Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 31st

• With $340 million in revenue, Nest is underperforming, and its future at Google is at risk:  Nest generated about $340 million in sales last year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. That’s an impressive figure for a company in the very nascent market of Internet-connected devices. Nest currently sells three products: The flagship smart thermostat; Protect, its smoke detector; and Nest Cam, the home-monitoring video predecessor to Dropcam. But it’s below the initial expectations Google had set for Nest when it bought the startup in 2014 for a whopping $3.2 billion. The company’s sales performance may face even deeper scrutiny inside Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, where Nest now sits, as the hardware maker faces its most critical year ever. Alphabet, whose execs have spoken regularly about controlling costs at the non-Google companies, may become less charitable. And in the meanwhile, Nest's CEO got slammed in a column in TechCrunch for the culture there: though the company currently manufactures three products — its thermostat, a smoke alarm, and its Nest cam (via its Dropcam acquisition) — it has repeatedly delayed product releases and disappointed its customers, particularly given the billing that Nest’s products receive. In one of the more visible cases of customer dissatisfaction, a New York Times reporter said in January that a software bug drained his Nest thermostat’s battery, a discovery he made only when his infant began crying from his chilly bedroom in the middle of the night. Nest’s smart smoke alarm has also been plagued by software glitches. In the meantime, says The Information, Google has moved forward on similar efforts, including its OnHub wireless router and a stealth project to create a competitor to Amazon’s Echo. That Google has done so without Nest’s involvement must be demoralizing to Nest’s current employees, who were presumably drawn to the challenge of helping Nest become one of the world’s great hardware companies. But there’s reason for even more concern going forward: Fadell has created a culture that’s increasingly unlikely to attract the world’s best engineers, which has always been the top priority for its parent company. (Google, in stark contrast, is consistently ranked as one of thebest places to work.) If Alphabet wants to maintain its feel-good reputation, it may be time to part ways with Fadell, or at least to demote him. He’s now had more than two years to prove himself. What Fadell has shown instead is that he’s unable to get out of his own way — or Nest’s.

• Car-Pooling Helps Uber Go the Extra Mile: One day not long ago, an Uber driver picked up a passenger in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district. Let’s call our passenger Abby, because her real name has been lost to database anonymization, an effort to keep her identity private. Abby needed to go to Noe Valley, a 25-minute drive that might ordinarily have cost about $15. But she had chosen UberPool, the ride-hailing company’s 18-month-old car-pooling program. In the process she had unwittingly initiated one of the service’s more epic recent trips. Unlike a standard Uber ride, in which a single rider starts a one-time trip, UberPool works like a party line for cars. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, describes it as the future of his company — and thus the future of transportation in America. Call up the app, specify your destination, and in exchange for a significant discount, UberPool matches you with other riders going the same way. The service might create a ride just for you, but just as often, it puts you in a ride that began long ago — one that has spanned several drop-offs and pickups, a kind of instant bus line created from collective urban demand. In total, Uber collected about $48 for the ride, of which the driver kept $35. The company had collapsed five separate rides into a single trip, saving about six miles of travel and removing several cars from the road. For riders, the discounts amounted to savings of at least half of a standard Uber trip. For the driver, an hourlong trip with no idle time resulted in steady earnings (Uber drivers make money only when riders are in the car). And though Uber made less from the single ride than it would have from multiple rides, the company benefited by installing itself as a fixture in people’s lives. UberPool may push us to re-evaluate how we think about Uber and its impact on the world.

• People Are Spending Lots of Time, Not Money, on Their Phones: Shopping on mobile phones is growing at its fastest rate ever. But there’s still a huge gap between how much time shoppers spend on mobile websites and apps, and the percentage of total e-commerce sales that happen on these mobile sites. One big reason for this 44 percent gap: Entering in credit card and shipping details on a phone can be a pain, both on mobile websites and in apps. Services like Apple Pay and Android Pay have eliminated a lot of that work in partnering apps, by filling in those details automatically. And as Re/code reported, Apple Pay will be coming to mobile websites soon, too. If the gap between time spent and dollars spent on mobile sites is going to close, these services are going to be a big reason why.

• Elon Musk has a lot riding on his new Tesla: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is poised to reveal his newest creation, the Model 3, at an event on Thursday. Starting at $35,000, the car represents Tesla's first electric vehicle aimed at price-conscious, mainstream consumers. And how it fares is going to have a major impact on Tesla's long-term future as a company — and the future of electric cars more broadly. That's why this unveiling is an incredibly important moment. Back in 2006, Musk laid out this vision in a blog post on Tesla's website: The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model. In other words, this is the endgame. Although the company had focused first on high-end cars — the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, and the Model X — the ultimate goal was to bring the electric car to the masses. So for Tesla to have reached this point is going to be, naturally, a very big deal in the company's history. But that's not the only reason the Model 3 is significant. Tesla's new car is important in a very immediate sense because it offers Tesla a big chance at reversing some of the headwinds facing the company. You may recall that in October, Consumer Reports dinged the Model S for reliability problems, even though the same publication had otherwise issued aglowing review of the vehicle. Meanwhile, Tesla sales may have been affected by low oil prices that could be suppressing demand for electric vehicles, even as internal production issues hindered the company's supply. Not all of that is Tesla's fault, but it has prompted analysts to sour on Tesla's stock. Over the latter half of 2015, shares of Tesla fell roughly 15 percent from about $280 a share to $240. (It's now hovering at $230.) The Model 3 could be Tesla's opportunity to regain momentum.

