Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, May 3rd

• This new apartment is like a college dorm for grown-ups: WeWork, a provider of co-working spaces in 28 cities, isn’t content to just offer you a place to do your job. This week it’s opening WeLive, which offers furnished living quarters and a range of extra amenities in a fresh take on what apartment life should be like. The apartments themselves are on the small side, and many lack a complete kitchen or a full-sized fridge. In some apartments the beds fold into the wall to create more space. But when residents step outside their own walls they have access to common areas including large kitchens stocked with appliances, game rooms, quiet areas and a community garden. WeLive is designed around flexibility — residents live month to month rather than signing a one-year lease. There’s no need to wait for the cable guy to hook up one’s TV or Internet service. And no one has to shop for a bed, couch or table. Residents need to arrive with little more than their clothes. A security deposit is required, but credit checks aren’t done. A private studio in Crystal City starts at $1,640 a month, and a studio with two beds starts at $1,880. There are also one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments. A four-bedroom goes for $4,220 a month. Residents pay a $125 monthly fee that covers utilities, cable and Internet. The New York apartments are more expensive, with private units starting at $2,550. Stephanie Sutton, 31, moved into WeLive’s Crystal City location a month ago. WeLive has brought in some residents early as part of a test period. Sutton said her favorite aspect has been the sense of community. “It really does feel like home,” she said. “It’s a great way to develop friendships without any pressure. Here you passively make 10 friends instantly.”

• Mid-Career and Itching to Lead a Startup? This VC Firm Wants You: It’s easy to spot the silver hair among Jungle Ventures’ gallery of startup founders. Look closer and you’ll find many have called the shots at banks and Fortune 500 outfits.  That’s no accident. Jungle Ventures’ strategy involves betting on executive-suite veterans over starry-eyed twentysomethings who dream of changing the world, saidAmit Anand, co-founder and managing partner of the Singapore-based firm.  While peers crave youthful upstart vision, Jungle Ventures openly courts corporate bigwigs wondering where to take their careers. Singapore is an Asian base for global banking and technology firms such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- and that’s its advantage, Anand said. Professionals more accustomed to navigating the corporate jungle than envisioning the next Facebook can become standout entrepreneurs with a little help, he said. And they know how to make a buck. Jungle’s unusual approach seems to have paid off: it’s cashed out of three startups in four years including ZipDial, bought last year by Twitter Inc. Its tactics have won investment from heavy-hitters like Singaporean state investor Temasek Holdings Pte, International Finance Corp. and the wealthy Thakral family. Anand said it’s close to raising a new $100 million fund to add consumer tech and Internet of Things to a portfolio spanning e-commerce, finance and software across Asia.Anand and co-founder Anurag Srivastava were professionals-turned-entrepreneurs themselves before they met through Sony Entertainment Television co-founder Jayesh Parekh and started Jungle in 2012. Over the next four years, the pair witnessed the Singaporean startup scene transform from young university dropouts into an arena dominated by mid-career professionals with serious banking and Internet chops.  They were “leaving their jobs, knowing their industries inside out, wanting to disrupt their own industry. More seasoned, more experienced, going after very large ideas,” Anand said. “That’s something we are going to double down on over the next years, to back more professionals turning into entrepreneurs in disruptive industries, trying to create new industries.”

• Oculus will sell its virtual reality headset in Best Buy stores beginning this week: Facebook-owned Oculus wants to take virtual reality mainstream, so it’s bringing its VR headset to the place mainstream shoppers can find it: Retail stores. Oculus announced Monday that it will begin selling “a small number” of Oculus Rift headsets in 48 Best Buy stores around the country later this week. It’s the first time the Rift has been available in-store, although Best Buy has already been selling the Rift online. Perhaps more important than actually selling the headset from a physical store is Oculus’ plan to set up demos for these devices at each Best Buy location. Virtual reality is still a very niche industry that appeals primarily to gamers. Simply getting the word out that Oculus exists and is available for purchase is still a challenge. Putting demo stations inside Best Buys could help educate shoppers who stumble upon the product for the first time. Oculus started selling the Rift in January and shipping them in March, but the process hasn’t been as smooth as expected. Lots of the orders have been delayed, so Oculus says that those waiting on a preorder can buy a Rift in-store and still get the rest of their preorder perks (like a game and first dibs on the Oculus controllers, which are alsodelayed). This backup was not-so-subtly hinted at in the company’s blog post Monday: “Quantities [in Best Buy] will be extremely limited while we catch up on Rift preorders.” So don’t hold your breath. In addition to selling in Best Buy starting May 7, Oculus will also sell online from Microsoft and Amazon beginning this week.

