technology usage. There is “immense potential” in drone technology for last-mile mail and e-commerce delivery, Bernard Leong, SingPost’s head of digital services, said in the statement.

• An Amazon Rival, Jet.com, Eliminates Its Membership Fee: Just three months after its introduction, Jet.com, the much-hyped rival to Amazon and Costco, has done a 180-degree turn in its business model by making its members-only shopping club freely accessible. On Wednesday, Jet said it would eliminate its $50 annual membership fee, but continue to provide better prices on items, along with high-quality customer service and free shipping on orders of more than $35, among other benefits. The about-face raises questions of whether Jet was struggling to gain the traction it needed to expand its business. But Marc Lore, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said. While eliminating a membership fee may help expand Jet.com’s customer base, the move could diminish the company’s chances of turning a healthy profit. Mr. Lore had raised more than $200 million from investors to fund the site. In an interview with The New York Times, he had predicted that the company would take five years to grow to a point where it was not losing money on every shipment. The $50 membership fee would have been a major revenue stream contributing to Jet’s profit. Now Jet’s revenue will rely on raking in commissions on sales from retailers. Discounts for customers come from what Jet calls Smart Cart savings, which let shoppers lower costs by adding more products to their shopping carts, resulting in orders that are more efficient and cheaper to fulfill.

• Amazon Seeks Cloud Computing Growth With New Data Products: Amazon Web Services announced products Wednesday that give businesses new ways to transfer, manipulate and derive insights from data they store in the company’s cloud. The products span diverse areas of information technology from a business intelligence service named Quicksight, to security systems, to new tools to help people migrate databases from proprietary versions into free ones hosted within Amazon. The company also unveiled a new product, called Snowball, that is a hardware device that lets businesses securely transfer large amounts of data into the Amazon Web Services cloud. And Amazon announced a deal with consulting giant Accenture Plc to focus on corporate customers. The products and services shown at the company’s re:invent customer conference in Las Vegas represent a further expansion by Amazon into competitors’ territories, whether database vendors such as Oracle Corp. or business intelligence companies such as Tableau Software. The effort also keeps the pressure on traditional hardware providers, who are seeing their businesses slow as more of their customers opt for cloud computing offered by Amazon and others. Amazon’s Web Services division generated $1.8 billion in sales in the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarter and almost $400 million in operating profit. The e-commerce company created the AWS division almost 10 years ago, giving it a lead on competitors such as Microsoft, Google  and IBM. that were slow to release their own cloud services. In recent years that has changed. Microsoft is now a major competitor to AWS via its Azure service, and companies like Oracle are converting more applications to run in the cloud.

• Snapdeal invests $20M more in logistics firm gojavas: Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs online e-com marketplace Snapdeal, has invested $20 million (Rs 131 crore) more in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the gojavas brand, it said on Wednesday. Snapdeal had first invested in gojavas, which was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet, in March this year. It had not disclosed the investment amount but said it has picked a minority stake in the logistics firm. “The company’s average timeline for delivering Snapdeal orders has reduced by a full 24 hours in the last six months and our teams have worked closely to come up with innovative solutions that are enhancing customers’ shopping experience on Snapdeal. With the freshly infused funds, our aim is to help gojavas become more successful and expand their reach,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal. Snapdeal said it has invested $100 million in the last six months to improve it delivery timelines by 70 per cent and it will invest $200 million more in next 12 months to strengthen its supply chain. gojavas will be using the capital for expanding its operations to 100 more cities within 12 months. Vijay Ghadge, COO at gojavas, said the partnership with Snapdeal has helped it become one of the largest independent logistics players in the country with a revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore currently. gojavas currently manages over 1 lakh sq ft of fulfilment centres and helps more than 400 companies reach consumers in close to 350 cities and towns in more than 3,000 PIN-codes. It claims to deliver over 1.8 lakh packages every day and closed FY15 with revenues of over Rs 200 crore. It was originally an in-house delivery venture of Jabong but later spun out as a separate third-party logistics firm.