• Amazon Assembly, Installation Services Bolster Big-Product Sales: Amazon.com Inc. wants to sell bigger things. To do so, the Web retailer has put together an army of workers who can handle everything from mounting flat TVs on walls to assembling treadmills. In the year since it rolled out Amazon Home Services, which also offers professional jobs such as painting, plumbing and yoga instruction, the online store has expanded the service to 30 cities from an initial four. Amazon now offers more than 1,200 services, the Seattle-based company said on Wednesday. It’s part of a push by Amazon to expand beyond products, and also a way to make it easier for consumers to buy big items that require an extra pair of hands to set up. Amazon has also increased its warehouse capacity for large items like furniture and flat-screen televisions. A new shipping hub in Kansas announced last week will be among about a dozen Amazon warehouses specifically designed for big products. Others are in Connecticut and California. Amazon now sells more than 1 million items that give shoppers the option of requesting assembly, installation or other related services, which is boosting the sale of home-improvement products, said Erika Takeuchi, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The most popular services requested are mounting flat-screen televisions to walls and assembling treadmills, she said. Amazon’s home services also include a wide range of offerings that don’t require purchases from the online store. Housecleaning is the third most popular job requested, according to Amazon. Other services include landscaping, gutter cleaning, pet grooming and yoga instruction. But most service requests are tied to a purchase.

• Foxconn unit Hon Hai's Quarterly Profit Slides as Smartphone Demand Wilts: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.’s quarterly profit dropped for the first time in more than three years after the main assembler of Apple’s devices fell prey to slowing iPhone sales and intensifying competition in contract manufacturing. The largest member of billionaire Terry Gou’s Foxconn Technology Group reported a 7 percent slide in fourth-quarter net income to NT$52.9 billion ($1.6 billion), compared with the NT$59.1 billion average of analysts’ estimates. The fall in profit was Hon Hai’s first since the second quarter of 2012 on a comparable basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Hon Hai’s 2015 profit exceeded expectations but it’s grappling with a slowdown in smartphone demand. The Taiwanese company gets half its revenue from Apple, whichwarned in January of its first quarterly sales decline in over a decade as China decelerates. The iPhone maker has since launched a smaller and cheaper version of its marquee device, which investors are counting on to rejuvenate the business. Gou is seeking to broaden Foxconn’s remit, transforming the contract manufacturer into a company that also makes key electronics components and devices. Hon Hai and several other Foxconn affiliates on Wednesday announced a deal to take control of Sharp Corp. for about $3.5 billion, adding the Japanese supplier of displays for smartphones to Gou’s corporate empire. Researchers at IDC predicted in December that global smartphone growth will dip below 10 percent this year for the first time. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 15

• Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet, and archived snippets are here. 

• YouTube Takes On Amazon With New Gaming App: Google announced the release this summer of YouTube Gaming, a mobile application and website that will focus on video game videos and live streams. In a blog post, the company said YouTube Games would have individual pages for some 25,000 games as well as pages for particular publishers and gaming celebrities. This arena has become increasingly competitive. There is Twitch, the site where gamers watch each other play live, which Amazon bought for about $1 billion last year. And Twitch is facing competition from sites like MLG.TV, which has poached former Twitch stars like the Call of Duty phenom Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag. YouTube Gaming is the latest example of the website’s efforts to better serve a specific demographic of its customer base, with the goal of encouraging advertisers to spend more money. YouTube has also created an app specifically for kids who watch videos. YouTube is stepping up investments in new services to attract viewers and ad dollars to compete with Amazon, Facebook, Hulu and Spotify. In February, YouTube released YouTube Kids, which can be downloaded onto phones or tablets and includes special parental controls and programs such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Mother Goose Club and Reading Rainbow. It is also testing a stand-alone music service called YouTube Music Key.

• Nielsen Study: The average American used apps for 37.5 hours last quarter -- nearly a full work-week. Nielsen on Thursday released a new study showing that while the number of apps that smartphone-wielding Americans use holds steady at around 26.7 per month, we're spending more time with them overall. The average American used apps for 37 hours and 28 minutes last quarter -- nearly a full work-week. And that's up from 30 hours and 15 minutes just the quarter before and a 63 percent rise over two years, the company said in a blog post. Nielsen dug into its data and found that entertainment apps such as games, music and video seem to be the main culprits of the increase. Overall, smartphone users reported a 26 percent increase in the time they spend using their smartphones for the fun things in life, for an average of 13 hours and 20 minutes per month. Entertainment app users gained 13 million additional users over the past year. And, as a group, they spent nearly three hours more in apps than they did last year. Gaming, meanwhile, was the fastest-growing app category within entertainment. More than three-quarters of entertainment app users reported playing at least one game in the last quarter of 2014. Smartphone owners spend a little more than 10 hours playing games, which can get awfully addictive.Men use more apps than women -- 27.2, on average, versus 26.3 --  but women tend to spend about an hour more using apps overall each month.

• Alibaba Plans to Create TBO, China’s Version of Netflix, HBO: Alibaba is planning to build China’s version of Netflix and HBO via a new service called Tmall Box Office, as it tries to service 600 million families craving more entertainment content. Tmall Box Office will be offered in about two months through Alibaba's set-top box and smart televisions that carry its operating system, including those manufactured by Haier Group. Some of the content will be produced by the company and some purchased overseas. Alibaba is on a buying spree as it tries to compete with Tencent Holdings for China’s $5.9 billion online video market. Alibaba Pictures Group Ltd. completed a $1.57 billion stake sale in Hong Kong to help finance potential acquisitions in June. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma visited Hollywood in October to acquire more content. “We want to create a whole new family entertainment experience,” Liu said. “Our goal is to become like Netflix in the U.S, HBO in the U.S.” It was not clear how the service would fit with Youku Tudou, one of China's biggest video streaming platforms in which Alibaba bought a 16.5 percent stake last year. However, unlike the majority of domestic rivals, about 90 percent of TBO's content will be paid for, either by monthly subscription or on a show-by-show basis, Liu said. The remaining 10 percent would be free. Netflix itself is also considering an entry into China, a notoriously difficult task for foreign Internet companies. 

