Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 28

• Facebook revenue smashes expectations as mobile ad sales surge: Facebook Inc's (FB.O) quarterly revenue rose more than 50 percent, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its wildly popular mobile app and a push into live video lured new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to boost spending. The company's shares rose 9.5 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $118.39, setting it on track to open at a new high on Thursday, at nearly triple its initial public offering four years ago. Facebook also announced it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded. Some 1.65 billion people used Facebook monthly as of March 31, up from 1.44 billion a year earlier. Zuckerberg said users were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, a huge amount of time given the millions of apps available to users. "The company consistently 'warns' about higher spending, but they consistently manage their spending to deliver earnings upside. They're an impressive company, and they leave very little room for criticism," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who called the operating margin a good surprise. Facebook did not offer details on sales of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but emphasized that it was early days and said that sales would not significantly impact 2016 revenue.  The company's net income attributable to common shareholders nearly tripled to $1.51 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the first quarter from $509 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding items, the company earned 77 cents per share, beating Wall Street's 62-cent consensus. Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 percent to $5.20 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 percent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 percent a year earlier.

• PayPal beats the street on Q1 sales of $2.54B and EPS of $0.37: Payments giant PayPal posted strong Q1 earnings today, counter balancing some of the weaker showings from other tech stocks yesterday and outstripping the overall growth rate of e-commerce, in its own words. Following in the footsteps of its former parent, which alsoposted strong results for Q1, PayPal posted revenues of $2.544 billion with non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.37, rising 19% and 28% respectively on a year ago and both beating analysts’ projections of $2.5 billion and $0.35 EPS. The company says it has 184 million customers now, up by 4.5 million, with 1.4 billion transactions in the quarter up 26% on a year ago. Services like Venmo and the company’s expansion into credit and other services has given the company a life on average transactions per customer, which were up 12% to 28 payments per user, and $81 billion in total payment volume. That $81 billion in TPV, it said, “was faster than the growth rate of e-commerce.” On the merchant side, there are now 14 million active accounts. When it comes to new-wave revenues, PayPal is showing some of its legacy: the company only completes 26% of transactions on mobile devices today, versus 22% a year ago.

• A Silicon Valley VC says investors from China are joining Series A deals, and they’re playing “hardball”: On valuations: The average thing coming out of Y Combinator is probably a half to three-quarters of what it was [in terms of valuation in recent years]. The average seed-stage deal is half. On hardball tactics: Docs are taking longer because there are new investors coming in, and they want more stuff in their terms. These are newer investors, often foreign investors, who are basically saying: “I want senior preference to [a company’s earlier] investors,” and that’s adding two or three weeks as they usually ask right as the docs are closing. They’re almost all from China, and they want all of their preferences to be senior to everyone else’s. What’s happening is, since they know the capital’s financials, they just wait it out. By that point, we’ve already signed a term sheet and turned off a lot of other people who wanted to invest. These things never come up in the term sheet phase but later in the docs. They’ll say, “We did our diligence, and we need XYZ to invest.” It’s not a great way to start a relationship. People in the ecosystem around here are playing for the long term; they realize that sooner or later, they’ll be on the other side of the table and don’t want this stuff applied to them. This is mostly coming from Asia, where they play much harder hardball than here. And [these investors] do it with a happy face. That’s just the environment [to which they’re accustomed]. On the slowdown in tech valuations:  I don’t expect it to pick up any time soon, which is a function of retail and institutional investors looking for high-growth stories with profit associated with them. They want profit and growth. Meanwhile, a lot of companies that have strong revenue can’t show that growth, and vice versa. There just aren’t a lot of companies that could sustain being public right now.

• Amazon is liable for billing you for your kid’s wild in-app purchases, a judge says:  A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Amazon is liable for billing parents for unauthorized in-app purchases made by their children. With the ruling, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour sided with the Federal Trade Commission in its lawsuit against Amazon for failing to get consent from parents for in-app purchases made by kids. “Many of Amazon’s arguments improperly assume a familiarity with in-app purchases on the part of consumers,” the judge said in the ruling. “For example, Amazon cites to a case determining that a ‘reasonable Amazon customer is accustomed to online shopping,’ but online shopping and spending real currency while obtaining virtual items in a game are completely different user activities.” The court has not yet ruled on how much Amazon will have to pay out to customers affected by the practice. The FTC previously settled with Apple and Google in similar cases, resulting in more than $50 million being returned to consumers.

