Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 24

• Tesla’s new 100 kWH battery makes it the third-fastest accelerating car ever: Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles just got faster. On a call with journalists today, Elon Musk unveiled a larger battery pack — 100 kWH — that enables the Model S to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds in what the company calls “ludicrous” mode. That makes the Model S the third-fastest production car ever made, after the Ferrari LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder, but it’s the quickest pure electric vehicle that has the capacity to seat up to five adults and two children, according to the company. In an industry first, the battery also enables the car to drive an estimated 315 miles on a single charge. This is the first electric vehicle to go above a range of 300 miles, according to Tesla. The Model S P100D will start at $135,000 — compared to a $125,000 MSRP for the Model S P90D equipped with ludicrous mode — and the Model X P100D will start at $135,500. The Model X P90D started at $115,500.

• Narrative Science can now describe your Tableau charts for you: Tableau Software‘s shares soared 13 percent on Tuesday following the announcement that the data analytics provider has partnered with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that develops natural language generation (NLG) tools. The result of the partnership is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau graphics. Let’s say, for example, that you have a chart — made with Tableau — of sales and profits of your business for a certain amount of time. The extension, which works with Tableau Server 10.0 or the free Tableau Public service, will generate a narrative description of the data by writing sentences such as “Sales and profit ratio moved in opposite directions from January 2011 to December 2014,” as shown in this example. Narrative Science is best known for Quill, a platform that can take data — say, sports scores — and turn them into stories. Narratives for Tableau is one example of applying Quill’s capabilities, Frankel pointed out. Once Narratives for Tableau has generated the text, users can customize it by choosing a paragraph- or bullet point-style for the description, among other things. If users are not satisfied with the results, they can also make changes to the text.

• Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles: Pinterest Inc. is buying Instapaper, the app that lets you save an article to read later, as it works to understand the technology behind recommending stories for people. The acquisition of Instapaper, which has expertise in saving, curating and analyzing articles, aligns with Pinterest's goal to provide content that fits users' interests, the company said in a statement. Pinterest declined to comment on a price for the deal. Instapaper, started in 2008 by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, is known for helping people save longer-form stories they don't have time to read. Pinterest said people use its application to save articles, though they often tend to be image-based how-to stories about recipes or from inspirational do-it-yourself blogs. Instapaper's technology could help improve Pinterest's ability to match content with its users' interests.

• One Kings Lane sold for less than $30 million after being valued at $900 million: One Kings Lane, an online home-furnishings retailer, fetched less than $30 million in its recent sale to Bed Bath & Beyond, according to three people familiar with the deal. The purchase price marks a massive discount from a valuation of $900 million that the startup had secured when it raised more than $100 million from investors in early 2014. In the wake of Dollar Shave Club’s $1 billion sale to Unilever and Walmart’s impending $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet, the One Kings Lane outcome is a reminder of how brutal the e-commerce industry can be for many startups.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, August 18

• Pinterest Follows Rivals Into Selling Video Ads: Pinterest is finally taking the plunge that many other tech companies already have: It has started selling video advertising. Video ads from brands like Kate Spade and bareMinerals will start appearing in the virtual scrapbook-like Pinterest feed on Wednesday and into the coming weeks, and Pinterest is hopeful that ads from other brands will soon follow. The new ads will show up in a silent, GIF-like format within Pinterest’s feed, and will play with sound once clicked. Users will be able to click images, or pins, of featured products next to the videos. That could, for instance, bring them to a brand’s website or allow them to buy the product without leaving Pinterest. The move puts the social-bookmarking site in competition with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, as well as large digital publishers, which are all vying for the increasingly large amounts of marketers’ digital ad dollars. Pinterest allows people to save links to images and videos, known as pins, to aesthetically pleasing virtual bulletin boards, and to follow the boards created by others. It has become a popular destination for consumers looking to buy goods, particularly in areas like home improvement and cooking, and for the brands looking to reach them. Pinterest says 75 percent of the content people consume on its site comes from businesses. Pinterest, which says it has more than 100 million visitors a month, has largely been absent from conversations about videos, even as such content has boomed in popularity on its site. The company said it had seen a 60 percent increase in the number of videos saved by users in the last year. Last year, Etsy was the website with the greatest number of links from Pinterest’s Save button. Now, it is YouTube. “Candidly, the company just in general has underinvested until now in video as a platform,” Jon Kaplan, the head of global sales at Pinterest, said in an interview. “We wanted to make sure it was customized and specific to the way people use our platform. What you’re going to see going forward is a very big investment in video.”

• An Expert in Valuation Says Uber Is Only Worth $28 Billion, Not $62.5 Billion: According to Aswath Damodaran, a professor who specializes in equity valuation at NYU's Stern School of Business, Uber is running up against the roadblock that has thwarted many upstart businesses: Profit. While Damodaran thinks Uber and riding sharing will continue to expand, albeit at a slower pace, he's concerned about whether revenues will follow. China especially worries him given Uber's recent sale of its operations in that country to Didi Chuxing, its biggest rival there. The decision to exit "even if it was the right one from the perspective of saving itself from a cash war, will reduce its potential revenues in the future."  In the other places where Uber does continue to operate, there are often large discounts for riders and other special promotions. This is proof that the business model is challenged, according to Damodaran. "I believe that a significant portion of their expenses are associating with maintaining revenues rather than growing them," he says. "In effect, it looks like the business model that has brought these companies as far as they have in such a short time period are flawed, because what allowed these companies to grow incredibly fast is getting in the way of converting revenues to profits, since there are no moats to defend." Damodaran says that young companies all face a point in time that he calls the "Bar Mitzvah Moment," when the focus shifts from growth to evidence that the business model can be profitable. In his mind, that moment is right now for ride sharing. "After an initial life, where investors have been easily sated with reports of more ride sharing usage (number of cities served, rides, drivers etc.), these investors are starting to ask the tough questions about how ride sharing companies propose turning these impressive usage statistics into profits."

• Lenovo's first-quarter profit jumps 64 percent, beating estimates: China's Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's biggest personal computer (PC) maker, said on Thursday its first-quarter net profit rose 64 percent, beating estimates as solid PC sales offset tepid smartphone demand. Beijing-based Lenovo said in a filing that net profit grew to $173 million for the quarter ended June from $105 million in the same period a year earlier. That was more than the $130.1 million average of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters SmartEstimates. First-quarter revenue dropped 6 percent to $10.05 billion from a year earlier, compared with an average of $9.63 billion estimated by analysts. Lenovo consolidated its hold on the slowing PC market during the quarter. PC shipments fell 2 percent year-on-year, compared with a 4 percent decline in the broader industry. Like peer Xiaomi Inc, Lenovo has been focusing on diversifying away from intense competition in low-margin devices in China - still the world's largest handset market but affected by the slowing Chinese economy.According to researcher TrendForce, Lenovo had a 4.5 percent share of the global smartphone market in April-June, leaving it a distant seventh after top player Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's 24 percent and Apple Inc's 15 percent.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 1, 2015