• Reliance readies for an e-Commerce push - talks of B2B marketplace and mobile payments at AGM. Mukesh Ambani said Reliance Retail’s fashion and lifestyle format will roll out its e-commerce property before the end of this year. Reliance Jio, the wireless telephony and data services unit of RIL, is set to launch 4G services by December this year.  RIL will also use Reliance Jio’s internet infrastructure to roll out an e-commerce marketplace platform, group chairman Ambani said at the company’s 41st annual general meeting on Friday. Here’s a peek at upcoming JIO services: Jio Money – Digital payments and money transfer services including a digital wallet. Switch-and-Walk – an app that allows customers to seamlessly change phones. Jio Drive – a cloud app for storing, sync-ing and sharing content between devices and with friends. Jio Play – An HD TV service with hundreds of channels.  Jio Beats – a digital music streaming service, that also allows download and offline listening. Jio Mags - a collection of popular magazines. Jio News – news from leading news publishing houses across multiple languages and categories. 
• Facebook will tweak your news feed based on how long you look at stuff: Facebook is tweaking its algorithms to account for a new metric: the amount of time you spend looking at things in your feed, regardless of whether or not you actively interact with it. Scroll past something without stopping for long, and Facebook’s algorithms will slowly learn that you don’t particularly care for that sort of content. Camp out on a post for a bit, though, and Facebook starts the timer behind the scenes. If you spend more time on this story than you spend on most things in your feed — studying a picture, perusing the comment thread — they’ll take that as a signal that it’s something you care about. Facebook is doing this because it realizes that you probably don’t always like, share or comment on the stuff that pops up in your Facebook feed, even if it’s something you care to see. In other words: those endless baby photos and motivational fitness memes that you tend to scroll right on past? At least theoretically, this change allows Facebook’s algorithms to take the hint without requiring you to lift a finger.

Onager's Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday May 28

• Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet. Experimental.

• Mary Meeker's 2015 Report is Out, and Calls Out that India Tech is at an Inflection Point: Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s yearly Internet Trends report is the ultimate compilation of essential tech statistics. Here is her 2015 report, which  calls out that India could be at a tipping point. India's Internet penetration in 2014 was where China was in 2008 and the U.S. was in 1996. If India's curve follows the same pattern, get ready for big things in the next five years. One thing India is lacking is the catalyst companies that will lead its Internet revolution.

• Nielsen to measure digital ads in partnership with Tencent: Nielsen announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Tencent Holdings to measure its digital audience in a move that could direct more ad dollars from companies in the United States to China's biggest social network. Nielsen said it is launching its Digital Ad Ratings, which tracks unique users, reach and frequency of a digital ad across computers, tablets and smartphones for the first time in China. Comscore, which offers a similar service and competes with Nielsen, said it is already available in China. The online gaming company Tencent, which also operates the popular mobile messaging app WeChat with 500 million monthly active users, has been making a big push to increase its advertising revenue especially through mobile. Nielsen will measure an ad campaign in a combination of surveys, consisting of 46,000 Chinese consumers, and aggregated, anonymous data from Tencent's hundreds of millions of active users. Tencent, which has a market value of $190 billion and reported first-quarter online advertising revenue of $438.4 million competes with Alibaba and Baidu.

• Its a Small World: Ola-owned TaxiForSure integrates Alibaba-investee Paytm wallet as cashless payment option, joining its arch-rival Uber: TaxiForSure, has tied up with Alibaba-backed online payments platform Paytm. The move will allow users of TaxiForSure to go cashless and pay through Paytm’s pre-paid wallet, the company said in a statement. Customers can link their debit card or bank account via a Paytm wallet or recharge their Paytm wallet and use it to pay for their rides. In March, cab hiring startup Ola had acquired TaxiForSure in what largely a stock transaction. Interestingly, Ola also has a prepaid wallet called Ola Money. Last November, on-demand car service Uber, Ola's arch-rival in India's ride-hailing space had joined hands with Paytm.

• Google and Apple Adjust Their Strategies on Mobile Payments: The battle for mobile software dominance revolves around two companies: Apple and Google. Now both giants are also going head-to-head in mobile payments, as they prepare to push deeper into digital wallets. Google is set to unveil plans at its annual developer conference on Thursday for an overhaul of its mobile payment products. Changes include a service called Android Pay that will let merchants accept credit card payments from inside their mobile apps and can be integrated with loyalty programs at retailers, the people said. Google Wallet, a mobile commerce app, will also be reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app that consumers can use to send money to each other directly from their debit accounts, they said. Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its software conference next month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service. The moves are the latest advances in mobile payments as several players jockey for an edge. With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses. The stakes are also high for Apple and Google, which are entering mobile payments later than others in the industry. For Apple, mobile payments tie people more directly to its main product, the iPhone. For Google, payments are a hook to reel people into its ecosystem of services and another way to gain insight about consumers. The challenge for Apple and Google, along with rivals, is that the mobile wallet is generally a technology in search of a problem. Cash and credit cards are easy to use and accepted broadly worldwide. As a result, the mobile wallet is typically more of a supplementary service than a replacement. Nonetheless, mobile payments are growing quickly. Forrester Research predicts they will balloon to $142 billion by 2019 in the United States, almost tripling from $52 billion in 2014. Still, Google and Apple offer something that few others can: Hardware, software and an insatiable desire to win. “Google and Apple have deep pockets and the appetite to invest,” said Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. “They may create something that is a lasting disruption.”

• Despite Its Dominance, Analysts See A Murky Road Ahead for Android: Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than a billion Android devices were sold in 2014, a c cording to the research firm Gartner. That’s about five times the number of Apple iOS devices sold, and about three times the number of Windows machines sold. Yet all is not well on planet Android. On the eve of Google IO, the company’s annual developer conference that starts Thursday, where Android will once again be a primary topic of discussion, cracks are emerging in Google’s hold over the operating system. Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android. Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014, according to one estimate. Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business. The stark numbers prompted a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android? Google faces several major Android-related headaches. First, while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple’s iOS. iOS users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices. A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 percent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly. But how long Google can expect Play to keep paying remains an open question, thanks to the second Android-related headache. Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China. Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps. Android has always been a tricky strategy; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.