• Chinese phone makers Oppo and Vivo pass Xiaomi in global phone sales: Being the “it” smartphone sure doesn’t last long. New data from IDC finds that Xiaomi now trails several of its less well known Chinese rivals when it comes to global market share. Overall, there were 334.9 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2016, IDC said, up very slightly from the 334.3 million units a year ago. That marks the smallest year-over-year growth on record. Oppo and Vivo, two names unfamiliar to most Americans, are now the No. 4 and No. 5 phone sellers behind Samsung, Apple and Huawei, another big Chinese hardware maker. Huawei is also on the rise, still far short of its goal of supplanting Apple and Samsung, but at least closing the gap on the two leaders. Oppo and Vivo are mostly known in the Chinese market, though Oppo now gets about 20 percent of its sales from outside its home turf.

• It feels like every tech company is offering cash advances. Shopify is the latest: Following in the footsteps of PayPal and Square, e-commerce software company Shopify said on Wednesday that it would start offering cash advances to business owners who use its software. The program, called Shopify Capital, will let eligible Shopify merchants obtain a lump-sum cash advance in exchange for a fixed percentage of their daily sales. Cash advances are popular with small businesses that don’t have the time or business history to secure a loan from a bank. The Shopify announcement comes more than two years after payments companies PayPal and Square began offering similar programs. Right now, companies that serve small businesses are seeing this market as a way to create a new revenue stream that can be sold to existing customers — and, they hope, help retain them. They are joining an increasingly crowded space, as the online alternative lending space has heated up in recent years. Merchant cash advances have had a mixed reputation in the past, due to hidden fees and the risk of a business getting addicted to them. But internet companies like Shopify are trying to remove the stigma around them by promising to disclose up front how a business will pay back the advance. Square recently moved from offering cash advances to actual loans.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, March 24

• The Uber Model, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Translate: Other than Uber, the hypersuccessful granddaddy of on-demand apps, many of these companies have come under stress. Across a variety of on-demand apps, prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down. Here is what we are witnessing: the end of the on-demand dream. That dream was about price and convenience. Many of these companies marketed themselves as clever hacks of the existing order. They weren’t just less headache than old-world services, but because they were using phones to eliminate inefficiencies, they argued that they could be cheaper, too — so cheap that as they grew, they could offer luxury-level service at mass-market prices. So do a lot of other apps offering services across a number of industries. They are super convenient, but the convenience comes at a premium, which seems here to stay. Some of these services could make for fine businesses, but it is hard to call them groundbreaking. After all, paying extra for convenience isn’t really innovative — it is pretty much how the world has always worked. Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used its growth to keep cutting its prices and expand its service. Uber shifted from a convenient alternative to luxury cars to an alternative to taxis to, now, a credible alternative to owning a car. But Uber’s success was in many ways unique. For one thing, it was attacking a vulnerable market. In many cities, the taxi business was a customer-unfriendly protectionist racket that artificially inflated prices and cared little about customer service. The opportunity for Uber to become a regular part of people’s lives was huge. Many people take cars every day, so hook them once and you have repeat customers. Finally, cars are the second-most-expensive things people buy, and the most frequent thing we do with them is park. That monumental inefficiency left Uber ample room to extract a profit even after undercutting what we now pay for cars. But how many other markets are there like that? Not many. Some services were used frequently by consumers, but weren’t that valuable — things related to food, for instance, offered low margins. Other businesses funded in low-frequency and low-value areas “were a trap,” Mr. Walk said.

• Why you should be skeptical that any video is real: Be careful about believing what your eyes are telling you. Researchers have shown how a video of a person talking can be altered in real time to change what a speaker appears to be saying. In a new video, the scientists show how they edited YouTube clips to change mouth movements. The system uses a webcam to track one person’s facial expressions, and then applies them to the face of the person in the target video. The software creates a 3D representation of a subject’s face, which can then be swapped with the 3D representation of another face. The process works even if one subject has facial hair or a different skin tone. But it won’t work if a person’s long hair blocks his or her mouth. Currently the researchers are considering commercializing the technology for use in TV shows that are re-released in a different language. Editing actors’ facial movements to match the audio should make the dubbed programs seem more natural, even if what’s onscreen is actually fake.