• Holiday Shopping Is Chilly for ‘Buy’ Buttons at Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest: More than a year after Twitter and Facebook began placing Buy buttons on their social networks, their e-commerce initiatives still appear to be relegated to experimental side projects. And at Pinterest, the tech platform that many believe is most conducive to e-commerce, one of its mainstream launch partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day via so-called Buyable Pins. The lack of aggressiveness on the part of Facebook and Twitter, and tepid early results at Pinterest, highlight the myriad challenges all three platforms face in transforming their immense user bases into shoppers. The sluggishness of the combined efforts also serves as a warning to other industry players betting big on the idea of social commerce that it’s still unclear if consumers will make purchases in big numbers on platforms that aren’t mainly retail destinations. Spokespeople for the three companies declined to disclose sales numbers for these initiatives. While each platform had its own reasons for pursuing e-commerce initiatives, the central idea was that they thought there was an opportunity to make it easier for their users to buy a product when they discover it on the platform. In theory, the usefulnesses of such a feature would be the biggest on mobile phones, where clicking through to make a purchase on another site can make purchases less likely because of uneven mobile webpage experiences. Facebook was the first to take a crack. Sixteen months after Facebook first began testing Buy buttons on ads and regular posts to let people purchase products they discover on Facebook without leaving Facebook, the initiative is still being dubbed a beta test, restricted solely to online merchants who work with e-commerce software provider Shopify. The company has also recently added purchase capabilities to some Facebook business pages and to a dedicated shopping section of Facebook, but these features, too, are being characterized as “tests” that aren’t available to all Facebook users in the U.S. At Twitter, it’s still unclear how big of a priority e-commerce will be going forward under the leadership of new CEO Jack Dorsey. The company began placing Buy buttons in tweets in September of 2014, and struck partnerships in October of this year with software partners such as Bigcommerce and Stripe to get more merchants on board. Best Buy, for example, will soon join the program — just not in time for the just-passed Black Friday weekend. But regular Twitter users can still go weeks without seeing any tweets enabled with e-commerce; most Re/code colleagues I polled, who are absolute Twitter power users, said they never come across them at all. Then there’s Pinterest, the massive tech platform that retailers were most excited about for its e-commerce potential. The company began inserting Buyable Pins into its iPhone app in late June, and just added the feature to its Android app in early November. The company says more than 10,000 merchants have joined the program, including big retailers and brands like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Cole Haan and Tory Burch, but at least one of these big partners is seeing fewer than 10 purchases a day on Pinterest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the sales figures. This source and another also said that Pinterest insiders have privately admitted to being disappointed with early sales numbers.

• AppDynamics Raises $158M; Now Valued At $1.9 Billion: Last month, based on an SEC filing, we told you that seven-year-old, San Francisco-based AppDynamics had raised a fresh $83.4 million in funding as part of a round that was targeting up to $150 million. Turns out the company met that target and then some. CEO David Wadhwani — who joined the firm in September after spending more than a decade as an executive at Adobe, including as its digital chief — says the company has just closed on $158 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Altimeter Capital. Other participants in the round include Adage Capital, Industry Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Cross Creek Advisors, as well as earlier backers Institutional Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. AppDynamics makes software to monitor the performance of business applications, competing with some traditional firms like IBM, as well as younger outfits like New Relic, which went public last December and has seen relatively steady stock performance since. (New Relic, which raised $214 million in venture funding, has a current market cap of $1.8 billion.) AppDynamics had previously raised roughly $206 million in debt and equity, including a $120 million round — $70 million equity and $50 million of debt — that closed in July of last year. At the time of the funding announcement, the company told VentureBeat that the money represented “pre-IPO growth financing.” Asked today what this new round means, Wadhwani said he “won’t speculate on the exact timing” of an IPO but added, “I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do.” The new funding, he said, “represents freedom. We can [execute on our plans for the company] on this money and effectively choose when we want to go public.” Wadhwani declined to discuss the company’s post-money valuation, but a source close to the company pegs it at $1.9 billion.

• In a Global Market for Hacking Talent, Argentines Stand Out: Want to learn how to break into the computerized heart of a medical device or an electronic voting machine? Maybe a smartphone or even a car? Thanks to the legacy of military rule and a culture of breaking rules of all sorts, Argentina has become one of the best places on earth to find people who could show you how. As Silicon Valley’s talent war has gone global, particularly for those skilled at breaking into things, this Latin American nation has become a rich recruiting ground for corporations and foreign governments. Companies need hackers to help defend against online criminals and state-sponsored spies. And as the world’s critical infrastructure moves online and the threat of war moves into cyberspace, governments are desperate to acquire hackers’ tools. Within Latin America, Brazil has become known in recent years as the world leader in Internet banking fraud. But Argentina’s hackers have a reputation for creativity. In particular, they are known for their ability to find so-called zero-day flaws, which are unpatched holes in widely used technology that can be used to spy on or even destroy adversaries’ computer networks. Technology companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have encrypted their products and services so that in many cases the only way to monitor a target’s communications is to hack directly into its device. As a result, there is a new urgency among governments in acquiring zero-day exploits. A mix of executives from around the world, government officials, contractors and — or so it was rumored — spies gathered here in October in an industrial building converted into a cultural center to watch hacking done the Argentine way at the 11th annual EkoParty, the largest hacking conference in Latin America. Long before foreign companies came calling, hacking things was a life skill in Argentina, a way to get by through decades of repressive military rule and a volatile economy. Argentines have a saying, “atado con alambre,” which translates roughly as “held together with wire,” to describe the inventive nature of so many here who learned to do much with little. The country still has one foot in the tech industry’s past because of stringent import rules. Amazon will not ship to your door here. BlackBerry has more market share here than Apple. A new iPhone costs $2,000 or more on MercadoLibre, an online auction site, but many iPhone owners said they had been able to persuade a friend traveling from abroad to sneak one through customs. To get their hands on the latest, greatest devices, Argentines often have to think like a hacker — or even become one. “You make do without resources, without high-end technology, with poor Wi-Fi connections,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentine political analyst. “We improvise creative solutions, for lack of other options, and many have applied these same procedures to the technical industry.”

• FAA Permit for Drone Flight School May Help Amazon, Google Speed Up Delivery Plans: The Federal Aviation Administration is plotting how to regulate drones. Tech companies with plans for drones — Amazon, Google, DJI, GoPro and a bevy of others looking to tap a potential multi-billion dollar market — are itching for the FAA to get on with it already. Last week, the agency made a small legal maneuver that advocates hope indicates more leniency to come on the commercial applications of drones. The FAA authorized the Kansas State University Polytechnic campus to train students and outside companies on flying unmanned aircraft. This type of authorization, called a Section 333 exemption, is common; construction sites, news outlets and disaster relief groups have received them. Amazon scored one in April. The notable difference here is in how close the FAA lets drones get to people. Even with flight authorization, drones must stay 500 feet from people, unless the craft meet some stringent safety and logistics requirements. The only exception had been on closed film and TV sets, which deploy drones for movie magic. But the FAA lifted the 500-foot restriction for the Kansas school, even though it didn’t ask for the specific closed-set exemption.

• Target and PayPal Sites Report Problems on Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday, the online version of Black Friday, is not immune to traffic jams of shoppers rushing to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales. Some of the most popular websites experienced an overload on Monday, similar to a crowd pushing its way into an already packed brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers were for a period of time unable to gain access to the site of Target, the discount chain,and PayPal, the online payments processing service. Both are now back online after an onslaught that reflects the shifting trends in the way consumers are looking for shopping bargains. Foot Locker, Groupon and Victoria’s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns Monday afternoon, according to Catchpoint Systems, a web monitoring firm. In a statement on Monday, Target said it was experiencing its biggest online volumes ever in response to a 15 percent online discount that it had announced previously. Visitors to the site early Monday got a message saying: “Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic’s causing delays. If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP.” According to a statement from Target, the company said it placed online shoppers in a queue in order to manage the volume of users, but it then allowed them to keep trying to gain access by refreshing their browser. A heat map on downdetector.com showed most of the problems with PayPal were reported in North America and Europe. Problems started around 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. PayPal said in an emailed statement that the “brief, intermittent interruption” in service was resolved. It did not provide a reason. The holiday buying frenzy has evolved over the years as more stores offer sales before and sometimes on Thanksgiving Day. It has also shifted away from physical stores as Americans have increasingly turned to online shopping. For many people, Monday was their first day back at work after the long Thanksgiving weekend, so some shopping was presumably being done surreptitiously while at work.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, November 10

• With a Mobile Website Like an App, Flipkart Takes a Swipe at Apple: India’s e-commerce start-up Flipkart has worked with Google to make a new mobile website that could eliminate the need for apps, in a move that takes a swipe at Apple’s grip on the mobile experience. On Monday, Flipkart unveiled the website, which it created with the Google team that focuses on the mobile web browser Chrome. The two made a site that supports push notifications, the ability to search for and read information while offline, location-based data and access to hardware features like a smartphone’s camera. While such features have long been available in apps that people download to their phones, they typically have not been prevalent on mobile websites. Flipkart plans to show other companies what it took to build the website — including the hurdles it had to overcome and the weaknesses it found — at Google’s Chrome Developers Conference this month. Google’s parent company is Alphabet.