• Brazil orders cell phone carriers to block WhatsApp for 72 hours: WhatsApp, Facebook’s messaging service that recently rolled out end-to-end encryption to its users, will be blocked in Brazil for 72 hours, starting this afternoon. A judge from the small Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered telecom providers in the country to block WhatsApp today in a dispute over access to encrypted data. Judge Marcel Montalvao has ordered WhatsApp to turn over chat records related to a drug investigation, but WhatsApp has argued that it cannot access the chats in an unencrypted form and therefore cannot provide the required records to the court. Local newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that the ban would begin at 2 p.m. local time and that phone companies in the country would face fines if they did not comply. This isn’t Montalvao’s first clash with WhatsApp, which boasts more than 100 million Brazilian users. The judge ordered the arrest of Facebook’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, in March. Facebook has said that WhatsApp operates with relative independence and that Dzodan has no control over WhatsApp data. Brazil also cut off access to WhatsApp in the country last December. Although the block was ordered to last for 48 hours, it was lifted after just 12 hours.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, March 29

• U.S. Says It Has Unlocked iPhone Without Apple: The Justice Department said on Monday that it had found a way to unlock an iPhone without help from Apple, allowing the agency to withdraw its legal effort to compel the tech company to assist in a mass-shooting investigation. The decision to drop the case — which involved demanding Apple’s help to open an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the Decembershooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people — ends a legal standoff between the government and the world’s most valuable public company. The case had become increasingly contentious as Apple refused to help the authorities, inciting a debate about whether privacy or security was more important. Yet law enforcement’s ability to now unlock an iPhone through an alternative method raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of security in Apple devices. The development also creates potential for new conflicts between the government and Apple about the method used to open the device and whether that technique will be disclosed. Lawyers for Apple have previously said the company would want to know the procedure used to crack open the smartphone, yet the government might classify the method. A second law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reporters in a conference call said that a company outside the government provided the F.B.I. with the means to get into the phone used by Mr. Farook, which is an iPhone 5C running Apple’s iOS 9 mobile operating system. The official would not name the company or discuss how it was accomplished, nor would officials say whether the process would ultimately be shared with Apple.

• Oculus Rift Review: A Clunky Portal to a Promising Virtual Reality: Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion two years ago, released its much-hyped Oculus Rift system on Monday. With a headset, camera and game controller, the system, which costs $1,500 when bundled with a powerful computer, is the first virtual reality product of its kind to reach consumers, before similar ones coming this year from HTC and Sony. Over the last week, I tested the Rift and many pieces of content for the system to see how true Mr. Zuckerberg’s words might ring. I can report that while the Rift is a well-built hardware system brimming with potential, the first wave of apps and games available for it narrows the device’s likely users to hard-core gamers. It is also rougher to set up and get accustomed to than products like smartphones and tablets. The Setup: The Rift works with technology that some might find anachronistic: a Windows PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse. With many people shifting away from desktop computers toward laptops, tablets and smartphones, finding a place to install the Rift and those other components may be a challenge. If you purchase the Rift, you had better have thick skin. The aesthetic of the headgear — it looks like a pair of black ski goggles with air traffic controller headphones built into the sides — is not designed to get you a date. And since wearing the Rift makes users less aware of the outside world, videos and photos of them donning the contraption — and taken without their knowledge — may end up on Instagram or Facebook. I became a subject of ridicule when my partner was watching TV and I crouched in the middle of the living room while playing the dead space pilot game. The Rift has other consequences for the mind and body. I felt mentally drained after 20-minute sessions. My eyes felt strained after half an hour, and over a week I developed a nervous eye twitch. Oculus recommends Rift owners ease into the headset: Use it a few minutes at a time initially, then gradually increase the amount of time. All Rift users should take short breaks after every 30 minutes of use, the company said. The headset may also leave lasting impressions, or what I call “nerd paint,” on your face. After a long session, the Rift left two sets of parallel horizontal lines under my eyes. When it comes down to it, I don’t disagree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is just the beginning of virtual reality. With about 30 games and a few apps available at Rift’s introduction, there isn’t much to do with the system yet. Oculus will eventually need a larger, more diverse set of content to transcend its initial audience of gamer geeks.