• Square Teams Up With Facebook to Offer Ads That Can Be Gauged: On Wednesday, Square announced a new integration with Facebook. Under the integration, small businesses that use Square to process payments can buy and target Facebook advertising using Square’s software. Square will make subscription fees off the new product. Small businesses can benefit from the move because Facebook ads bought through Square’s platform are directly connected to sales activity and data, Square said. That will allow business owners to understand whether their Facebook ads are working to attract new and repeat customers. The Facebook ad integration is just the most recent new line of business for Square, which went public in November. When the company began in 2009, it focused on providing a square credit card reader that easily attached to smartphones and tablets, giving small, cash-only businesses the ability to accept credit cards. Square takes a small percentage of each transaction, a fee it splits with credit card companies and other financial intermediaries. But as Square has grown, the company has diversified from that payments processing core, which some analysts and investors have criticized for having overly thin margins. Square now offers cash advances to merchants through Square Capital, scheduling with Square Appointments and food delivery with Caviar. The company has also begun offering other subscription-based products to businesses, like an email marketing service linked to sales history. The new Facebook advertising integration was spurred by an acquisition of talent and technology from a start-up called LocBox a few months ago. Square hired Mr. Mehta and his colleagues from LocBox, which specialized in online marketing for small and local businesses, to work on similar advertising technology at Square. The new lines of business still account for far less revenue than Square earns by processing payments. But Square believes that as more small businesses begin adopting its full array of products, these nascent revenue streams will grow. Two weeks ago, Square reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, posting a 49 percent revenue increase to $374 million for the fourth quarter from a year ago, with sales from its software and data products more than tripling.

• Why I’m skeptical about Apple’s future: Facebook is set to release its virtual reality headset, Oculus, next week. It will be big and clunky, expensive, and cause nausea and other problems for its users. Within a few months, we will declare our disappointment with virtual reality itself while Facebook listens very carefully to its users and develops improvements in its technology. Version 3 of this, most likely in 2018 or 2019,will be amazing. It will change the way we interact with each other on social media and take us into new worlds — like the holodecks we saw in the TV series Star Trek. This is the way innovation happens now. You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released. Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection. Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers — believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed. He ruled with an iron fist and did not tolerate dissent of any type. People in one division of Apple also did not know what others in the company were developing, that is the type of secrecy the company maintained. Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the ’90s and Microsoft in the late 2000’s. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007. Since then, it has been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors—as with the iPad and Apple Watch. Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features.  It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well.

• Shopify Doubles Down on ‘Buy’ Buttons Despite Sluggish Start: Last year certainly wasn’t the year of the “Buy” button that some envisioned, but Shopify is betting that 2016 could be. The e-commerce company, which makes software that small businesses use to sell products online, is expanding the number of online sales channels its customers can sell through as shopping on mobile devices booms. The new channels include product discovery app Wanelo, home design site Houzz and coupon app Ebates; Shopify said that more are on the way. “This is a continued bet on distributed commerce,” said Satish Kanwar, Shopify’s director of product. The expansion follows Shopify’s previous work to let its merchants start selling directly on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, in addition to their own sites. But shopping on Pinterest got off to a slow start last year, and e-commerce efforts on Twitter and Facebook are still in early stages.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 12

• Square, the Mobile Payments Company, Discloses I.P.O. Plans - Lost $77M on revenues of $561M in H1 2015: Jack Dorsey is about to get even busier. On Wednesday, one of the companies Mr. Dorsey runs, Square, the mobile payments start-up, made its initial public offering prospectus public, indicating it is close to a road show to sell stock to investors. The move follows an action-packed 10 days for the technology executive, who was named permanent chief of Twitter last week and who on Tuesday announced that he was laying off 8 percent of the staff at the social networking company as he tries to attract more users to the service. The disclosure of Square’s I.P.O. prospectus is set to quicken the pace for Mr. Dorsey. While the filing revealed that Square’s revenue jumped to $850 million last year, up 54 percent from a year earlier, losses increased to $154 million in 2014, more than in 2013. For the first six months of this year, Square lost $77 million on revenue of $561 million. That means Mr. Dorsey, 38, will need to sell a money-losing Square to investors when I.P.O.s — including recent technology offerings like Pure Storage — have been met with a lackluster reception. In addition, Mr. Dorsey faces questions about whether he can juggle his chief executive roles at Twitter and Square. Taking a company public and navigating the turnaround of another are each tall tasks on their own. Some critics have said Square’s core business does not make enough money to justify the lofty $6 billion valuation that it received from private investors. While Square said that more than two million merchants accepted five or more Square transactions last year, the company’s revenue is not as large as some other technology giants that it is often mentioned alongside. The filing also presented a rocky picture of a key partnership with Starbucks, the global coffee giant, which the two companies entered into in 2012. Square ended up losing tens of millions of dollars on the countless credit card transactions it processed for Starbucks customers, the filing showed. The deal, which is expected to wind down in 2016, will winnow away a significant portion of Square’s transaction volume.