• Match Is Seeking $3.1 Billion Value in I.P.O.: The Match Group is seeking a valuation of about $3.1 billion as it prepares for an initial public offering. The company, which owns the online dating brands OkCupid and Tinder, said on Monday that it planned to sell 33.3 million shares for $12 to $14 apiece. Those terms indicate an offering size of $433 million and a market valuation of $3.1 billion at the midpoint. In setting these terms, Match begins a roadshow, meeting with investors who will help the company set an official I.P.O. price in a few weeks, based on demand. The media conglomerate that owns Match, IAC/InterActiveCorp, whose chairman is Barry Diller, has been acquiring a number of dating sites over the last few years. As the online-dating industry increased in popularity, legacy sites like Match.com started facing more competition from free models like OkCupid. Mr. Diller’s strategy was to build scale by acquiring a portfolio of brands – now 45 in all – and eventually spin them off under the Match umbrella.

• Google Offers Free Software in Bid to Gain an Edge in Machine Learning: A race is underway toward the future of computer technology with advances in a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. Machine-learning software is trained to handle vast amounts of data, and then learns as it goes, often on its own. Machine learning has been around for a long time, and it has been a crucial technology in the success of Internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook — used in the development of search, ad targeting and product recommendations. But in the last few years, machine learning has made huge improvements in computer vision, language translation and speech recognition, largely by applying the techniques of deep learning, which is inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns. Every major technology company is investing aggressively in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And not just computer companies. Last Friday, Toyota announced it would spend $1 billion for research and development on artificial intelligence in the United States over the next five years. Google announced on Monday a bold step to establish its leadership in the field of machine learning, accelerate the pace of innovation in the field and potentially strengthen its business. It is making the software of its new machine-learning system, TensorFlow, which was developed over years, open-source code. The software will be freely available for outside programmers to use and modify.

• How Pinterest Got the Full Attention of Ad Agency Execs: Better features for marketers and consumers: Pinterest is getting serious about becoming a formidable digital advertising player, and agency executives are taking notice. "What Pinterest has accomplished in the last nine months is the most evolution of any platform," said Chris Tuff, evp and director of business development and partnerships at 22Squared. For comparison, Tuff said it took Facebook four and a half years to build the same kind of sophisticated ad tools that Pinterest is pitching. On Monday, the site launched a search feature that uses photos to comb through millions of product images. For example, someone looking at a picture of a table can zero in on finding similar tables by tapping on the Pin to start a search result without typing a word. Up until now, people have only been able to search on Pinterest with text queries. Marketers won't be able to buy visual search ads like they've been able to with text search ads, which debuted in early 2014. Pinterest hasn't said whether visual search ads were part of its future plans, but that scenario seems likely. The visual-search move should prove popular to users—which will help maintain marketers' attention for the Pinterest ad products that currently exist. In January, Pinterest opened its Promoted Pins advertising business to all U.S. advertisers. Then in May, the San Francisco-based company started offering more targeting and video promos.

• Rackspace Announces Better-Than-Expected Q3 Results, Including Revenue of $509M, Plans $350M Debt Offering: Following the bell, Rackspace announced its third-quarter financial results, including revenue of $509 million and earnings per share of $0.26. The market had expected Rackspace to report $0.20 in per-share profit off revenue of $503.08 million. Down nearly four points in regular trading, the company has swayed both positive and negative following its earnings announcement; investors, it seems, are not entirely sure at the moment how to parse the results. The company’s top line expansion clocked in at 10.7 percent, compared to the year-ago quarter. On the product side of things, Rackspace recently announced, and I’ll quote here to avoid butchering the truth, “Carina, A Hosted Environment For Running Docker Containers.” It has been rumored that Rackspace could entertain the possibility of going Full Dell, and heading private.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 6

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• Euro markets set for major jolt after Greek 'No', look to ECB for calm: European stock and bond markets are set to take a sharp hit on Monday after Greece voted 'No' to harsh bailout conditions, and bankers said the European Central Bank's response was now key to the extent of contagion. "The ECB has the capacity to limit the spread of contagion. But we might still see a fall of 3 percent on European markets on Monday," said Antonin Jullier, head of equity trading strategy at Citi. With no immediate prospect of a bailout for the Greek government, its banks need further help to avoid collapsing. Oil prices tumbled as the US dollar strengthened. European officials are putting the onus on the Greek government to make the next move as Chancellor Angela Merkel heads to Paris on Monday for talks with President Francois Hollande to map out a way forward for Greece.


• After weeks of turmoil, China stocks rocket 8 percent at open after weekend rescue moves: China's stock markets rose 8% at the start of a make-or-break week after officials rolled out an unprecedented series of steps at the weekend to prevent a full-blown stock market crash that would threaten the world's second-largest economy. The government is anxiously awaiting the market opening on Monday to see if the new measures will halt a 30 percent plunge in the last three weeks, or if panicky investors who borrowed heavily to speculate on stocks will continue to sell. In an extraordinary weekend of policy moves, brokerages and fund managers vowed to buy massive amounts of stocks, helped by China's state-backed margin finance company which in turn would be aided by a direct line of liquidity from the central bank. China has also orchestrated a halt to new share issues, with dozens of firms scrapping their IPO plans in separate but similarly worded statements over the weekend, in a tactic authorities have used before to support markets. The Shanghai Composite Index had surged more than 150 percent in the 12 months prior to June 12 as investors assessed that monetary stimulus would revive China’s economy. Now, those hopes seem to be fading, and Chinese equity markets are plunging. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 5.8 percent Friday, bringing the decline since its June 12 peak to 29 percent. More than $2.8 trillion of value has been erased from the Chinese stock market during that time, an abrupt end to the longest bull market in the nation’s history. Stocks entered a bear market on June 29 as leveraged investors headed for the exits; China’s securities regulator that day urged investors to be rational. In response, China is suspending initial public offerings, creating a market stabilization fund and telling investors not to panic in an effort to shore up its stock market, which has had the largest three-week drop since 1992. According to company filings to the exchanges Saturday evening, 10 companies will suspend IPOs on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and 18 will do the same at the Shenzen Stock Exchange. Halting IPOs may stem the diversion of funds away from current listings. The move came hours after major Chinese brokerage firms pledged billions of dollars to form a stock market rescue fund.