• Pandora Buys Ticketfly, a Competitor to Ticketmaster: Pandora Media, the biggest player in Internet radio, has moved into the ticketing business with an agreement to buy Ticketfly, an independent firm that competes with Ticketmaster and is popular with clubs and festivals in the United States and Canada. Pandora announced early Wednesday that it would acquire Ticketfly for $450 million, in a mix of cash and stock. The deal further expands Pandora’s interests in providing services to artists. Last year, it introduced a data system, the Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP, that shows musicians which songs are most popular on the service and where. And in May, Pandora bought Next Big Sound, another data service, which studies the listening and searching patterns of streaming music customers. Pandora, which has nearly 80 million regular listeners, said that its acquisition would benefit artists and listeners. The deal will also add a level of complexity to the sometimes delicate system of alliances in the ticketing world, which is dominated by Ticketmaster, a unit of Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketfly, which was founded in 2008 and was an early proponent of using social media and the web to market tickets, has become a popular choice for promoters that want to avoid the Ticketmaster system. Last year, according to its announcement with Pandora, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets worth more than $500 million. Among Ticketfly’s clients are the club Brooklyn Bowl and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. This year, the independent ticketing world was jolted when Ticketmaster bought Front Gate Tickets, another service popular with clubs, festivals and acts, a move that led some bands, like Wilco, to shift their alliances to other companies. Pandora’s control of Ticketfly could pose a challenge to Ticketmaster, particularly given Pandora’s history of using its user data for marketing. The company, which derives about 80 percent of its revenue from ad sales, has long pitched advertisers on its ability to identify its users based on their demographic data and listening habits — even going so far as to say it can predict its listeners’ political affiliation. “The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse.”

• Amazon considering online TV service: Amazon.com Inc is considering the creation of a live online TV service and has reached out to networks such as CBS Corp and Comcast's NBCUniversal to express interest in carrying their channels, Bloomberg reported. The e-commerce giant's talks with the networks are in preliminary stages, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Such a move would increase Amazon's already growing presence in online video. Amazon currently offers an on-demand video streaming service similar to that of Netflix. Amazon signed an exclusive deal with former "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson in July to present a new motoring show for its Amazon Prime subscription service. The company last month said it would launch six TV show pilots for its video streaming service in the United States, the UK, Germany and Austria for the 2015 fall pilot season.

• If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your Router: Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless connection in his bedroom. For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland, Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.” What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department. Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a router or try to decide which one to pick. So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal. The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too complex for their needs.

• Pure Storage Falls In Public Debut, CEO Optimistic: Pure Storage, the enterprise storage company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. After pricing at $17, shares traded down in its debut, closing the day at $16.01. CEO Scott Dietzen spoke to TechCrunch about why the company executed an IPO during what has been a lackluster year for tech stocks. “We were ready to be a public company,” said Dietzen. “We don’t worry about market conditions. Great companies can come out when it’s right for them.” The company’s IPO performance, slipping in its first day’s trading, isn’t big news. Other recent IPOs that have seen sharp declines in value following their flotation have performed more strongly. For example, Box, a tech company that went public this year, surged on its initial day as a public company. In the ensuing months, its shares have sagged. For industry watchers, any current public technology offering is a bellwether. The IPO cadence for technology firms has been infamously slow in 2015, causing concern among those both seeking liquidity for their investments, and executives worried about where their private valuation might square with the public markets. To underscore that point, Dropbox, a company that could formerly do no wrong, recently endured an embarrassing haircut. Pure Storage’s offering went off mid-range. It fell a modest 5.8 percent. These things are not the end of the world. But they may describe public investor uncertainty about the value of firms that are burning large quantities of cash to expand their top line. Box, MobileIron, and a host of others have endured related declines.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, April 17