• Twitter Is Giving Advertisers More User Data In The Hope That They Spend More: Twitter is hoping to help marketers better understand their Twitter audience by adding a tool that will give them deeper user behavior around organic tweets. The audience insights dashboard tool adds some similar insights as the Facebook advertising platform with aggregate information on user demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior as well as what television shows users watch and their mobile usage. These new insights are expected to help advertisers identify a more relevant audience for upcoming campaigns on the platform. Will these new insights help boost advertising on Twitter? The company needs it right now. It had slower than expected growth in advertising sales this last quarter and even die-hard fans and early investors think the company needs some help. Early investor Chris Sacca recently scribed a blog post warning Twitter that he would soon be sharing a few thoughts on what the company needs to do now. Offering more profound insights about organic user behavior may be an answer to some of this frustration and may help to lure brands to spend more ad dollars on the platform. The audience insights tool is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Twitter-specific information can be accessed within the U.S., with plans to roll this out more broadly over the next few months.

• Cisco Predics that in 5 years, 80 percent of Internet Traffic will be online video: We already know that Netflix accounts for one-third of Internet traffic at peak hours. Toss in YouTube, and that figure rises to roughly half of all bandwidth consumed. But even that's small potatoes compared with what's coming. In five years, 80 percent of the entire world's Internet consumption will be dominated by video. That number will be even higher in the United States, approaching 85 percent. That's according to the latest projections from Cisco, which publishes an annual study peering into the near future of the Web. The newest report, out Wednesday, predicts that by 2019, the Internet will have become more or less a big video pipe. Part of the growth will come from adding new people to the Internet — for the first time, over half the world's population will be digitally connected. But individual Internet users are also expected to consume more video over time, and at a higher quality, which will put tremendous new burdens on the world's Internet infrastructure. When you see the Internet as a huge distribution channel for video, it puts virtually everything that tech and communications companies are doing into perspective. Telecom firms like Verizon are racing to expand their cellular networks so that they can deliver video over LTE. Cable companies are fleshing out their public WiFi hotspots so users can watch videos outside their homes. Content providers like HBO and CBS are putting their programming on the Internet so that customers don't have to be tethered to their television sets. Implicit in this idea is that mobile devices will be the primary way users will access all this video. And researchers agree on that point. Five years ago, Americans were spending less than an hour a day on mobile devices. Today, it's more like three hours a day, accounting for more than half of the time we spend consuming digital media in general, according to the latest in an annual report released Wednesday by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 14

• New Facebook Ads Come With a Call Button to Ring Up Businesses: Facebook has built a "call" button people can tap to call businesses directly from an ad. More than 30 million businesses have Facebook pages, and now they can add the instant call button or a "get directions" button in marketing campaigns. The buttons open more direct-response marketing opportunities on Facebook, which previously only offered businesses the ability to ask users for Likes. Facebook is calling them "local awareness ads," and they can target users by neighborhood. "Our new local awareness objective is the first Facebook ad objective created explicitly for local businesses," Facebook said in its post today announcing the new features. Local businesses can set up a campaign with the new buttons from their Facebook pages and see the results. According to Facebook, the ads reach the most people for the least money. One example showed an unnamed advertiser spending $40, reaching 6,500 people and generating six calls. Of course, Facebook is not the first to offer a call button. Google's search gives users call and directions links, and Twitter also has similar offerings. Facebook topped 2 million advertisers earlier this year, and it credited much of its new business to a focus on small and medium-size businesses.

• Wal-Mart to Challenge Amazon Prime With $50 Shipping Service: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will offer a $50-a-year unlimited free-shipping service for online customers starting this summer, seeking to challenge the $99 Prime service offered by retail rival Amazon.com Inc. The service will be available by invitation only in select markets, said Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman for Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart. More than 1 million items -- including apparel, sporting goods, electronics and toys -- will be available for delivery in three days or less, Jariwala said. Jariwala declined to say what markets will be included in the initial test of the service, how long it will last or how many people will be invited. The move ratchets up competition in e-commerce, where Wal-Mart has been trying to make inroads. While the company is the world’s largest retail chain, Amazon dominates online shopping. Prime has emerged as a key weapon for Seattle-based Amazon because it keeps customers loyal, making it ripe for imitation. In the U.S., customers pay $99 a year for Amazon Prime membership, which includes delivery discounts and online streaming of movies, television shows and music. Prime membership grew by more than 50 percent in 2014 from a base of “tens of millions,” according to Amazon. Prime members also spend more than occasional shoppers. For that reason, Amazon is trying to boost Prime membership with new perks. In December, it introduced same-day delivery for Prime members in Manhattan and has since expanded the service to additional cities, including Dallas and Miami. Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter estimated last month that Amazon has at least 35 million Prime members and that approximately 50 percent of U.S. households will have a membership by 2020. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, is trying to pull out of a broader slump and improve customer service. The company cut its sales forecast in February, and higher spending on wages and other investments have raised concerns for investors. Wal-Mart shares declined 1 percent to $78.16 at the close in New York on Wednesday. They have dropped 9 percent so far this year.

• Cisco Earnings: Quarterly Revenue $12.1B, +5% Y/Y; Net Income $2.4B; Shares Flat; Analysts Hail Cisco's Resilience: Cisco Systems delivered gains in quarterly profit and sales on Wednesday that slightly surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. The company reported a 12 percent increase in net profit, to $2.4 billion. Its operating earnings of 54 cents a share were just above analysts’ consensus estimate of 53 cents a share, as compiled by Thomson Reuters. Revenue rose 5 percent, to $12.1 billion, essentially in line with the average analyst forecast of $12.07 billion. Parts of the business were weak: Sales to telecommunications and cable companies were off by 7 percent and sales in emerging markets slipped, particularly in Russia and China. Cisco shares were down slightly in after-hours trading. Over the last year, Cisco shares have climbed 28 percent. Over the years, Cisco rivals have surfaced from Silicon Valley to China. But Cisco has managed to stay on top. “Its scale and breadth are extremely hard to replicate,” said Amitabh Passi, an analyst at UBS. That heft amounts to what Pierre Ferragu, an analyst for the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, called “a powerful platform advantage” in a report last week.