• Pandora Media's founder returns as CEO; shares fall: Online music streaming service Pandora Media Inc (P.N) appointed founder Tim Westergren as its chief executive to replace Brian McAndrews, who left the company on Monday, sending its shares down 10 percent. Pandora, whose shares had fallen 32.5 percent in the last 12 months, faces stiff competition from Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. "I'm sure the stock performance was a factor in McAndrews' departure," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told Reuters. Pandora last month reported disappointing fourth-quarter results with active listeners of 81.1 million at the end of December, a slight fall from a year earlier. The company had said it planned to invest $345 million in 2016 to expand its paid subscription service and enter new markets, with an aim to achieve $4 billion in revenue by 2020. It reported revenue of $1.16 billion for 2015. "McAndrews was pretty ambitious, and my guess is that Westergren will be a bit more deliberate, so we will likely see a slower roll out of their international expansion," Pachter said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 7

• Facebook’s Oculus Says It Will Charge $599 for the Rift: After months of teasing the introduction of its Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, the company said on Wednesday that it had opened orders for the system, which includes a headset and controller devices, with a price of $599. That’s without a computer included — you’ll need a fast one that will probably cost around $1,000. The device begins shipping in March. Oculus also said that in February, it would open orders for a bundle, which includes the Rift headgear system and a computer that is certified to work with Oculus, for $1,500. Oculus is just one of many companies preparing to offer virtual reality devices this year. HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer, worked with the software distribution company Valve to develop the virtual reality gadget Vive that will be released in April. Similar to Oculus, the Vive requires connecting to a powerful computer, meaning the pricing should be similarly high. The companies have not announced the price yet. And Samsung Electronics teamed with Oculus last year to offer an entry-level virtual reality system, the Gear VR. That device, at $100, requires inserting a Samsung Galaxy smartphone into the headgear because it relies on the smartphone’s screen for video and its computing brains for running apps and games.

• Apple’s App Store made $1.1 billion over the holidays: Apple said Wednesday that customers bought $1.1 billion worth of apps and in-app purchases in the two weeks between Dec. 20 and Jan. 3 alone. They also set a new single-day spending record, dropping $144 million on apps on New Year's Day. In a release, Apple said that this broke a record that had been set just a week before, on Christmas Day. Overall, Apple said that customers spent $20 billion on App Store purchases in 2015. Most popular apps included games such as Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Trivia Crack and Heads Up!, as well as messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Snapchat. In terms of top-grossers, Apple also noted that gaming and subscription apps did the best this year, mentioning Clash of Clans, Monster Strike, Game of War - Fire Age and Fantasy Westward Journey as well as Netflix, Hulu and Match. The firm was also quick to note that the App Store has made developers about $40 billion over the lifetime of the App Store, with roughly one-third of that figure -- about $13 billion -- coming from 2015 alone. Last year, the company said that it had generated $10 billion in revenue for developers in 2014.

• Netflix Goes Live in 130 New Countries Including India - But China Skipped; Shares Advance: Netflix Inc. began selling its streaming service in India and more than 100 other countries, closing in on its goal of becoming the first global online television service. The stock logged its biggest gain since July, surging 9.3 percent. Netflix went live in 130 new countries, including Russia, Poland and Singapore, during his presentation. Adding India, most of the rest of Asia and other countries around the world marks a major step for Netflix. But China, the world’s most populous country, remains a gap. The company faces challenges in China, where a local partnership is essential given government controls over licensing for online content, and many potential allies already have competing businesses. Alibaba recently acquired full control of Youku Tudou, one of the largest video streaming services in the country, while Baidu and Tencent own popular video services.