• Forcing Login Helps Facebook Solve the Global Cookie Shortage: The company tracks app users across devices to prove ads work. For advertisers, one of the Web’s advantages over TV is the ability to track which ads get clicks and lead to sales. However, most mobile apps block cookies, leaving marketers blind. This cookie crunch has become a full-blown crisis as shopping on smartphones and tablets has exploded. Last year, U.S. marketers bought about $19 billion worth of ads on phones and $32 billion on PCs, according to researcher EMarketer; this year, the company estimates, the total will be $29 billion on phones and $30 billion on PCs. Enter Facebook, which promises the more than 1 million businesses that advertise through its Atlas Solutions network that they can follow 1.4 billion users from PCs to smartphones to tablets and back. To use Facebook, you have to log in, and the social network records identifying information about each device you’ve logged in from. That data is stored in your profile, so Facebook knows it’s you online, even when you’re visiting other sites. Atlas is an ad network, like Google’s AdSense, that Facebook bought from Microsoft in 2013 and relaunched late last year. Its advantage lies in the depth of Facebook’s knowledge of its consumers. Even though advertisers don’t know the identity of specific users, the demographic information Facebook gives them, broken down by characteristics such as age and gender, can help them tailor ad campaigns for different audiences, says Jonathan Nelson, chief executive officer of Omnicom Digital, an early adopter of Atlas. “If you can connect the dots backwards, you can understand, ‘How did that happen?’ ” Nelson says. “That’s a gold mine.” The Atlas network can also track Facebook users’ behavior on other websites, says Brad Smallwood, vice president for marketing science. Retailers can embed special Atlas code into their websites or apps that detect whether a customer buying a blouse she saw on her mobile browser viewed a related ad on Facebook. Atlas is an important test for Facebook, which gets more than 90 percent of its revenue from ads, as it tries to boost its appeal to mobile advertisers and compete with Google. The search giant commanded 37 percent of U.S. mobile ad revenue in 2014, more than double Facebook’s share, and has also begun tracking people across devices by using login data. Facebook’s ads, however, are more tailored to individual users based on what it knows about them.

• Etsy Closes Up 86 Percent On First Day Of Trading: Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, went public today. Shares opened at $31 on the NASDAQ, popping up 94 percent from the initial set price of $16 per share. The company closed its first day of trading at $30 per share, an 86% percent rise from its initial price. The company raised over $287 million by selling 16.7 million shares before trading, valuing the company at nearly $1.8 billion. Stock went up close to $35 by mid morning. Etsy is now worth more than $3.5 billion. The handmade crafts company is not yet turning a profit, but has seen year-over-year growth in revenue for the past few years, rocketing from $74.6 million in 2012, to $125 million in 2013 and to $195.59 million last year. It had 1.4 million active sellers and 19.8 million active buyers as of December. The success of the company’s IPO bodes well for the technology liquidity market, as it could spur other firms waiting on the sidelines to pull the trigger on their own IPOs. The technology IPO market has been slow so far in 2015. Box listed its shares earlier this year, receiving a massive 70 percent day one pop. Box’s shares, however, have since receded. The success of Etsy’s IPO could shine especially bright for Shopify, another company that recently filed for its own initial offering. They are related, if not analogous companies; Shopify provides e-commerce tools to small and medium-sized business, a moderate contrast to Etsy’s own solution. Still, the companies both track the aggregate dollar flow through their respective platforms. Etsy saw gross merchandise sales (GMS) in 2014 of $1.93 billion, while Shopify saw gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $3.76 billion in the same period. Etsy derives, as you expect, more revenue per dollar-through-platform given its intimate status as the marketplace network itself, in contrast to Shopify’s SaaS solution that helps others build their own sales channels. Given the enthusiastic reception of Etsy by investors, Shopify might anticipate a similiary warm reaction given the shared overtones of the two companies. The latter company has yet to price.

• European Regulators Are Stifling the Ad Business for Google, Facebook and Others: Regulators, consumers fight some of their best tactics: This week, Google was the latest, and perhaps the hardest hit, by the scrutiny overseas, as the European Union charged it with anti-trust practices by favoring its own Web properties in search results over rivals. Often, Google serves up results for shopping items to the detriment of e-commerce competitors, and it delivers instant reviews, keeping traffic away from rivals like Yelp. The ultimate penalty could force Google to change its search tactics, but the probe could also veer into other aspects of its business that impact advertising. Here in the U.S., regulators declined to label Google a search monopoly when they fully investigated the company in 2013, but they still closely watch how it competes with rivals and deals with consumers. The Mountainview, Calif.-company is not alone in these tense situations with European leaders. Facebook has been hit over user privacy, especially in Germany. The continent also is going after tech companies over taxes and security issues. The less the companies are able to operate freely, the less data they can accumulate, and the less finely tuned—and less valuable—their ads are, according to marketing experts. This week, industry research group eMarketer, which tracks global marketing spending, found social ad revenue is growing more slowly in western Europe than in North America or Asia. Meanwhile central and eastern Europe lagged further behind, and the disparity in overall digital growth was even greater. A number of factors drive digital ad dollars, but one is the ease with which tech companies can collect data on users, target ads and charge for such messages. European attitudes could hinder one of the most effective types of digital advertising, retargeting. "One of the main attractions to social media from advertisers (particularly to Facebook and Twitter, who own 75 percent of spending in this market) is the ability to use data to target customized audiences," said Dan Marcec, public relations director at eMarketer, in an email. "So any restriction on that would have an effect." Google wants to give brands new retargeting tools for search ads, according to reports this week. A source confirmed the company is interested in using advertisers' e-mail lists to do so. When reached for comment, Google said it always considers new products, but had nothing to share at this time. Another digital advertising source said Google's interest in retargeting could attract more regulatory spotlights. Fair or not, while Twitter and Facebook build fully integrated data machines for targeted ads across the Web, Google sometimes gets closer review in the U.S. and Europe. "It's clear Google is starting to think about using search to inform more advertising, and it runs a risk with regulators," the ad executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Some of Google's top rivals, including Microsoft, are said to be leading the charge in tipping off regulators about practices they see as unfair—practices that touch on all corners of its business, like search, data, privacy and advertising.