• Its OK to Fail - India learns to 'fail fast' as tech start-up culture takes root: After ping pong tables, motivational posters and casual dress codes, India's tech start-ups are following Silicon Valley's lead and embracing the "fail fast" culture credited with fuelling creativity and success in the United States. Taking failure as a norm is a major cultural shift in India, where high-achieving children are typically expected to take steady jobs at recognized firms. A failed venture hurts family status and even marriage prospects. But that nascent acceptance, fueled by returning engineers and billions of dollars in venture fund investment, is for many observers a sign that India's $150 billion tech industry is coming of age, moving from a back office powerhouse to a creative force. "There is obviously increased acceptance," said Raghunandan G, co-founder of TaxiForSure, which was sold to rival Ola this year. He is now investing in others' early stage ventures. "My co-founder Aprameya (Radhakrishna) used to have lines of prospective brides to meet ... the moment we started our own company, all those prospective alliances disappeared. No one wanted their daughters to marry a start-up guy." Srikanth Chunduri returned to India after studying at Duke University in the United States, and is now working on his second venture. "I think what's encouraging is that acceptance of failure is increasing despite the very deep-rooted Asian culture where failure is a big no," he said. The shift has come about, executives say, as engineers began returning from Silicon Valley to cash in on India's own boom, as hundreds of millions of Indians go online. "Investors too want to find the next Flipkart, and most of them come from Silicon Valley backgrounds, so they bring that culture," said Stewart Noakes, co-founder of TechHub, a global community and workspace for tech entrepreneurs. "That's changing the Indian norms. It's becoming ok to fail and try again."

• Amazon Unveils Advertising Platform for Mobile-App Developers: Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a new advertising platform for mobile-applications developers, a push by the largest Web retailer to grab a bigger piece of the smartphone advertising market dominated by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. The service lets developers promote their apps on Android smartphones and tablets as well as Amazon tablets, paying Amazon each time a user clicks an advertisement displayed through the system. Campaigns start at $100. Amazon is a small player in the $28.7 billion U.S. mobile-advertising industry. The Seattle-based company has less than a 1 percent share of the market, compared with Google’s 35 percent and Facebook’s 17 percent, according to EMarketer Inc. Spending to market apps alone is projected to rise 80 percent this year to $3 billion, with Facebook leading that category.

• Facebook Begins Testing Instant Articles From News Publishers: Facebook’s long-rumored plan to directly host articles from news organizations will start on Wednesday, concluding months of delicate negotiations between the Internet giant and publishers that covet its huge audience but fear its growing power. Nine media companies, including NBC News and The New York Times, have agreed to the deal, despite concerns that their participation could eventually undermine their own businesses. The program will begin with a few articles but is expected to expand quickly. Users of iPhones will see glossy cover videos and photos tagged with map coordinates. Most important for impatient smartphone users, the company says, the so-called instant articles will load up to 10 times faster than they normally would since readers stay on Facebook rather than follow a link to another site Facebook has gone to unusual lengths to court the publishers participating in the project, some details of which were previously published by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The news publishers can either sell and embed advertisements in the articles, keeping all of the revenue, or allow Facebook to sell ads, with the social network getting 30 percent of the proceeds. Facebook is also permitting the news companies to collect data about the people reading the articles with the same tools they use to track visitors to their own sites. For publishers, the Facebook initiative represents the latest in a series of existential balancing acts. The social network, which has more than 1.4 billion active users worldwide, captures more attention of mobile users — and prompts more visits to news sites — than virtually any other service. Publishers have little choice but to cooperate with Facebook, said Vivian Schiller, a former executive at NBC, The New York Times and Twitter who now advises media companies and brands. “That’s where the audience is,” Ms. Schiller said. “It’s too massive to ignore.” But Facebook’s role as a powerful distributor of news makes many people in the industry uneasy. The fear is that it could become more of a destination than their own sites for the work they produce, drawing away readers and advertising. Facebook clearly plays an important role as a gatekeeper to news. Nearly half of American Internet users said they got news about politics and government on Facebook during the course of a week, almost as many as got such news from local television, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center. Facebook has a long history of changing the algorithm that determines what people see in their feeds. Zynga, the mobile gaming company, built its business on Facebook only to lose much of its traffic when the company changed the rules to make a user’s game activity less visible to friends. Last year, Facebook decided to downgrade the prominence of viral content like cat videos and promote “high quality” news content. A month ago, it changed course again to highlight personal posts by users’ friends and family.

• Diverging Internet Usage Patterns: Facebook, Instagram Rule in the US, Messaging Apps Score Elsewhere: Messaging apps are becoming the most heavily-used type of app in a majority of key markets worldwide, based on both smartphone sessions and time spent in apps. However, according to new data from App Annie, the U.S. is an exception to that trend. Here, Facebook still dominates in terms of smartphone sessions, while both Facebook and Instagram led by time spent in apps. The data collected was based on Android sessions in the first quarter of this year, so it’s not necessarily a full picture of the mobile application ecosystem or app usage – but it is sourced from one of the industry’s largest datasets on mobile data. In fact, App Annie’s dataset recently grew following its acquisition of mobile measurement firm Mobidia last week. The firm is able to now detail app usage data from millions of users across 60 countries. With Mobidia and App Annie’s data combined, the company put out its first-ever report examining usage-level trends regarding mobile applications, which looked, in particular, at countries like the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Not surprisingly, given that smartphones are primarily communication devices, the report found that within every key market, apps in the Communication and Social categories accounted for at least 40% of smartphone sessions on Android. And that trend was similar to how users spent time in apps, says App Annie. In the U.S., Social remained the top category based on sessions per active user, thanks to Facebook’s prominent position here. But in the U.K., Germany, Japan, and South Korea, Communication was in the #1 position, referring to their preference for messaging apps.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday January 22