• Netflix launches in India; basic monthly subscription at Rs 500:  Netflix is offering three packages for Indian consumers starting with a basic plan that would cost Rs 500 a month and allow users to access all content on any one device at a time with standard definition quality. The other two higher subscription plans allows users to watch content with HD or ultra HD quality and a choice of 2-4 devices at the same time. The topmost package is priced at Rs 800 a month. In contrast, domestic and international peers in India like Hungama Play, BoxTV of Times Group, HOOQ and Singapore-based Spuul charge Rs 200-300 a month. HOOQ, which was launched globally in a three-party JV by Sony Pictures, SingTel and Warner Brothers a year ago, also offers a bundled deal with Airtel’s Wynk Movies App. A cable TV service, on the other hand, costs around Rs 250-300 a month for a bouquet of a basic set of channels in the country. Where Netflix can differentiate is its huge catalogue, especially English language entertainment content. It is currently offering a one month free look period. However, this comes with a catch. Besides bandwidth issue and cost of watching entertainment content online another hurdle to wider adoption of Netflix to begin with could be its insistence on credit card details even if one chooses to opt for a one month tasting period.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 5

• Augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: Understand the Difference: The Battle Is Real: Although virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have existed in some form for decades, only recently have they garnered mainstream attention. VR is blowing up right now, and its content and hardware advances have been exciting to watch. In a short amount of time, content creators have made some mind-blowing advances in storytelling with this new technology. Brands, movie studios, gaming companies and news organizations are all tinkering with this tool and channel. VR will gain ascendancy throughout 2016, but my money’s on AR becoming the dominant technology in our daily lives. The New York Times recently distributed more than one million Google cardboards to its digital-edition subscribers. YouTube and Facebook are enabling VR online through digital video players. Everything is aligning to have VR hit critical mass next year. VR is the only medium that guarantees the user’s complete focus on the content. There is no looking away, no checking email or text messages and no updating social-media statuses. VR is the most immersive way to tell a story because what happens inside that headset makes you feel something in your head, heart and gut. But VR’s biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. The immersive nature of VR hinders users from interacting with their surroundings. It takes them out of the moment. They can’t walk around and see what is right next to them, look people in the eye or read someone’s body language. VR is a powerful way to experience content, but is not practical for interacting in the real world. And therein lies the major problem with VR. Content is king, no doubt, and providing immersive experiences is the holy grail in advertising. But VR will never become an innocuous part of our daily lives. AR adds contextual layers of information to our experiences in real time. We have seen this future foretold in Hollywood films, such as Avatar, Minority Report, Iron Man and Wall-E, among others. Soon these depictions will become real. However, AR has issues with execution, which tends to feel gimmicky. Remember pointing your smartphone to a print ad to get some poorly made content? Google Glass showed some innovative AR applications, but they were ultimately a failure because the hardware and technology were too broad and lacked focus on the consumer problem they were trying to solve. These examples have shown the promise of AR, but have failed to deliver on contextual utility. Still, the future is bright for AR with several tech companies working on their AR offerings. Microsoft is working on HoloLens AR headset glasses. Developer kits are scheduled to hit the market in early 2016. Google invested in a company called Magic Leap, whose technology beams lasers into the viewer’s iris to activate AR. That future will become a reality in another year’s time. Both VR and AR tinker with our reality — but AR enhances it, while VR diverts us from it, which is why the latter will come to the fore in 2017, with its promise of contextual data for marketers and utility for consumers.

• Oculus to take preorders for Virtual Reality headset Rift from Wednesday:  Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook Inc, said on Monday it would take preorders for its much-awaited virtual reality headset, Rift, from Wednesday. The Rift would come bundled with the game, Lucky's Tale, and a multiplayer space combat game, EVE: Valkyrie, Oculus said in a blog post. The blog post did not contain any further information such as pricing of the headset. Rift "remains on schedule to ship in Q1," Oculus had said in a blog post last week. However, the touch controller, a pair of motion controllers, would be delayed and shipped only in the second half of 2016, the company had said. In September, Oculus and Samsung unveiled a new version of Gear VR virtual reality headset for $99.

• G.M., Expecting Rapid Change, Invests $500 Million in Lyft: The founders of Lyft, the ride-hailing service, have long imagined that the future of transportation would involve fewer cars on the road. Now General Motors is helping the start-up reach that goal. Lyft announced on Monday that G.M. had invested $500 million in the company, or half of its latest $1 billion venture financing round. The funding, which recently closed, values Lyft at $4.5 billion, not including the new capital. G.M.’s $500 million interest in Lyft is the single largest direct investment by an auto manufacturer into a ride-hailing company in the United States, according to data from PitchBook, an alliance that pairs an auto stalwart with the kind of start-up trying to disrupt it. The investment reflects how much consumer automotive habits have been changed by technology over the last decade. With the rise of ride-sharing companies, car manufacturers have raced to adapt to how people can now use each other’s vehicles for rides, which could potentially lead to a decline in car ownership.