• New, Simple ‘Buy’ Buttons Aim to Entice Mobile Shoppers: Despite spending close to three hours of each day staring at their mobile phones, Americans continue to do the vast majority of their online shopping through desktop and laptop computers, which have larger screens and physical keyboards that are more amenable to browsing and typing in credit card numbers. Mobile phones are projected to account for about half the time Americans spend online this year, but only about one-fifth of retail e-commerce sales, according to eMarketer. Now several companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, are trying to bridge the gap between mobile browsing and desktop purchasing with a simple “buy” button. Buy buttons have been around since the early days of the web, of course, notably with Amazon’s “One-Click Ordering,” where people set up a button that runs their credit card and ships whatever they have bought to a designated address. But these new buy buttons allow technology companies to act as middlemen between mobile shoppers and retailers — extending one-click ordering to thousands of small retailers and eliminating exasperating typing on a phone’s touch screen. The logic for the companies working on the new buy buttons is that, in an increasingly mobile world, where people do less typing and more tapping, a more predictable checkout process will drive sales by reducing “friction,” which is a technology industry euphemism for any inconvenience, no matter how small, that might cause people to wonder why they are opening their wallets.


• Alibaba Arm Eyes More Capital to Build China Finance Empire: Ant Financial, which dominates e-commerce payments in China, was said to be valued at over $40 billion in its latest round -- making it one of the world’s largest private tech companies. It manages the nation’s biggest money market fund Yu’E Bao and is targeting smaller borrowers to tap a market overlooked by traditional banks. Investors may be drawn by Ant Financial’s exponential growth. Since it began life as Alipay in 2004, the company has become the country’s largest online provider of financial services, helped by its role as the preferred payment method across Alibaba platforms. It has since expanded into adjacent industries such as insurance and online credit. One of the more aggressive of China’s new breed of online finance companies, Ant Financial’s maneuvers have courted controversy in the past. Ma spun off Alipay into a new company he controlled in 2011, citing the risk of foreign ownership of domestic financial firms. Major shareholder Yahoo protested and said it was caught unaware.


• Tesla Rises After Second-Quarter Deliveries Top Forecast: Tesla Motors gained the most since April after the electric-car maker beat its car-sales forecast for the second consecutive quarter with a 52 percent surge in the three months through June. The shares rose 4 percent at the close in New York for the biggest daily advance since April 27. Tesla has climbed 26 percent this year, outpacing the Russell 1000 Index’s 1.3 percent increase. Tesla delivered 11,507 Model S sedans in the second quarter, according to a statement of preliminary figures Thursday. The Palo Alto, California-based company predicted in May that it would sell 10,000 to 11,000 of the cars, its only model, during the period. The preliminary total brings first-half sales to 21,552, less than 40 percent of Tesla’s full-year target of 55,000 vehicles. Output and deliveries are projected to increase with the introduction of the Model X sport utility vehicle this quarter. “Tesla still has to deliver on the Model X promise,” Dan Dolev, a Jefferies analyst, said in a telephone interview. With the Model S, “the execution is there, the demand is there, the delivery is there, so that all these areas are positive is encouraging.”


• Housing crisis puts SoftBank in a spot amidst its headline grabbing announcements: The fall of Housing.com from one of the hottest tech startups in India to a big public relations disaster has been quick, thanks to its just ousted CEO Rahul Yadav. And this has put the largest owner of Housing—Japanese internet giant SoftBank, one of the biggest internet investors from Asia with $70B in revenue—in a delicate spot. Only six months ago it wrote a $90 million cheque for this college startup in exchange of a 32.5 per cent stake, but it appears SoftBank is already exploring a sale. Sources familiar with developments at the online real estate company said Quikr-Housing.com deal, as reported by VCCircle, is in works but it may not be easy to fructify due to several reasons including a mismatch in valuation expectations. SoftBank, Housing’s biggest stakeholder, is said to be seeking a price of $350 million which none of its rivals would want to cough up considering the startup’s main asset is its product and technology and not so much the business (revenues). As an immediate sale may prove to be daunting, sources say SoftBank’s current priority would be to stabilise the affairs at the startup while also increase the monetisation efforts rather than stepping up the sell-off initiatives. “They wanted to make a big bang entry into India with a $1 billion investment, make a splash, and get a meeting with (Prime Minister) Modi..,” said a venture capital investor who manages a diverse portfolio, indicating the Japanese giant might have made a mistake in a hurry to invest.


• Reddit Moderators Revolt Over Site's Firing of Popular Talent Director Victoria Taylor: Hundreds of Reddit's community forums—called subreddits—have been made inaccessible to the public in protest after the San Francisco-based company dismissed its director of talent, Victoria Taylor, who ran its Ask Me Anything (AMA) feature. The extremely popular AMA subreddit has been temporarily shut down by its moderators, while the reasons for Taylor's exit haven't been revealed. According to Business Insider, Reddit user "Karmanaut" posted about Taylor's departure, stating: "We have been really blindsided by all of this. As a result, we will need to go through our processes and see what can be done without her." The Business Insider story added that Taylor replied in a subbredit thread that she was "dazed" by the development but planned to stay in the public relations/communications field. For the AMA program, she has been credited for booking everyone from Hollywood stars like Madonna and Will Ferrell to political players such as President Barack Obama and conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Taylor was widely beloved by Redditors for cultivating such an intriguing mix of content. Reddit may be wise to shed more light on Taylor's departure sooner rather than later, otherwise the subject could continue to explode throughout the July 4 weekend. Already, many users are threatening to leave Reddit for good in an exodus similar to the user backlash that gutted competing site Digg in 2010.


• Reports that Amazon is trying Special Price Discounts on Prime, possibly to challenge Jet, the Hot Discount Shopping Site: The last time the companies run by Jeff Bezos and Marc Lore squared off, there were fireworks. We’re about to see what happens the second time around. The first time, Amazon instigated a pricing war with Lore’s company, Diapers.com, ultimately pressuring it into a $550 million sale to Amazon. It wasn’t exactly the outcome Lore was hoping for, but was a pretty good exit nonetheless. Now, as Lore’s new, members-only shopping site Jet.com preps for its public launch, there are some signs that Bezos once again doesn’t plan to sit aside idly. In the last few months, Amazon has been offering discounts on different products as exclusive deals for members of Prime, its two-day shipping and streaming media program. Last week, reports surfaced showing that Amazon was giving special discounts on video games to Prime members. Amazon has sporadically offered special discounts to Prime members in the past, such as exclusive discounts on Vizio TVs dating back to 2013. But the timing of the current set of discounts across multiple product categories could have to do with the fact that Jet, which is operating in private beta currently, is also a membership program built on the idea of discount pricing. For $50 a year, Jet is promising its members the best prices on the Web thanks to a complex system of discounting by stripping costs out of the order fulfillment and shipping process of e-commerce.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 11

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

• Facebook expands its Buy Button test; ties up with Shopify. With the news that Google and Pinterest are introducing their own Buy buttons, Facebook has a message: We’re still working on our own version, too. The company on Wednesday announced it is working with e-commerce software company Shopify, which helps companies set up digital storefronts, to expand its Buy button test to a larger number of small businesses that already work with Shopify. Since July, Facebook has been testing the Buy buttons with a few hundred small- and mid-sized businesses.

• Spotify Value Tops $8 Billion as Investors Bet on Streaming: Spotify Ltd. received a valuation topping $8 billion in its latest round of funding as the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service said its number of customers exceeded 75 million. The company raised $526 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Discovery Capital Management, Lansdowne Partners, Rinkelberg Capital and Senvest Capital for a valuation of $8.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. Phone carrier TeliaSonera said Wednesday it invested $115 million. In comparison, Pandora, which runs an ad-supported Web radio, and reported 79.2 million active listeners at the end of the first quarter, has a market value of $3.6 billion. Spotify continues to amass funds as it tries to boost its subscription service before Apple Inc. gains more customers for its updated music offering, unveiled this week. Both Apple and Spotify give users access to more than 30 million songs, and each service costs $9.99 a month. With music purchases shrinking in stores and online, streaming has emerged as the industry’s primary source of growth. Record labels acknowledge its significance, while complaining streaming has failed to replace lost retail sales. Spotify now has more than 20 million paying subscribers and more than 75 million active users, it said in a statement on its website Wednesday. The company said it has paid more than $3 billion in royalties to artists and record labels since its start over six years ago.