• A big day for Microsoft, which unveiled lots more about Windows 10, a new browser named Spartan, and Windows Holographic, an augmented reality headset: the next generation of its operating system, including how it will work across mobile, tablet, desktop and other platforms. The biggest surprise was probably the new HoloLens augmented reality headset Microsoft created, and the Windows Holographic software it built to support said gadget: Microsoft Reveals Windows Holographic, An Augmented Reality User Interface For The World. Microsoft To Bring Xbox One Game Streaming to Windows 10 Devices Later This Year. Microsoft Previews Windows 10, Unveils New Internet Browser: Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), seeking to use the next version of its Windows software to win back consumers and keep business customers happy, gave a detailed look at the new operating system and took the wraps off a revamped Web browser. At an event Wednesday to preview Windows 10, the new iteration of its flagship personal-computer software, Microsoft showed the browser that will succeed Internet Explorer, code-named Project Spartan. The update to Windows, coming later this year, will also bring Cortana, the voice-activated digital assistant, to PC desktops, and will have touch-enabled Office applications such as Word and Excel built-in for smartphones and tablets. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, who took the helm almost a year ago, is trying to resuscitate Windows even as mobile computing continues to surge, PC demand sputters, and Microsoft focuses on versions of its Office applications for rival software platforms. He’s also tasked with overhauling the product little more than two years after the last update -- Windows 8 -- failed to jump-start consumer demand while alienating corporate customers. Microsoft also announced Windows Holographic, and a headset with glasses called HoloLens that will enable users to see holograms while tracking a user’s voice, motion and surroundings. The glasses will be available “in the Windows 10 timeframe,” said Alex Kipman, a technical fellow in Microsoft’s operating system group. The company also showed HoloStudio, software tools for creating holograms, 3-D printing them and sharing them. The new browser showed today lets users annotate websites using a stylus and touch or mouse and keyboard, and then send and share comments through e-mail and social media. The company also announced a new device called the Surface Hub, an 84-inch touch-screen computer designed for workplace collaboration that will run Windows 10.

• Uber closes $1.6 Billion in convertible debt that incentivize Uber to IPO in less than 4 years; also in talks to raise $600M in Series E; valuation at $41.2B: Uber, the popular ride-hailing start-up, has closed $1.6 billion in financing from clients of Goldman Sachs’s private wealth arm, the investment bank confirmed on Wednesday. The new round of financing comes just months after the company raised $1.2 billion from big institutions. Including that investment, the company is valued at some $41.2 billion, one of the richest-ever valuations for a private start-up. Moreover, Uber may still raise an additional $600 million in stock from hedge funds and strategic overseas investors, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are ongoing. The funding adds to Uber’s already overflowing war chest; to date, the company has raised upward of $4 billion. With the new cash, Uber has more incentive to take on a new life as a publicly traded company. The securities sold to Goldman’s clients — in what was one of the biggest-ever sales of convertible debt — can be converted into shares in the start-up once it begins trading on a stock exchange, at a discount of 20 percent to 30 percent of the price set in an initial public offering, people briefed on the matter have said. Should the company not stage an I.P.O. within four years, however, the interest rate on those securities will rise.

• Vessel, a YouTube competitor launched by ex-Hulu execs went live to the public today; several big brands have signed on, and terms are more favorable to content producers than YouTube's: Vessel, the much-awaited online video startup founded by ex Hulu executives Jason Kilar and Richard Tom, finally opened its service to the public today. It may take time to see if users are willing to pay to watch Web videos that are usually free, but the company says brands like Chevy, Corona Extra, Land Rover and Jaguar, as well as Unilever's Axe, Dove, Suave and St. Ives, have signed up as advertisers. Kilar wrote in a blog post that Vessel is now welcoming sign-ups for an invite-only beta version of its service. To access content, users can choose to pay $2.99 per month or watch ad-supported videos. Vessel ads come in two forms: Five-second pre-rolls or interstitial units, which appear as branded "motion posters." The latter pops up as users scroll through the site. The platform offers creators a more favorable revenue share than YouTube, which splits ad revenue 45/55 in favor of the Google-owned video platform. Creators get 70 percent of all ad revenue made from their content on Vessel. Plus, the site earmarks 60 percent of its subscription revenue to divvy up among creators—if a creator's videos make up 10 percent of platform views, he or she would get 10 percent of that allotment. A referral program also pays creators who attract new subscribers. (The company estimates that creators will make $50 per 1,000 views.) To qualify for the subscription-based revenue, creators agree to post new content on Vessel for at least 72 hours before offering it elsewhere for free. After the early access period, the content then moves to Vessel's free, ad-supported service and can be posted on other non-subscription-based platforms.

• EBay's disappointing earnings: Q4 revenue $4.92B, Y/Y +9%, net income $936M, Y/Y +10%; will cut 2,400 positions and explore listing its warehousing & logistics unit: EBay reported earnings of $936 million in the last quarter, a 10 percent increase from the same period a year ago. Overall revenue rose 9 percent, to $4.92 billion, nearly in line with analysts’ estimates of $4.93 billion. But other numbers foretell the reasoning behind the company’s drastic restructuring. EBay’s revenue growth in the company’s marketplaces division rose just 1.3 percent, to $2.3 billion, signaling the slowest growth of its auction sites in years. Mr. Swan said the company planned to reinvest in its marketing efforts to promote its auctions arm to encourage repeat business. It will also heavily promote PayPal and Braintree, the payments start-up eBay acquired in 2013, as competition from rivals like Apple, Google and other start-ups begins to heat up. Facing stiff competition and the declining growth of its auctions business, eBay announced a shake-up of the company on Wednesday, saying it planned to cut 2,400 positions, or 7 percent of its global work force. “It’s going to get a little bit worse before it gets better,” said Bob Swan, chief financial officer of eBay, citing declines of traffic and repeat customers in the company’s online auction business. “Our ecosystem has simply been disrupted.” The layoffs come in advance of a planned spinoff of PayPal, the company’s payments arm, set for later this year. EBay said it would also explore a sale or a possible initial public offering of eBay Enterprise, the company’s warehouse and logistics unit for third-party eBay sellers. eBay announced an agreement with activist investor Carl Icahn that will give investors a greater say in its PayPal payments unit once it is spun off and said it exploring a sale or public offering of its enterprise unit. The moves could lay the groundwork for a future acquisition of eBay and PayPal by companies looking to gain a foothold in the e-commerce and online payments markets. Wall Street analysts have identified Alibaba (BABA.N), Google (GOOGL.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O) as potential acquirers. EBay also said it plans to cut its workforce by 7 percent, or 2,400 jobs, in the current quarter. EBay shares were up 2.6 percent at $54.75 in after hours trade.