• Square’s IPO Filing: It’s Complicated: Square recorded revenue of about $560 million in the first half of the year, a 51 percent increase over the first half of 2014. For the same period, losses were about flat year-over-year at about $78 million. That doesn’t look great. But a more nuanced look at the numbers, stripping out the Starbucks deal, tells a story of a healthier core business with even a path toward, yes, profitability. As a result, Square is making the case that that deal doesn’t reflect its core business, and it is right: Square loses money on Starbucks transactions, while Square makes money on the transactions it processes for all the other brick-and-mortar businesses it works with. Additionally, the metric subtracts other costs associated with things like stock-based compensation that fast-growing tech companies often argue don’t reflect the health of their main business. In the first half of the year, Square narrowed its Ebitda losses to $19 million from $44 million in the same period last year. And in the second quarter of this year, Square actually recorded an adjusted Ebtida profit, even if just barely. That’s a good sign.

• Jack Dorsey owns 24.4% - i.e. a lot -  of Square: No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company's chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square's registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14. Dorsey's sizable stake indicates that he was savvy enough to keep control of the company he co-founded. Dorsey's high-flying reputation as a Twitter co-founder helped him negotiate more favorable terms for Square than an untested entrepreneur trying to raise money could. Contrast Dorsey's position with that of, say, Box CEO Aaron Levie. When the file-storage company filed for an IPO in January, the 30-year-old Box co-founder owned 4 percent. While that still makes for a nice payout, six venture-capital firms owned more shares than Levie when the company went public. Or look at Dorsey's first venture, Twitter. Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder along with Dorsey, provided the company with early financing, which helped him maintain a 12 percent stake by the time it went public. Meanwhile, Dorsey had 4.9 percent. This month, Dorsey was named "permanent CEO" of an ailing Twitter at the same time Square was prepping for an IPO. He's said he can handle both jobs, but investors are wondering how that will play out. In terms of ownership, he's got a lot more eggs in Square's basket. "There are so many incentives for him to just spend all his time on Square," Lemkin said.

• Amazon Shutters Hotel-Booking Site After Six Months: Amazon.com Inc. has shuttered its hotel booking site "Amazon Destinations" six months after its start, signaling the world’s largest e-commerce company couldn’t persuade many of its customers to book weekend getaways. The Seattle company introduced the site in April hoping to expand on its Amazon Local initiative connecting shoppers with deals close to home. The destinations site featured maps, lodging offers and information about restaurants at popular weekend getaways near Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. Amazon Destinations stopped selling reservations on Tuesday, according to an announcement on the website. "If you have a reservation, your reservation is valid and will be honored by the hotel," the site states. “We have learned a lot and have decided to discontinue Amazon Destinations,” the company said Wednesday in a statement. The business pitted Amazon against Web travel businesses Priceline Group Inc., Expedia Inc., startup Airbnb Inc. and others for a piece of the online hotel booking market. 

• Shopify partners with Uber to ensure same-day delivery: Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify said on Wednesday it was partnering with taxi-hailing service Uber to help merchants deliver goods to customers on the same day in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Shopify said the UberRUSH delivery service will be available to its merchants in the three cities immediately. U.S. department stores such as Kohl's and Macy's Inc offer same-day delivery services via a tie-up with Deliv, an Uber-like startup that contracts drivers to pick up ordered items from stores and deliver them to customers. The agreement with Uber is the latest in a series of major tie-ups announced by Ottawa-based Shopify. Last month, it inked a tie-up with the U.S. Postal Service, making it more attractive for smaller U.S. retailers to use its software to power their e-commerce sites. Just prior to that, Amazon.com also made Shopify its preferred partner for smaller vendors that are seeking to sell their goods via the online retailing giant. Although the rapid delivery services appear to compete with Amazon's own speedy shipping options, the tie-ups with Uber and USPS will not put Shopify on a collision path with Amazon said Brennan Loh, Shopify's head of product partnerships, who added that smaller vendors would still look to sell their products via Amazon due to its much broader reach, in comparison to their own portals.