• Toyota Snubs Tech Companies With Ford Dashboard Deal: Toyota Motor Corp. agreed to use a car-phone connectivity system championed by Ford Motor Co. in a front to keep Apple Inc. and Google from dominating control of dashboards. Toyota will introduce a telematics system with Ford’s SmartDeviceLink, an open platform that the automakers are inviting their peers to adopt for in-car applications, it said in a statement. Toyota has resisted offering Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, citing safety and security concerns, while Ford is offering them as apps within its Sync connectivity system this year. The deal shows two of the world’s largest automakers remain wary about giving Apple and Google too much control over displays that IHS Automotive estimates will generate $18.6 billion in sales by 2021. For Toyota, which is involved in another system called MirrorLink that competes with the two tech giants, the collaboration with Ford suggest the company is spreading its bets on car connectivity options. Ahead of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota also said it will equip U.S. vehicles with data communication modules next year that connect cars with cellular networks. The modules will enable a system that notifies authorities when air bags deploy due to traffic accidents.

• Alibaba's Finance Arm Said to Seek at Least $1.5 Billion: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s finance affiliate is seeking at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in a second round of fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said. Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co., controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire chairman Jack Ma, plans to issue stock to existing and new investors, according to the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private. The firm, known as Ant Financial, is speaking to potential investors including insurers and other financial institutions, as well as private equity funds and venture capital firms, the person said. Challenging bricks-and-mortar banks, the Internet-based Ant Financial runs China’s biggest online payment service, Alipay, and controls the company which manages Yu’E Bao, the nation’s largest money-market fund with more than 600 billion yuan of assets. It also holds a stake in MYBank, a private online lender. Ant Financial was valued at about $45 billion after completing an initial round of fundraising in June 2015, the person said. The company may sell shares in an IPO as early as this year and hasn’t decided yet whether to conduct a third round of financing ahead of that, according to the person. Ant Financial may use money from the current fundraising for acquisitions, the person said, without identifying potential targets. Ant Financial has already invested in companies including India’s One97 Communications Ltd. and Postal Savings Bank of China.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 22

• An MP3 version of this snippet is here

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 7

• Facebook's Oculus to sell virtual reality headsets for consumers from early 2016. Virtual reality technology company Oculus said it would start shipping the much-awaited consumer version of its Rift headset in the first quarter of 2016. Pre-orders for Rift will start later this year, Oculus, which Facebook Inc bought for $2 billion last year, said. Previous versions of the VR headset, available since 2012, were aimed at developers to make games and run tests. The consumer version was widely expected sometime this year. "In the weeks ahead, we'll be revealing the details around hardware, software, input, and many of our unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences coming to the Rift," the company said on a blog post.

• Apple Is Planning Another Big Bond Sale: Apple Inc. is planning to sell bonds in the iPhone maker’s fourth multi-billion dollar offering since 2013 as it borrows to return capital to shareholders while preserving its cash holdings abroad. The company will issue the securities in as many as seven parts today, with the longest-dated bonds maturing in 30 years, according to a person with knowledge of the offering. Proceeds will back stock repurchases, capital expenditures, acquisitions and debt repayment, said the person, who asked not to be identified because of a lack of authorization to speak publicly. Apple may sell the bonds due in 2045 at a yield of 1.5 percentage points more than similar-maturity Treasuries and 10-year notes at a 1.10 percentage-point premium, said the person. The company is also planning to issue fixed and floating-rate notes maturing in two and five years and a seven-year fixed-rate bond. The Cupertino, California-based company has issued the equivalent of $40.35 billion of bonds since April 2013, including the $17 billion it sold in what at the time was the biggest corporate-bond offering ever. The company may also sell its first yen bonds and has arranged a series of fixed-income investor calls starting Thursday, Goldman Sachs, one of the underwriters of that offering, said in an e-mailed statement. A sale would be the first in the Japanese currency for Apple, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