• Twitter Advertisers Can Now Target You Based on the Other Apps on Your Phone. For the past six months, Twitter has been collecting data on which smartphone apps its users download. Now, the company is using that data to make some money. Twitter announced on Wednesday that its advertisers can use that app information to target users with ads. Marketers will be able to target you based on the different categories of apps you have downloaded onto your phone as well as how recently you downloaded them. Twitter first announced in November that it was collecting this data, but until now, it wasn’t using it for anything. It’s easy to understand the draw from Twitter’s perspective: If Twitter knows you like Candy Crush, it may assume you like other similar games as well. It’s also easy to understand why this type of targeting may freak some users out. You can block Twitter from collecting this data in settings, but the feature is opt-out, which means the company will gather this information unless you tell it to stop. Twitter won’t, however, have access to information within the apps you download. For example, the company may know you’ve downloaded WhatsApp, but it won’t have access to your messages.

• Microsoft Launches Giant Smart Whiteboard - Picks Unusual Place to Manufacture it - the U.S.: There is nothing ordinary about Surface Hub, a gargantuan touch-screen computer that Microsoft is about to start selling to companies as a high-tech replacement for conference room whiteboards. People in a meeting can scribble on the screen with a stylus and pan around an image using their hands. Everything on the screen, along with video images of meeting participants, can be shared over the Internet with people in other locations. The largest Surface Hub, measuring 84 inches diagonally, looks like an iPad that has gone through a growth spurt. The 4K resolution of the screen produces dazzling images. At $20,000 apiece, a price Microsoft plans to announce on Wednesday, it should. Just as unusual is where Microsoft is building the Surface Hub: Wilsonville, Oregon, just outside Portland and about 200 miles south of the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. That puts the Surface Hub in a rare category, since most of Microsoft’s better-known devices, like the Xbox game console, are made overseas.In recent years, there has been a surge of optimism about the prospect of high-tech manufacturing jobs returning to the United States after some headline-grabbing moves, like Apple’s decision to build its Mac Pro computer in Texas starting in 2013. But they remain outliers in an industry that has outsourced to Asia the making of everything from game consoles to smartphones. The Surface Hub, though, is an illustration of an exotic tech product that its makers believe can be manufactured cost-effectively in the United States. The product is so unusual — representing one of the largest touch screens of its kind — that Microsoft could not find existing assembly lines in Asia to build it on, the company said. At 220 pounds, the largest Surface Hub is expensive to ship long distances. And its already hefty price means any additional labor costs associated with making it in the United States will be harder for customers to detect.

• Hackers May Have Obtained Names of Chinese With Ties to U.S. Government. Chinese hackers who attacked the databases of the Office of Personnel Management may have obtained the names of Chinese relatives, friends and frequent associates of American diplomats and other government officials, information that Beijing could use for blackmail or retaliation. Federal employees who handle national security information are required to list some or all of their foreign contacts, depending on the agency, to receive high-level clearances. Investigators say that the hackers obtained many of the lists, and they are trying to determine how many of those thousands of names were compromised. “They are pumping this through their databases just as the N.S.A. pumps telephone data through their databases,” said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It gives the Chinese the ability to exploit who is listed as a foreign contact. And if you are a Chinese person who didn’t report your contacts or relationships with an American, you may have a problem.” Officials have conceded in the briefings that most of the compromised data was not encrypted, though they have argued that the attacks were so sophisticated and well hidden that encryption might have done little good.

• Box Spikes 9% On Strong FQ1 Revenue Growth, Narrowing Losses. Cloud storage provider Box raised its full-year forecast as more customers subscribed to its content-sharing platform. Box raised its full-year forecast to $286 million-$290 million from $281 million-$285 million earlier. Shares of the company, whose customers include AstraZeneca, General Electric and Chevron , rose about 8.7 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company said it surpassed 37 million registered users, compared with 34 million at the end of the fourth quarter. The number of paying users grew 70 percent from a year earlier, and now accounts for more than 10 percent of total users, the company said. The online file-sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses leverages a "freemium" business model, providing up to 10 GB of free storage for personal accounts and charging for additional space. In April, Box launched its premium security service, which lets businesses control their encryption keys, the encoding tools used to keep data safe. The company's main competitors include privately held Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive, Citrix Systems ShareFile and Google's Drive.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, June 3

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

• Instagram to Open Its Photo Feed to Ads: Instagram is cranking up its money machine, and that means a lot more ads in your photo feed. Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, has kept the mobile photo-sharing service mostly free of advertising, allowing only a handful of big brands to put a few carefully drafted commercial messages on the service. But on Tuesday, the company announced plans to open the Instagram feed to all advertisers, from the local tattoo parlor to global food makers, later this year. Marketers will be able to target ads to the service’s 300 million users by interest, age, gender and other factors, just as they can on Facebook. Instagram will also begin testing a type of ad that allows viewers to click on a link to buy a product or install an app that is advertised. The commercialization of Instagram, while sure to disappoint some users, was probably inevitable. Major social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest have committed to keep their services free to users, and they have turned to advertising to pay the bills. Instagram offered its first ads in November 2013, but since it has been subsidized by Facebook, it has had time to develop an ad strategy. Many retailers already use third-party workarounds, such as Curalate’s Like2Buy tool, to allow fans to shop their Instagram feeds. Visitors to the Instagram pages of Target, Nordstrom, Forever 21, Williams-Sonoma and other retailers can click on a special link that the store posts in its account description that leads to a mirror image of its Instagram feed — but one where photos are clickable and link to product pages where a shopper can buy the items.

• More On Instagram's Monetization: Instagram Unleashes a Fully Operational Ad Business With shopping links and Facebook-powered targeting: Instagram's ad business is growing up fast thanks to a boost of new technology from Facebook. Today, the popular photo-sharing app with more than 300 million users and counting is opening up to potentially millions of advertisers, with more ad styles and sophisticated targeting tools first honed by its parent company. Instagram is launching ads with "Shop Now" buttons and other messages that link outside the app so users can take marketable action. Also, there's a new API—software platform—that lets marketing partners automate the advertising process. The API comes polished—able to manage, track and measure marketing campaigns—thanks to borrowed technology and lessons learned from Facebook, said James Quarles, Instagram's global head of business and brand development. Advertisers can reach users based on more than just their ages and genders, targeting interests gleaned from Facebook profiles. "We have benefitted greatly from being a part of Facebook," Quarles said. "It would have taken us years to build this tech stack for ourselves. So, we're fortunate to be able to take select pieces of Facebook's tech stack."

• Amazon Debuts Free Shipping on Small Goods, No Minimum Order: Amazon.com is introducing free shipping on thousands of popular, smaller items -- makeup, mobile phone accessories, earplugs -- in its Web store, without requiring a minimum order. The new initiative applies to all customers, including those not enrolled in Amazon Prime, the annual membership program that includes two-day shipping, the company said on Tuesday. Amazon is using the free shipping program to target cost-conscious shoppers, a group that EBay Inc. is courting. Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos has focused on increasing the value of the $99-a-year Prime membership, adding same-day delivery in big cities, video streaming and music. By offering free shipping, the Seattle-based online retailer will be able to target a wider pool of customers and market its services, including Prime membership. The new offer gives online shoppers an opportunity to order inexpensive goods one at a time without worrying that shipping costs are more than the price of the item or feeling compelled to buy additional products to meet a free-shipping threshold. The service covers items that weigh 8 ounces (230 grams) or less, which usually cost no more than $10. Delivery will take four to eight business days from a new shipping hub in Florence, Kentucky, specifically stocked for the program dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon Small and Light.