• Behind the Failure of Leap Transit’s Gentrified Buses in San Francisco: Leap, which raised $2.5 million from some of the industry’s best-known investors, charged riders $6 to get across San Francisco, nearly three times the cost of riding a city bus. Its primary draw was luxury. Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app. The luxury vehicles were up for auction; Leap filed for bankruptcy in July. The end for Leap apparently came so suddenly that its founders didn’t have time to remove much from the vehicles. Inside each bus, sitting in an out-of-the-way parking lot near Oakland, Calif., was a state registration form pinned to the wall, a bundle of iPhone and HDMI cables, and a display case full of snacks. Among the choices were packages of That’s It — vegan, gluten-free, non-G.M.O. fruit bars — and organic, paleo Simple Squares. Leap is one of at least several dozen tech companies that have failed this year. Their deaths are illuminating; dead start-ups show us which investors’ theories are bogus, which technologies aren’t ready for prime time and which common ways founders overextend themselves. In particular, Leap’s death suggests one emerging cause of start-up doom, a problem that also did in the anonymous social network Secret: too close an association with Silicon Valley’s tech-bro sensibilities. Start-up deaths often go unstudied. Silicon Valley stands out for the way it embraces failure, and it’s true that the “We Failed!” start-up post-mortem note has become a staple on publishing sites like Medium. By the time of its bankruptcy auction earlier this month, which attracted only a handful of bidders, Leap was all but forgotten. In its bankruptcy filing, Leap reported that it made nearly $21,000 in the two months during which it offered service. That turned out to be less than two of its buses — which officials told me could no longer start — fetched at auction: One sold for $11,100, and another for $12,100.

• Twitter has appointed Omid Kordestani, who until recently was Google’s chief business officer, as its executive chairman. Mr. Kordestani, who has a reputation for affability and business acumen, could bring a level of calm and stability to Twitter, which has been plagued by management chaos it its nine-year history. A company spokesman said Mr. Kordestani was unavailable for an interview but said he would play an active role in operations, supporting the leadership team and helping with recruiting. His appointment is the latest in a series of quick decisions by Mr. Dorsey, who announced on Tuesday that Twitter would cut up to 8 percent of its staff. Mr. Kordestani was the 11th employee hired at Google. He joined in 1999, when it was a year old, and helped create its primary business of selling the ads that appear in Google searches. His original title was “business founder” and he oversaw Google’s first dollar of profit and built its first sales team. That model has since generated hundreds of billions of dollars and still accounts for more than half of Google’s annual revenue. Mr. Kordestani left the company in 2009 but came back last year after his successor, Nikesh Arora, quit to join SoftBank. As chief business officer, he was Google’s highest-paid executive in 2014, with a $130 million pay package that consisted mostly of stock vesting over four years. Mr. Kordestani does not appear to be a regular user of Twitter. Before his appointment, he had sent just eight tweets on his personal account. Some Twitter investors, most notably Chris Sacca, have complained that Twitter has too many board members who “don’t use the product.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, September 18

• Facebook Just Made 2 Big Changes to Appease Advertisers on Viewability - Offers premium option and third-party verification: Facebook today introduced a premium buying choice that should quell some of that unease, offering marketers the option to pay for ads only when the entire unit appears on a viewer's screen.  Until this change, advertisers were charged as soon as any piece of an ad appeared on a Facebook user's screen. Now they will have the option to require full visibility before being charged at a higher per-view rate (which hasn't yet been announced). The development is part of a two-tiered announcement today by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant, which also revealed that it has tapped digital-measurement company Moat to check how often advertisers' promos are seen on Facebook. While Moat is among several viewability-focused vendors that are accredited by the Media Ratings Council, inking this deal—which likely involves considerable sums of money in the near future—with Facebook appears to be the latest sign that Moat is leading its niche.  What's more, Facebook is reversing its stance against using an independent verifier for ad viewability. The move appears to be largely in response to huge companies like Unilever, Kellogg's and WPP banging the drum for better measurement tools in not only recent years but recent hours. Just yesterday, WPP chief Martin Sorrell called out Facebook's viewability standards while speaking at Dmexco in Cologne, Germany.