• Shazam, a smartphone app that identifies songs playing on TV/radio, raised $30M at ~$1B valuation: Shazam, a smartphone application that can identify songs, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $30 million in new funding round that valued the company at roughly $1 billion. The start-up, which was founded in London and has around 100 monthly million users worldwide, has been rumored to be moving toward an initial public offering. It is expected to join other fast-growing technology companies that have tapped the public markets in recent months. Shazam uses audio-recognition technology to allow people to identify songs by holding their smartphone or other mobile device next to a television or radio. The company’s technology typically identifies the song within seconds, and Shazam generates revenue from taking a percentage of sales from music found through its app and mobile advertising. As tech giants like Google and Amazon move aggressively into Shazam’s core music market, the company has reached a series of deals to expand its core business. Among them is an agreement with the Warner Music Group to create a label imprint for new artists who are discovered through Shazam. Shazam has also made deals with a number of brands and blue-chip advertisers allowing individuals to view additional content on cellphones or tablets about products when they use Shazam’s app with certain television commercials.

• India internet/digital usage stats from a global report released by 'We Are Social': Social marketing agency, We Are Social, released a whopping 376 page report on the latest digital numbers around the world. Here is a summary of the India stats: India has 242 million active internet users (China boasts of 642 million).75 percent of the population has mobile subscriptions, a total of 946 million.95 percent of the Indian mobile subscriptions are on prepaid plans. Only 11 percent of the mobile users have accessed 3G and 4G. A deeper look into the web traffic in the country reveals, 72 percent of all online activity in India is done on mobile, up by 9 percent rise from last year. Laptops and desktops account for 27 percent of the activity, a drop of 19 percent. India has 118 million active social media accounts, of which 100 million of which are mobile users. Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter top the list as the most popular social networks in India. Interestingly, LinkedIn is more popular than Pinterest and Instagram. Also 14 percent of Indians shopped online via a PC, while 9 percent made purchases from a mobile phone last month.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday January 6

• Facebook buys a voice recognition platform that simplifies making a voice-enabled Facebook app; part of a bet on a "Build-Grow-Monetize" loop for app developers: Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it seem that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop where they get help building apps, but eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads. As part of Facebook, Wit.ai could help the company offer voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform, aid with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s understanding of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app you can navigate through speech. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in speech recognition and voice control. Without it, developers would need the expertise, time and resources to build a whole voice-recognition system themselves.

• Start-ups, giants rush to break down ‘Deep-Linking’ walls between Apps and Web: Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them. Say you want a hotel for a weekend stay. You could Google for deals or go to a travel site. But wherever you go on the web, you will not find the rooms on HotelTonight, an app that offers steep discounts for last-minute bookings. The only way to get those listings is to use the app. And if you find a few hotels on HotelTonight, you cannot email them to your spouse, because there are no links to send. As people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines. In tech speak, the problem is known as “deep linking,” the technological hurdle of giving apps some sort of links — those identifying lines of letters, dots and slashes that make up a web address or URL. Though deep linking is a worry for large tech firms, it is a big opportunity for start-ups looking to unseat them. For web giants, deep linking is a way to protect their businesses by creating mobile versions of things they do on the web. Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising. Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages. Twitter has Twitter Cards, which make it possible to go from the Twitter app to another app in the user’s phone, rather than from the Twitter app to the web. If the user does not have the app he or she wants installed on a phone, Twitter will ask if the user wants to install it immediately. Facebook is trying to create an open standard of deep links to help apps connect to one another, so, for instance, someone could go from listening to a band in the Spotify app to finding information about the band’s live appearances in the Songkick app.

• "Unbundling" is causing US eCommerce order values to fall, as consumers spread purchases across multiple transactions: While sales were up overall this year, order value was down 8 percent from 2013, with the average order costing $119.33. Experts say these offers can prompt shoppers to "unbundle" their orders, meaning that shoppers may spread out their purchases over several transactions instead of scooping up slippers for Mom and "Frozen" pajamas for the kids in one order. According to data released Monday by IBM, sales on mobile devices rose by 27 percent in November and December over the same period last year. And yet sales made through smartphones and tablets still only accounted for about 23 percent of online sales overall, with a whopping 77 percent of sales coming from desktops and laptops. IBM also studied how social sites Facebook and Pinterest drive retail sales. The analysis found that shoppers who came to retailer's Web site through a Facebook post spent an average of $101.38 per order, while those who came from Pinterest spent $105.75. Henderson said a key difference might be that Facebook included a mix of sponsored ads and posts from friends, while Pinterest did not contain ads, a sign that perhaps the more curated, trusted content from friends was more effective at driving sales. (Pinterest began selling ads on Jan. 1, so that could sour some users' experience with the site in the future.) IBM found that total online sales were up a healthy 13.8 percent this holiday season compared to 2013, an uptick that was about in line with the 15 percent growth IBM had predicted. This year's increase was significantly larger than the 8.5 percent online sales increase recorded by IBM last year.