• China Halts New Policy on Tech for Banks: China has suspended a policy that would have effectively pushed foreign technology companies out of the country’s banking sector, according to a note sent by Chinese regulators to banks. Dated Monday, the letter called for banks to “suspend implementation” of the rules, which have been at the center of a brewing trade conflict between the United States and China. The rules, put into effect at the end of last year, called for companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over intellectual property and submit source code, in addition to other demands. At stake is billions of dollars of business for major American companies that make the advanced computing hardware and software that crunches numbers for banks across China. Trade groups representing companies including Microsoft, IBM and Apple have complained that such policies are protectionist. Yet the development is only a small reprieve for American tech companies. The suspension is temporary as authorities revise the rules. It is unclear how regulators will change the rules, but industry officials say a new version — even if it avoids more contentious issues like forcing the disclosure of source code — will still be problematic to multinational tech companies. China’s vice minister of finance, Zhu Guangyao, informed Nathan Sheets, the Treasury’s under secretary, of the decision to suspend the rules during a meeting in Washington, a senior administration official said. The recent trade debate is part of a wider clash between China and the United States over online security and technology policy. Such backpedaling is rare for Chinese policy makers, yet there is a precedent. In 2009, China said all computers imported to the country must come with filtering software called Green Dam-Youth Escort preinstalled. After heavy international pressure, China suspended the rule indefinitely.

• With Eye on Mobile, Yahoo Revises Its Search Partnership With Microsoft: Yahoo and Microsoft announced on Thursday that they had amended their 10-year search partnership to allow Yahoo to deliver its own search results and ads for up to half the searches made by visitors to Yahoo sites and apps. Under the original agreement, struck five years ago, Yahoo was required to use Microsoft’s Bing search results and ads for all desktop searches, although it was free to use alternatives on mobile devices. Yahoo’s one billion users will not see a new search experience immediately, and any changes will probably be gradual. The venerable Internet company, which dominated web search before the rise of Google, sold its search technology to Microsoft under the original agreement and has only a small team devoted to search now. But Ms. Mayer, who oversaw the interface and other major elements of the search experience at Google, has made it clear that she wants Yahoo to innovate on search, and the company has been experimenting with new approaches on mobile devices, particularly in personalizing results and presenting ads. Search is vital to Yahoo’s business, accounting for 35 percent of the company’s revenue last year, or $1.8 billion. Under the original agreement, Microsoft gives Yahoo about 90 percent of the revenue from ads it shows on Yahoo. The companies said that under the revised deal, “this existing underlying economic structure remains unchanged.” Desktop users in the United States conducted 12.7 percent of their searches on Yahoo and 20.1 percent on Bing in March, according to comScore, a research firm. Google dominated the market with 64.4 percent of searches. Ms. Mayer and Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, were both personally involved in the negotiations. Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into search, and Mr. Nadella is committed to remaining in the business. Microsoft was a primary agitator behind the European Commission’s decision on Wednesday to bring antitrust charges against Google, accusing the company of abusing its dominance in search to hurt consumers and competitors. Yahoo will now be able to sell desktop search ads to advertisers through its Gemini platform, which the company is building into a one-stop shop for buying ads across all Yahoo properties as well as other apps and sites in its network. Microsoft will gradually take over sales of all ads for Bing search, allowing it to integrate the team more closely with the people developing search technology. Previously, the premium ads were sold by Yahoo sales representatives.