• Ad Blockers Shoot to the Top of iPhone App Store Chart After Debut Day: After the inaugural day of Apple’s latest operating system version, which permits new extensions for blocking content in Safari browsers, two apps that do just that shot to the top of the paid downloads. Peace, a $2.99 ad-blocking app created by former Tumblr engineer Marco Arment, currently sits at first place in the iOS paid apps, bumping Microsoft’s Minecraft. A similar app, Purify, built by developer Chris Aljoudi, is at fourth place. A third, Blockr, is the 28th most popular, as of Thursday morning.The apps, once activated, strip ads and tracking cookies out of the Safari browser on iPhones, but not other browsers, like Google’s Chrome, or within apps. Apple enabled them with iOS 9, which debuted on Wednesday. Publishers, particularly smaller ones, have worried that Apple’s move may spark an uptick in mobile ad blocking, curbing critical display ad revenue. It has been less of a concern for big ad-supported tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, since their bread and butter, in-stream ads within apps, won’t be affected by the blockers. Google, however, does make its cash from ads within the Web. The search giant has found a way to keep (read: paid for) its profitable text ads from being killed in previous popular content-blocking tools like AdBlock Plus. It’s not clear if Google has worked out a similar fix for these new iOS apps. 

• Shopify Surges After Partnership With Amazon: Shopify Inc. soared after the Canadian software maker teamed up with online retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. to help merchants create their own online stores. The shares rose 23 percent to $35.55 at the close in New York on Thursday. The stock has about doubled since going public in May. Amazon advised the users of its own Amazon Webstore software to move their online stores to Shopify, before it shuts down the Webstore service. Shopify merchants will be able to use Amazon’s payments system and warehouses, and the companies are working to let Shopify merchants list their products on Amazon.com, according to a statement. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. For Shopify, the deal advances plans to let its more than 175,000 merchant customers sell goods on as many platforms as possible. The company already has similar arrangements with Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

• Amazon Updates Its Fire TV and Tablet Offerings: The company on Thursday introduced new versions of its Fire TV products, which plug into television sets to stream content over an Internet connection. Notably, customers can now buy a Fire TV streaming stick or set-top box with a remote control that can find content to watch using voice commands, similar to the new Siri-powered Apple TV unveiled last week. Amazon’s voice-controlled assistant is named Alexa. This assistant first appeared in Amazon’s wireless speaker, the Echo. You’ll be able to speak commands like “Alexa, play ‘John Wick’ ” to play a movie or “Alexa, how’s the weather tomorrow?” to load the weather forecast on the TV. But unlike Apple, which raised the starting price of its new Apple TV to $150 (up from $70 for the previous model), Amazon is holding its prices steady. You can get the latest stick for the same $40 as before; the Fire TV streaming stick with a voice remote is $50. The Fire TV set-top box with the new remote is the same price as the previous model: $100. And in another sign of how serious Amazon is about competing for attention in the living room, the retail giant is also bundling the Fire TV set-top box with a game controller for $140. In addition, Amazon has added some cheap tablets to its Fire product family. It is offering a low-end Fire tablet for $50, which can also be bought as a six-pack for $250. This inexpensive tablet has a seven-inch screen, can play movies and load books, apps and games. On top of that, Amazon introduced two new tablets with high-definition screens, called Fire HD, which come in eight inches for $150 and in 10.1 inches for $230. (By comparison, Apple’s latest tablets cost $380 to $800.)

• As Search Matures, Baidu Tries to Move Offline: Baidu is spending an estimated $2.5 billion on e-commerce projects this year as its profits dwindle. Baidu runs China’s primary search engine, but with the PC search business maturing and the economy slowing, Chairman Robin Li has been looking to diversify. In the past two years, he’s pushed Baidu deeper into the kinds of e-commerce businesses dominated by China’s other two big Internet companies, Alibaba and Tencent. During that time, Baidu’s invested almost $1 billion in more than a dozen websites and apps specializing in everything from food delivery to laundry pickup, from booking a doctor’s appointment to reserving a slot at a karaoke club. The goal is “transforming the company from connecting people with information to connecting people with services,” says Li, who’s committing $3.1 billion more over the next three years to just one of Baidu’s investments, Groupon look-alike Nuomi.com. But as it commits more money to e-commerce expansion efforts, its profit margins have fallen by half since 2012, to 28 percent in its most recent quarter. So while Baidu is tapping its $12 billion in cash to widen its e-commerce footprint, it’s also trying to attract big-name partners. The company paid an undisclosed amount for a minority stake in Uber in December, and fast-food chain Ajisen announced in July that it’s investing $60 million in Baidu’s takeout service, which launched last year and has about 8 percent of China’s market. Borrowing from Amazon.com’s strategy, Li is also expanding Baidu’s entertainment offerings. Its video service, IQiyi, signed a deal with Paramount Pictures in July for local streaming rights to 800 of the studio’s titles, including the Transformers and Terminator series. Baidu has a ways to go before its new ventures pay for themselves. Investment bank Jefferies estimates that Baidu’s profit will fall more than 12 percent this year, to about $1.8 billion, while the company spends $2.5 billion on its e-commerce-centric expansion. Baidu’s Nasdaq-listed shares have dropped 28 percent in the past six months, and Li says he may consider delisting from the U.S. in favor of his home market. But, he says, “We need to be patient and give our U.S. investors some time. I hope they will be able to appreciate us more.”