• Pinterest Brings E-Commerce to Social Scrapbooking With ‘Buy It’ Button: Pinterest, the online social scrapbooking service, has long claimed to help people discover new things in the real world. Soon users will be able to buy those things, too. The San Francisco company announced Tuesday that it would offer the ability to buy products from inside of pinned items, in what is its first foray into e-commerce on its service. The new product, named “buyable pins,” allows sellers large and small to place a “Buy it” button on items that they post to the site. Founded in 2009 by the entrepreneur Ben Silbermann and some of his colleagues, Pinterest quickly caught on as a sort of digital scrapbook where people could save things that drew their interest online. A user may come across an interesting pair of jeans on the web, for example, and “pin” a photo of those jeans to a Pinterest board. The idea was that users could collect items that they may find or buy later. But there was no way to purchase items directly on Pinterest, so for many users, the idea of buying their saved items was largely aspirational. That changes with buyable pins, as Pinterest, which has raised more than $1.3 billion in venture capital, works to justify its valuation of $11 billion. While the company does not disclose its number of users, estimates place its audience in the United States at more than 75 million, according to the online analytics firm comScore. With buyable pins, Pinterest has teamed up with major retailers like Cole Haan, Ethan Allen, Kate Spade and Macy’s. More than two million blue “Buy it” buttons will appear on products posted to Pinterest by these companies. Payments made through the service will be powered by Stripe, an e-commerce start-up that focuses on small and midsize online businesses. Braintree, a payments processing company owned by PayPal, will also handle processing. Other merchants will be able to sell items on Pinterest using Shopify, which does the heavy lifting of online commerce for smaller, independent businesses. The move is a major moneymaking opportunity for Pinterest and perhaps an obvious one for the company, which has been around for close to six years but has only recently pushed heavily into generating revenue. In December, the company introduced its first major advertising effort with its “promoted pins” product; the announcement Tuesday is the company’s first real effort at building an e-commerce site. Pinterest does not plan to make money off e-commerce the traditional way, by taking a cut of retailers’ transactions. Instead, the company said, it would make money selling promoted-pins advertisements to retailers, who can then insert buyable pins into those ads.

• Tech boom lures Indian engineers back home: Kunal Bahl's American dream was coming together in late 2007. He had Ivy League degrees in business and engineering, a debut job at Microsoft Corp. and a roadmap to the career he’d always wanted in Silicon Valley. Then his application for a U.S. visa was rejected and he was kicked out the country. Lucky for him. Back in India, he got over the shock and founded a company in New Delhi with a childhood friend. Today Snapdeal.com is one of the most highly valued startups in the world’s third-largest economy, valued at about $5 billion. The 31-year-old is one of the thousands of a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs who quit America for home — some by choice, some because of U.S. immigration barriers — to find a technology industry with more green-field opportunities than Silicon Valley. Many Indians aren’t leaving at all, or are going to the U.S. for degrees from Harvard and Stanford with no plans to stay after graduation. India's booming startup culture probably wouldn’t feel any affects if the H-1B floodgates suddenly opened. The super-growth potential these days is east, not west. While only about 19 percent of Indians are connected to the Internet, their numbers are mushrooming. Economic output is expanding at an annual rate of more than 7 percent, and by some projections the country's population will reach 1.6 billion to surpass China’s by 2050. India is hard to resist. Google engineering executives Peeyush Ranjan and Punit Soni recently left the company and California for home, moving to Bangalore to join Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company and Snapdeal’s main domestic rival. Namita Gupta departed Facebook for Zomato, a restaurant-search service based in New Delhi. The trend is a dramatic shift from the 1980s and 1990s, when a graduate education and employment in the U.S. were the brass rings for engineers like Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive officer. Now for anyone interested in programming or e-commerce or mobile-device apps, India "is like the late 1990s in the U.S.," says Bahl. Venture capitalists and hedge funds are swooping in with aims to profit on startups like Snapdeal. Venture financing in Indian tech companies hit $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter, almost six times the $325 million in the year-earlier period, according to CB Insights. Hedge funds, investment firms and asset managers have pumped $3.8 billion into 26 Indian tech startups since the beginning of last year, according to data compiled by Bengaluru-based Tracxn. "Investors are writing big checks even by Valley standards."

• Russia's Internet Research Agency deploys an army of well-paid “trolls” that seek to wreak havoc all around the Internet - The New York Times investigates. A New York Times report investigates a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The word “troll” was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides. As former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian. Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 11

• Late to the party, global banks try to muscle into India's start-up boom: Global investment banks are scrambling to get a piece of the action from India's booming technology start-ups, having missed out on the initial flurry of deal-making to their better-connected but much smaller domestic rivals. Banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are looking to hire more bankers in India and are now regularly attending "bake-offs" to pitch for advisory roles on deals, according to several banking industry sources. Foreign money has been pouring into India's fast-growing e-commerce sector, with investors ranging from Japan's Softbank Corp to Singapore's Temasek Holdings [TEM.UL] and GIC Private Ltd [GIC.UL] piling in. Many large global investment banks have stayed away from work in the emerging sector though due to the relatively small deal sizes. Now they are stepping up efforts to build relationships while the companies are still young - learning lessons from China where many of them are struggling to compete with small boutique banks as Internet deals pick up speed. "Several of these companies will be large IPO candidates in the next 12 to 24 months, so the big banks have to start positioning themselves for this," said Harish HV, a partner in India at advisory firm Grant Thornton. The number of venture funding deals for technology start-ups in India in the first quarter of 2015 was the highest in nine quarters and exceeded the number of such deals in China, according to data from CB Insights. The total value of investments in India topped $1 billion for the third straight quarter. To compete with local rivals like Avendus Capital and Kotak Mahindra Capital, foreign banks are now pitching for relatively small deals at start-ups, hopeful they will eventually lead to more lucrative work, banking sources said. Avendus, which focused on the tech sector before the deal momentum picked up, ranks fourth in the advisory league table for announced technology deals in India so far this year. That's ahead of bigger global rivals including Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan, according to Thomson Reuters data. Now foreign investment banks are starting to make in-roads. Jefferies' India arm advised home shopping firm Naaptol.com to raise about $20 million last month from Japan's Mitsui & Co Ltd and some existing investors. Citigroup Inc, which advised Indian online payment services provider One97 Communications in raising funds from Alibaba Group affiliate Ant Financial Services in February, is "very focused" on the internet space in India, said Madhur Deora, its managing director for investment banking in India. Global banks vying to offer services like loan financing to online retailers like Flipkart and Snapdeal, hoping this could help them secure mandates on any future IPOs, sources said.