• Snapdeal invests in comparison site Smartprix - follows investments in recommendation engine Wishpicker, discovery platform Doozton: Snapdeal, has quietly picked a stake in Smartprix Web Private Limited, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix, sources privy to the development told Techcircle.in. This comes as yet another strategic move for Snapdeal in acquiring or getting an exposure to third-party e-commerce enabling ventures over the last year or so. It had recently acquired gifting recommendation venture Wishpicker besides snapping fashion products discovery platform Doozton around a year ago. It is learnt that Snapdeal had initially acquired 10 per cent stake in Smartprix in FY14 with the understanding to acquire a majority stake eventually. “Snapdeal’s VP engineering Amitabh Misra had joined the board of Smartprix as one of the directors,” said one of the sources. Smartprix was founded in May 2011 by then IIT-Delhi students Choudhary and Khandelwal who have dual degree in computer science and engineering. Smartprix.com is an online comparison shopping that helps users compare different products and choose the best product according to their needs. It also presents the pricing information of the product on different online stores and provides review, ranking and recommendations. Its product categories include mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras personal care appliances, accessories and books. The firm also features deals on all kinds of products and plans to introduce newer categories. The firm earns commission from the affiliates for every sale. To date, it has tied up with over 50 online stores. Snapdeal is not the first firm to eye a piece of a product price comparison engine. Amazon already runs a India specific price comparison site called Junglee.com There are several startups in the price comparison space, many of whom have managed to grab VC attention. Among these, Zopper.com raised $5 million led by Tiger Global Management LLC, PriceBag.com raised $2 million from angel investors, MySmartPrice raised $1 million from Accel and Helion, YouTellMe.com recently raised $100,000 from Dutch early-stage fund Bright Ventures, among others.

• Why did Amazon send 405 reps to CES 2014? Why did Apple send just 4? The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of largest trade shows around: Amazon.com, the third-biggest consumer-electronics retailer in the U.S., sent 405 representatives to CES 2014. Apple, the fourth-biggest, sent four, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the conference.Back in 2009, when Amazon was only eighth among U.S. electronics retailers, it sent 69 reps to the annual nerd festival. Apple, then the third-largest electronics retailer, also sent 69 that year. Apple hasn’t introduced a product at the dog and pony show in more than a decade—after debuting a series of flops there in the 1990s, including a video-game console and the Newton—but it had steadily increased its number of reps at CES from 2009 to 2011 as the company grew its retail operations. While Apple Stores mostly sell the company’s brand-name products, it does carry accessories from other hardware makers. U.S. electronics sales at Apple Stores last year rose to more than $11 billion, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. But for some reason, Apple cut its badge count to four in 2012, where it’s remained ever since. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Amazon, which also didn’t respond to a request for comment, sent more employees last year than Best Buy and Wal-Mart Stores, the top two gadget retailers. Amazon sells its own products, too, but it’s a retailer first and foremost. If CES’s influence in waning, nobody told Jeff Bezos.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

• Amid flagging investor sentiment, Twitter held its first Analyst Day, and announced a slew of upcoming product changes: the stock rose 7% in response: Loads of coverage: NYT, Bloomberg, Reuters, TechCrunch, AdWeek: (1) An "instant timeline" that would allow new users to get value out of the service right away, without having to follow anybody first. Twitter would use algorithms to figure out what might be important and interesting. The feature would also be shown to returning users who don't have "healthy" timelines, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo said. (2) By early next year, ways for people to "record, edit and share" video using the Twitter application. (3) A "what you missed" feature to show people the most important tweets that were posted since they last logged in. (4) Starting next week, an update that allows people to share public tweets within private messages. (5) Changes to the Twitter homepage, which draws 125 million people each month who don't log in or sign up. (7) New mobile applications besides Twitter and Vine. (8) Content organized around geography and events. (9) A "quick promote" option so that users can turn their tweets into advertisements with a couple of clicks.

• Tencent Q3 results (Q3 rev: $3.2B, 38% Y/Y, operating profit $1.2B, 56% Y/Y) indicate sharply slowing growth on WeChat engagement as well as games monetization: Tencent released its third quarter results for 2014 yesterday and, as analysts predicted, its growth in mobile games has slowed. In fact at RMB 2.6 billion (US$424 million) this quarter’s mobile gaming revenue is actually down compared last quarter, although Tencent blames that mostly on “delayed launches of upgrades.”. Here are a few other highlights from Tencent’s Q3 earnings report: Q3 revenues of RMB 19.8 billion (US$3.2 billion), up 28 percent from same period last year. Operating profit of RMB 7.5 billion (US$1.2 billion), up 56 percent year-on-year. Value-added service revenues saw revenues of RMB 16.5 billion (US$2.6 billion), up 38 percent on Q3 2013. Gaming revenues from WeChat and QQ (the desktop and mobile IM app) reached RMB 2.6 billion (US$423 million), but there’s no breakdown specific just to WeChat’s gaming platform. QQ hit 819.8 million MAUs, up just 0.5 percent year-on-year. WeChat messaging app now has 468.1 million active users (MAUs) in Q3 2014. That’s up from 438 million MAUs in Q2. It represents quarterly growth of 6.8 percent – by far the lowest it has ever seen. WeChat’s growth is nearly half the rate that it saw from Q1 to Q2.

• #Amazoncart lets you add products to your Amazon cart by replying on Twitter: The hashtag #AmazonCart was unveiled earlier this year, and according to Dowitcher Designs, it’s currently used in around 5,000 tweets per day. How it works: Someone posts an Amazon product on Twitter, you reply to that tweet with #AmazonCart and Amazon puts the product directly in your cart. Amazon is doing its part to promote #AmazonCart with Vine videos and pictures all tagged with #AmazonCart.   

• Chinese click on far more mobile ads than Americans, rely far less on TV and watch a lot of videos while commuting: The IAB U.S. and China Mobile Report 2014 finds that a whopping 71 percent of China's mobile-toting consumers watch full-length TV shows straight from a smartphone or tablet on a weekly basis. Only 28 percent of U.S. respondents said the same. Seventy-six percent of Chinese consumers used smartphones while on public transportation, and 49 percent pulled out their phones while in cars. Only 26 percent of Americans used their smartphones on public transport (likely because many buses and trains still lack Wi-Fi) while 64 percent used phones while in cars.  And 91 percent of China's users play with mobile ads monthly versus 62 percent of U.S. users.