• Startups are piggybacking on text messaging to launch services. Conventional wisdom holds that intricately designed mobile apps are an essential part of most new consumer technology services. But there are signs people are getting apped out. While the amount of time U.S. smartphone users spend with apps continues to increase, the number of apps the average person uses has stayed pretty much flat for the last two years, according to a report Nielsen published in June. Some 200 apps account for more than 70 percent of total usage. Product Hunt, a popular website where people post ideas for new tech services, recently compiled a list of more than 40 “apps without an interface,” most of which use text messaging to do things like schedule meetings, sell T-shirts, or process restaurant delivery orders. In August, Facebook introduced M, a digital personal assistant built into its messaging service that allows people to text requests for a dinner reservation or for the perfect baby gift. The service, which is being tested by a small number of users in California, hints at Facebook’s ambitions to transform its own messaging app into a kind of proprietary Internet where people spend all their time instead of bouncing around among different apps. The social media giant appears to be emulating China’s WeChat, which has embedded a broad range of services into its mobile messaging product. The simplicity of text-based services often obscures deep complexity. Most companies still struggle with what’s known as natural language processing, so what may appear to be impressive feats of automation are actually being done by old-fashioned humans. Facebook’s M service uses artificial intelligence to field requests, but people perform the actual tasks. Magic, a text-based concierge service that inspired excitement in startup circles when it was introduced earlier this year, does the same.

• Alibaba's Wipeout Leaves Investors Questioning What Comes Next: Alibaba looked like a sure thing a year ago when it pulled off the largest initial public offering ever. It had a lock on China e-commerce as the economy was surging and consumer spending was steadily rising. Shares soared 76 percent from the IPO price in just two months. Then it all crumbled. Alibaba came under fire from a China government agency, it cut deals that baffled investors and it replaced its chief executive as growth slowed. Most important, China’s economy turned wobbly, jeopardizing the rise in consumer spending Alibaba needed. Its stock slid down, down, down to the IPO price and then below. The sure thing was no such thing. What now? Investors who watched $128 billion in market value disappear shouldn’t expect a reprieve any time soon. Atlantic Equities’s James Cordwell, the top-ranked analyst covering the stock, predicts the slowing Chinese economy will undercut e-commerce transaction growth until at least 2016. The many deals Alibaba has negotiated will take time to pay off too. “All the operating metrics seem to be pointing in the wrong direction,” said London-based Cordwell, who topped Bloomberg Absolute Return rankings for his calls on Alibaba and also recommendations across the portfolio he covers. “Until investors feel some comfort in that slowdown bottoming out, it will be hard for the stock.”

• Adobe revenue, profit forecast miss estimates, shares slip. Adobe Systems Inc's lower-than-expected revenue and profit forecast for the current quarter overshadowed a strong rise in net subscriptions for its Creative Cloud software suite, sending its shares down 3.5 percent in extended trading. Revenue rose 21 percent to $1.22 billion. Net income rose to $174.5 million, or 34 cents per share, in the third quarter, from $44.7 million, or 9 cents per share, a year earlier. Up to Thursday's close of $80.31, Adobe's shares had risen about 11 percent this year. The company also said on Thursday that David Wadhwani, head of its digital media, was leaving to pursue a CEO opportunity. Adobe has been switching to web-based subscriptions from traditional licensed software to help attract more predictable recurring revenue. Recurring revenue had reached 73 percent of total revenue, Chief Financial Officer Mark Garrett said in a statement. The company said it added 684,000 Creative Cloud net subscriptions in the quarter ended Aug. 28, compared with the 640,000 net additions that analysts had expected, according to research firm FactSet Street Account.