• Alibaba in talks to buy $1.2 billion stake in India phone maker Micromax - 20% stake purchase would value Micromax at $6B: Alibaba Group Holding (BABA.N) is in talks with India's Micromax Informatics (IPO-MINF.NS) to buy an about 20 percent stake in the smartphone maker, helping the Chinese e-commerce giant expand in one of the world's fastest growing markets for the devices, several people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The deal, if completed, would see Alibaba investing as much as $1.2 billion in Micromax, the second-largest smartphone brand in India by sales, at up to $6 billion, two of the people said. India is the world's third largest smartphone market and was the fastest growing in the Asia Pacific region in the third quarter of last year, according to industry research firm International Data Corporation. Micromax and Alibaba began talks on the stake sale after discussions with investors led by Japanese telecoms firm Softbank Corp (9984.T) stalled over differences in valuations, the sources said. "The Softbank talks are not officially over, but it'll be hard to get back on track," said one of the people. Softbank is the largest shareholder in Alibaba. The sources said Alibaba wants to use the Micromax deal to tap into the boom in the number of internet users in India, which is also one of the world's most rapidly growing smartphone markets. Growth in India, and especially in mobile transactions, would help Alibaba offset stiff competition at home from domestic rivals including JD.com Inc (JD.O), as well as what appears to be growing e-commerce user saturation. "The talks are centered around using Micromax devices as a platform to get into a serious business of its own in India," said one of the sources, referring to Alibaba. Alibaba, for example, would be able to roll out services such as Alipay, its online payment platform, on Micromax phones. Ant Financial Services Group, which owns Alipay, is China's largest payment service provider and is controlled by Alibaba's executive chairman and founder Jack Ma. The stake sale is aimed at helping Micromax raise capital as it expands into new business segments including personal computing. The company is seeking funds from private investors, or a possible stock market listing, its co-founder told Reuters. Micromax started up in India in 2008, and its affordable, large-screen phones are now the country's most popular after Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) smartphones. Micromax counts Sequoia Capital and TA Associates among its investors.

• Uber might raised $1.5B at $50B valuation: Uber is fund-raising again. The mobile car-hailing application is in early talks to raise a new round of financing that could value the start-up at $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke anonymously because the process is confidential. Uber could raise around $1.5 billion, given the amount of interest from investors in the company, the person said. The new capital will not be used primarily for expansion purposes, unlike Uber’s previous financing rounds. Instead, the funding is strategic, with an eye on partnerships, the person said. Uber, based in San Francisco, has raised money relentlessly in recent years at rapidly swelling valuations. So far, the company has raised more than $4 billion as it moves into new markets globally, disrupting established taxi and other transportation industries by letting people request rides through their smartphones. The company was founded in 2009 and is led by Travis Kalanick, who is chief executive. In December, Uber closed a $1.2 billion round of financing that valued it at $40 billion. The company then moved to accommodate additional investors like Baidu, the Chinese Internet giant. That round followed one in June, when the service said that it had raised $1.2 billion at a valuation of $17 billion. At a $50 billion valuation, Uber would be the world’s most valuable private start-up, topping the Chinese electronics maker Xiaomi, which was last valued at $45 billion. It would also be worth more than publicly traded companies like FedEx, with a market value of $48 billion, and Nissan Motor, with a capitalization of $47 billion. The divide between Uber and other “unicorns” — Silicon Valley’s term for billion-dollar start-ups — would also grow. Even at its current $40 billion valuation, it was nearly triple that of other elite Silicon Valley start-ups like the data analysis firm Palantir, according to the research firm CB Insights. Among Silicon Valley start-ups, only Facebook had attained a $50 billion valuation as a private company.

• Pinterest Adds $186M To Series G Funding Round, Offers Secondary Sale To Employees Looking to Cash Out: Pinterest confirmed that it has padded its Series G funding a bit and is carrying out a new secondary sale that will allow employees to cash in some of their shares. As first reported by Re/code, the social sharing startup raised an additional $186 million in funding as part of its Series G round, bringing the total amount raised in that financing to $553 million. New investors in the round include Wellington Management Company and Goldman Sachs, while existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, First Mark, SV Angel, Valiant, and Fidelity also participated. Altogether, the company has raised about $1.3 billion since being founded in 2009. In addition to the primary financing, Pinterest is carrying out a secondary sale for employees who wish to sell their vested at the $11 billion valuation of the Series G round. This is the second time Pinterest has offered the option of a secondary sale to its employees, with the first being held in October 2012.

• Apps Need A New Data Center Stack, Because Infra is Difficult to Get Right: Google, Facebook and Amazon serve billions of users overall — and many, many millions concurrently — and store incredible amounts of data. Yet they rarely crash. Once it finally decided to make a significant investment in infrastructure engineering, Twitter all but slayed the fail whale. Among some of the better-known technologies these companies have produced are MapReduce, Hadoop, Cassandra and Kafka. A new suite of tools — some created by startups, some in labs, some as open source projects — has also emerged in their image, designed to make applications perform and scale better, and sometimes to enable new capabilities altogether. These include technologies such as Spark, Storm and Elasticsearch. In concert with these advances, new architectures also caught on in order to address the problems that come with trying to develop applications that can run reliably at such extreme scale. One is the concept of microservices, which involves treating applications as a collection of services that might serve multiple applications, rather than as monolithic entities with their own dedicated components. Among other things, a service-oriented approach results in less dependency among components and the ability to scale individual services without re-architecting the entire application. Another big architectural trend has been containerization, whether it’s done via developer-friendly means like Docker or lower-level means like Linux control groups. Containers can make it easier to plug applications into distributed services and to shift the focus from deciding where something should run; instead, containers let developers focus on what their applications need to run. Taken as a whole, this new collection of distributed services and architectural techniques could be called the “data center application stack.” Anyone building an application that serves millions of users on multiple platforms, and can make use of the volume, variety and velocity of data today, is going to be using this collection of services or something very much like it. In fact, these technologies are all gaining popularity fast. Many are already staples in the technology repertoires of startups trying to deliver everything from the next huge consumer app to the next Salesforce.com. “Big data,” “real-time” and “Internet of Things” are more than just buzzwords. They’re imperatives for corporate success in many parts of the 21st century economy. However, the elephant in the room — which you might not hear from IT vendors, open source advocates or expert Facebook engineers — is that building out these capabilities is hard. Deploy, manage and scale Hadoop. Deploy, manage and scale Cassandra. Deploy, manage and scale Kubernetes. Rinse and repeat for every framework or service you want to use. At some point, companies probably will want to give a little thought to actually writing the application, building the data pipeline and making sure the architecture is resilient. Huge, engineer-rich companies such as Google and Microsoft solved (or largely solved) this problem for themselves with systems like Borg and Autopilot, respectively. The systems automatically manage resource allocation and high availability for the services and applications that run across their millions of servers. Algorithms, not developers or software architects, determine where things run and on how many machines. Sure, they’re great systems, but they’re also proprietary. Google only recently officially acknowledged Borg’s existence by publishing a paper on it. Microsoft has done very little public discussion of Autopilot. Neither are for sale.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 26