• Affirm, consumer lending start-up raises $275M to lend to young borrowers using data science: Affirm is adding $275 million in debt and equity to accelerate its growth plans. The big Series B funding round is a vote of confidence by investors in one of the more ambitious entrants into the emerging field of financial technology. The firm is at the forefront of start-ups trying to use the new math of data science to more accurately assess credit risk than traditional scoring, which relies heavily on a person’s credit history. Conventional techniques, the new lenders say, do not do a good job of predicting the default risk on people with limited credit histories, like young people and recent immigrants. Traditional credit analysis tools, they add, tend to overly punish borrowers for single missteps such as a missed student loan payment or falling behind on medical debt. Affirm is building its business by focusing on lending to the millennial market, those under 35 years of age. They tend to have thin credit histories, and surveys show they generally have a lowly opinion of banks. “We’re building a financial technology company for the next generation,” said Max Levchin, the chief executive of Affirm, who was a co-founder of PayPal. To date, Affirm’s main product is a credit-card alternative for online merchants — installment loans from three months to a year. To seek a loan, an applicant provides a few items of personal information — name, cellphone number, birth date and the last four digits of the person’s Social Security number. Then, Affirm’s algorithms pore through all kinds of data from credit bureau reports to social networks. Affirm’s technology makes the underwriting decision almost immediately. More than 100 online merchants have signed up with Affirm, which has made more than $100 million in loans. Merchants using Affirm, the company says, report 20 percent higher sales, reflecting the appeal of Affirm’s alternative to credit cards. The tryout phase for the two-year-old company’s technology, Mr. Levchin said, is over. “We’ve come of age, so we want to have the resources to expand,” he said. New products, Mr. Levchin said, are part of the plan, including a credit-card offering.

• SAP Takes SuccessFactors and Concur to the Cloud: The new integration is being offered as a sort of “multi-tenant” business, akin to the public clouds of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, only for a set of fewer, but more high-level, functions. What that means is that it will be possible for customers of SAP, along with independent software developers, to make software applications that can take data from different elements of their business and build new kinds of information services. Both Ariba and SuccessFactors were independent online software companies that SAP purchased to hasten its transition from selling packaged software to a rental model. The features and data from another SAP acquisition, Concur, which does travel procurement and management, will also be integrated into S4 in the near future. Cloud-based revenue in the first quarter of the year was about $564 million, up 129 percent from a year ago. That was still a relative sliver of the $5 billion in total revenue the company scored, but total revenue was up 22 percent.

• India Start-up Action: Logistic services firm Delhivery raises $85M to ride on India’s ecommerce boom: Riding on the back of an ecommerce boom, India-based logistics service Delhivery raised a series D round of US$85 million led by Tiger Global Management. Last year, the company received US$35 million from Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Nexus Venture Partners, and Times Internet Limited. These investors have also participated in this round. This has so far been the biggest deal for an ecommerce support venture in India. Delhivery has a range of proprietary commerce technologies that they’ve built in-house to tackle logistics problems. The company has over 10,000 employees in more than 200 cities along with nearly a million square feet of warehousing space in 11 fulfilment centers. It handles over 3 million monthly transactions for 70,000 merchants and 1,500 ecommerce companies. With the funding, it plans to tap into India’s rural market and build 2.5 million square feet fulfilment centers. The startup aims to expand its reach four-fold. Delhivery is also expected to invest heavily in expanding the senior management team. It has recently appointed Sandeep Barasia, senior partner of Bain and Company and Suraju Dutta, ex-FedEx executive, as managing directors.

• IBM and Facebook in Marketing Partnership: Personalized marketing — the product pitch or message that really hits its target, the right person at the right time — is the much-discussed ideal in advertising and sales. The truth is that personalized marketing is, well, mostly marketing today. With modern tools of data analysis, it is becoming increasingly possible to identify customer groups in smaller segments than the big demographic buckets of the past, which filtered by age, gender, income and place of residence. But smaller audiences are still a long way from personalized marketing. On Wednesday, IBM and Facebook are announcing a partnership to take a step closer to the ideal. The partnership stems from how the companies bring complementary strengths to the lucrative business of data-fueled marketing. IBM’s data analytics business caters to major retailers and big consumer product brands. And Facebook, the social networking giant, does too. IBM’s data scientists do a lot of social media and sentiment analysis, but not with the vast laboratory of human behavior and preferences that Facebook has. The partnership is intended to combine data that marketers have on customers — like purchase behavior, responses to a marketer’s email campaigns and call center inquiries — with Facebook data including likes, comments and complaints. IBM’s data analytics will then be used to help big brands find and communicate with more finely targeted audiences on Facebook. Mr. Chandlee called this “personalization at scale.” And the insights gleaned from analyzing Facebook and other data should also help companies better target consumers in other marketing channels, such as ads on the web and email programs. Facebook will also be the first company to join IBM’s new Commerce ThinkLab. The new lab is a collaborative setting for applied research involving teams from major consumer brands and retailers, IBM industry experts and data scientists, and teams from Facebook as well. For IBM, the Facebook partnership is the most recent alliance the enterprise technology company has forged with consumer-focused technology companies, notably Apple and Twitter .