• Amazon’s On-Demand Services Marketplace Launches Monday: Amazon’s Angie’s List competitor, called “Amazon Local Services,” has been rebranded as “Amazon Home Services” ahead of a larger launch happening Monday, sources familiar with the plans tell TechCrunch. The site, which previously featured only a limited number of service offerings in a handful of select markets, has also recently expanded to include a much larger number of categories of services as well as additional cities around the U.S. As you may recall, Amazon Home Services quietly rolled out in late 2014 as the company’s initial foray in to providing a marketplace for services that would exist alongside its product offerings, offering the retailer another means of generating revenues outside of shipping physical products. Initially, the marketplace largely featured service providers whose businesses could help Amazon shoppers with additional needs that might follow a product purchase, however – like installers who could mount a new TV, for example. Now that expanded category line up is live – or at least it will be on Monday. On the rebranded “Amazon Home Services” website there are a variety categories beyond those that only relate to products Amazon sells. Top-level categories include Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Automotive, Computer & Electronics, and Lessons. There’s even a “More” category for those that don’t fit into the other groupings, which includes some more interesting services like “goat grazing” or “singing performances.” The idea here is to expand the marketplace to include any services a customer may need – even everyday needs like housecleaning or babysitting. In other words, with the official launch, Amazon is taking a big step to compete in the on-demand economy. But in our understanding, Amazon is partnering with some of these on-demand service startups, rather than trying to replace them entirely. This is a similar strategy to what Amazon has pursued with other initiatives, like its online art store or its Amazon Sellers program. Amazon could end up driving more business for some of these companies, the way it has provided additional customer flow for small retailers of physical goods. Also of note, Amazon hand-picks the businesses it includes on its site, and required all those who were listed to be licensed, insured and background-checked. The website previously said that Amazon would take a 20 percent cut of the services that cost under $1,000, and 15 percent for those over $1,000. But recently, the language on the website was updated, noting that, as of March 27, service fees are divided into three tiers: standardized, custom and recurring, each with a 5 percent transaction fee, and then with varying “service platform” fees ranging from 15 percent (standardized) to 19 percent (custom) to 5 percent (recurring). For consumers, the updated marketplace offers a number of features that could make it competitive to other providers, like Angie’s List, Yelp or Google’s business listings as a place to find providers. Because Amazon shoppers buy the services by placing them in an online cart, the company can verify the purchases leading to authenticated user reviews – meaning no one can slam a business out of spite or to take down a competitor. Instead, service reviews only come from real customers. Plus, the pros on the site offer Amazon the same pricing as if you dialed them direct, the website now claims – and if you find they offer a lower price, Amazon will match it. That change may be related to earlier complaints from consumers trying the service during its beta phase. Some found that they ended up haggling over pricing, and had trouble getting Amazon to pay up when they were given an incorrect quote.

• At developer conference F8, Facebook Opens Messenger for App Developers, Realtime Comments, New Ad Formats, Analytics for Apps,..: (more here and here) Today marked the first day of F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, and the company announced a ton of stuff Messenger As A Platform: Facebook is opening up Messenger as a platform for developers. That means developers will be able to add in new functionality to Messenger — things like Giphy for on-the-fly GIF searching, goofy voice changers for voice messages, a drawing pad for doodling things up for your friends, etc. Think of it like a mini-app store within Messenger. New Realtime Comments System: Facebook’s Comment system (like the one you see in use at the bottom of this post) is pretty solid, but it’s been a while since it got much love. Today, it’s seeing a bit of an overhaul. New comments will show up in real time, comments will sync between the story page (this one) and the shared story item on our Facebook Page, FB Embeddable Videos: Facebook is making a move on YouTube’s turf, now allowing users to embed their Facebook videos on other sites. Will this mean less personal, home-video style content on YouTube? Maybe. Will Facebook start tapping these embedded video streams as yet another place for them to stick an ad? Almost certainly. Spherical Video: In a curious move, Facebook will now support 3D, spherical video in the newsfeed. You can pan around the video with your mouse cursor. While spherical video looks a bit strange on a flat screen, the key here is Facebook’s purchase of the Oculus Rift. Parse For Internet Of Things: FB launched Parse for Internet Of Things — a set of SDKs that act as the backend brains for IoT projects. It’s compatible with Arduino first, with other platforms on the way. LiveRail: Last year, Facebook bought LiveRail — an ad exchange that fills ad space within apps and sites to the highest bidder. Today, they made two changes: they’ll support mobile display ads in addition to video, and will be able to tap into a pool of anonymized Facebook data to determine which ad to show. Analytics For Apps: Facebook knows a lot about the users of their apps. Now they want to help developers figure out who is using their apps. Are most of the people playing your game female? Are they teenagers? Are those teenagers spending money in game, or are most buyers in their early 20s? Facebook’s new analytics platform helps you figure that out.

• Uber, Ola stare at a possible IP address block in India: (more here) The Delhi government has asked India’s information technology ministry to block the taxi-hailing apps of Uber and Ola in the national capital, news agency Reuters reports, quoting an unnamed government official. Yesterday, Delhi transport officials asked Uber and Ola to cease operations if they want their applications for radio taxi licenses to be processed. The officials had earlier asked the central government to block Uber’s IP address in India if the company does not abide by the law on running taxis. A block of the IP address would prevent passengers and drivers from accessing the app. Now, Ola too seems to be caught in this regulatory fix. Taxi-hailing apps hit a roadblock in India when an Uber driver raped a passenger in Delhi three months ago. This led to a ban in several Indian cities, and a close scrutiny of safety measures, driver screening, and liabilities that these ride-hailing companies assume. Uber had given in to a transport authority demand to apply for a radio taxi license in India, after initially insisting that it is not a radio taxi company. But its application fell short of what was required. The bone of contention is Uber’s insistence that it is just an internet platform connecting owners and drivers of cars with their customers, while regulators are equally insistent that it has to follow rules like any other taxi service. The transport authority refused to give a license to Uber unless it met the licensing conditions. On its part, Uber said it is “evaluating the perceived deficiencies in the time period provided to us by the government.” Uber tied up with First Advantage to do background checking of its drivers and included two new panic buttons on the Uber app – only in India – to persuade consumers and authorities that it is serious about safety. Earlier this week, it got into a “commercial marketing arrangement” with The Times of India Group to help ease its rollout across India.

• Tinder hacked, results in matches of unaware straight men, odd conversations: Flirting can be hard, especially through a screen. But these guys never had a chance, considering they were chatting with other heterosexual male users as part of a clever technological ruse. A hack on Tinder isn’t anything new. More tech-savvy folks have actually dug into the app to automatically swipe right on every potential match, and then there are all the marketers that are tricking folks into chatting with a brand instead of a human. But the Verge reports that a hacker recently set up a program that would use female dummy accounts to put heterosexual men into conversations with each other. Using Tinder’s API, the programmer was able to channel messages from one unknowing man to another, with both parties in the conversation believing instead that they were talking to a woman.

• 3 Pinterest Features Retailers Need to Know: Pinterest should, if not already, be an integral part of your e-commerce strategy. The site’s visual nature can help you provide detailed images to buyers, share products and information, draw buyers to your website and ultimately increase sales. It’s an ideal fit for brands and retailers looking to boost product visibility and purchases. Because of its relatively young age, Pinterest is still expanding at a considerable rate. Below are three innovative Pinterest features to have on your radar. Price Notifications: Price notifications are a recent practical addition to the social network. Users who pin a Rich Pin — pins that are available to business accounts and include extra information like a title, price and availability — that is later reduced in price will receive a notification alerting them to the price drop. This is a unique way to notify shoppers about price changes and to interact with potential customers. Because both Rich Pins and Pinterest business accounts are free of charge, we strongly recommend trying them out. Promoted Pins: promoted pinsCurrently a reservation-only program for US-based businesses, Promoted Pins are Pinterest’s foray into advertising. Retailers can promote specific pins to targeted audiences so that they show up in relevant search results and in users’ home feeds. You’ll be charged when people click through to your site. Pinterest has been testing the program in beta, and the company reports that advertisers experienced about a 30% increase in earned media from their Promoted Pins campaigns. Buy Button: Pinterest is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter by adding a Buy button, which allows users to order and pay for products without leaving the social network’s website or app. Essentially, it’s a tool to reduce the steps in a consumer’s path to purchase Even though Pinterest is entering the social commerce game late, it has an advantage over Facebook and Twitter because its users are already coming to the site for product ideas and inspiration. When the act of pinning occurs, people are signaling some interest — if not clear purchase intent. Over the past five years the social giant has proven itself to be a big player in e-commerce. Think about it — 70 million active users are searching, sharing and “pinning” images of products. As Pinterest continues its rapid growth, more consumers will continue to trust the network to recommend quality products. This social channel is an ideal match for online retailers.