• Two Retail Veterans Take Aim at Amazon’s E-Commerce Reign: In the last few months, two retail veterans have been working on companies that explore these different avenues of breaking into online commerce. Ron Johnson, who, with Steve Jobs, created Apple’s lucrative physical stores, has been working on something out of left field — a selective online store called Enjoy, which, for no additional cost, will send an expert to hand-deliver tech products and spend an hour helping people set up and learn to use their new things. The service, Mr. Johnson said, is a smartphone-era take on his past at Apple — an effort to create the friendliness of an Apple Store in people’s homes and offices. Then there’s Marc Lore, an e-commerce veteran who in 2010 sold his company, Quidsi, to Amazon for about $550 million. Mr. Lore’s new service, Jet.com, represents a frontal assault on Amazon. Mr. Lore has raised more than $200 million — a staggering sum before even opening up shop — to create a nationwide e-commerce giant to compete with Amazon on selection, service and, especially, price. Jet’s promise is simple and, if the company can keep it, potentially momentous: to offer the absolute lowest price on just about everything, from paper towels to oatmeal to tennis rackets, guaranteed. Enjoy is starting small. The company, which has raised around $30 million from investors, is starting out in just the San Francisco Bay Area this week and in New York City next Wednesday. Enjoy does not compete with Amazon on selection; it offers only about a dozen or so high-margin tech products for sale, among them laptops, GoPros, drones and, in an exclusive deal, smartphones and tablets purchased from AT&T. Mr. Johnson believes that by limiting selection, Enjoy can offer free delivery and setup. Because it only needs to stock high-end products, the company hopes to squeeze enough out of each purchase to cover delivery and personal consultation. Enjoy is in stark contrast with Jet, which, when it opens to the public in early July, does not aim to start small. Right out of the gate, it makes a huge promise: “You should never find an item that’s more expensive on Jet than anywhere else,” Mr. Lore told me this week. Mr. Lore says he believes he can keep that promise thanks to an unusual business model. Like Costco, Jet will charge an annual membership fee, in this case $49.99. That fee is intended to free Mr. Lore from making any profit on each item — and thus pass all potential savings to customers. Right now, Jet is working well enough to bolster Mr. Lore’s basic claim — on dozens of items I searched for, Jet was cheaper, sometimes unbelievably so, than Amazon, Walmart or anywhere else online. For instance, a 40-pack of Duracell AA batteries on Amazon sells for $16.99. On Jet, the same pack is $13.70. If you add more items to your cart, Jet reduces the cost further. So, by ordering the batteries as part of a larger cart, I cut the price down to just under $11, about a third less than Amazon’s price. I noticed this effect on multiple orders across a wide range of household staples I usually order, from cooking oil to aluminum foil to shampoo to baby diapers. Jet’s sticker prices are low, but when I created large carts, the prices shrank even more. My child’s diapers, ordered in bulk, cost me 21 cents each, compared with 29 cents at Amazon. Still, there are some disadvantages: Jet’s fastest items ship in two days, slower than Amazon’s next- or same-day shipping, and a huge number of its goods ship in three to five days. It also does not offer an Amazon Prime-like free shipping service; you pay $5.99 for all orders under $35, after which your order ships free. These limitations suggest that Jet is going after an audience that’s different from Amazon’s — one that is less affluent, less hooked on impulse buying and more interested in discounts. “For most households, the proposition of paying $50 to Jet and saving $200 for the year, that’s a no-brainer thing,” Mr. Lore said. Over the holidays, Amazon sold a record $29.3 billion in merchandise, more than many large e-commerce companies combined. But Americans spent around $1.2 trillion in the same period, meaning that Amazon accounted for just 2 percent of our purchases. In other words, there’s lots of room for new ways to get Americans shopping online.