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: Friday, May 22

• HP sells $2.3 billion China unit stake to forge partnership with elite Chinese university-linked group: Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N) will sell a controlling 51 percent stake in its China-based data-networking business to China's Tsinghua Unigroup for at least $2.3 billion, forming a partnership designed to create a Chinese technology powerhouse. State-backed Tsinghua Holdings' subsidiary Unisplendour Corp Ltd 000938.SZ will acquire 51 percent of HP's H3C Technologies for at least $2.3 billion, Unisplendour said in a statement to the Shenzhen stock exchange late on Thursday. The U.S. company also said in a statement on Thursday it will form a partnership with Tsinghua Holdings, affiliated with China's elite Tsinghua University, to create a group in China to house H3C's networking operation alongside its China-based server, data-storage and technology-services businesses.

• Report/Rumor: CommonFloor and Quikr in preliminary talks which may lead to a merger: After recent mergers in India’s e-commerce and taxi businesses, it appears that online real estate is set to see a winnowing of weaker players. Bengaluru-based Maxheap Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns online real estate portal CommonFloor, is believed to be in preliminary conversations with classifieds company Quikr about teaming up, according to three people familiar with the developing situation.

• PayPal’s Instant Checkout “One Touch” Aims to Boost Conversion Rates on Mobile, No Longer Requires PayPal’s App: PayPal’s instant checkout service called OneTouch is now being extended to support all merchants using the e-commerce platform Bigcommerce, as well as on mobile devices – even in cases where the consumer doesn’t have the PayPal native application installed. The service, which allows customers to check out from an online merchant without having to enter their username and password, launched publicly last fall on mobile devices then expanded to the web in April. One Touch was originally designed to improve the conversion rates for online transactions. On mobile in particular, consumers tend to abandon purchases simply because of the challenges associated with entering in their personal information payment card details on mobile’s small screen. PayPal’s move to counter this trend was OneTouch for Mobile, which allows a customer’s information to be stored and shared between supported apps. That means that customers would only have to enter their PayPal credentials for their first mobile purchase, but subsequent purchases could be made with just one tap. The system is currently being used by a number of merchants including Jane.com, ParkWhiz, StubHub, Threadless, Airbnb, Lyft and Munchery, for example. In April, PayPal announced that it would offer similar functionality to web-based merchants as well, which meant the product now had the potential to reach PayPal’s 165 million customers. Despite being an older player in the ever-changing payments industry where newer contenders including Stripe, and now Apple Pay, are finding their ways into mobile apps and online stores, PayPal’s payments business is still growing. The company reported its net total payment volume rose 18 percent to $61 billion, it said in April, and it added 3.6 million new accounts in the quarter. The company says that today, online and mobile shopping accounts for $2.5 trillion in annual retail sales, and PayPal processes nearly 12.5 million payments for its customers daily. The move towards digital payments over physical payments is also a factor in PayPal’s growth. It notes that a couple of years ago, half of transactions involved checks or cash, but in a couple years’ time, they’ll account for only 25 percent of transactions.

• HP earnings: quarterly revenue $25.5B, down 7% Y/Y; earnings down too as company prepares for split; shares up 2.3% on asset sales: Hewlett-Packard, the computer and printer giant, reported continued declines in profit and sales on Thursday as it prepared to split into two companies later this year. HP, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said on Thursday that net income in the fiscal second quarter fell 21 percent to $1 billion, or 55 cents a share, from the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue fell 7 percent to $25.5 billion. Sales fell short of Wall Street analysts’ revenue expectations of $25.63 billion for the quarter, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. Excluding some items, the company reported a profit of 87 cents a share, beating analyst estimates on that same basis of 86 cents. The results give investors a progress report on Ms. Whitman’s plan to split HP into two companies: One will focus on enterprise-computing technologies like servers, and the other will sell products like personal computers and printers. The separation is set to happen at the end of October. HP said the split remained on track and would initially incur operations costs of $400 million to $450 million. The two independent companies will each be large enough to enter the Fortune 500 and may be better able to react quickly to changing markets than within a large organization. Yet investors question whether the split will slow HP’s product creation and sales, as assets and roles are allocated, and whether competitors will exploit customer confusion to seize market share. Since announcing the plan to split, HP has reported declining profit. In March, the company sharply lowered its outlook for annual earnings. In anticipation of the separation, HP is shedding some assets. The company said on Thursday that it sold a 51 percent stake in its Chinese network business to Tsinghua University for about $2.3 billion. The move lets HP continue to sell equipment to businesses in China, which face government restrictions on use of foreign technologies. Shares were up 2.3%.

• Two IPOs: Shopify pops 69%, Alibaba-backed Baozun's shares gyrate after overly aggressive IPO pricing: Canadian software maker Shopify valued at $2 billion in U.S. debut: Canadian e-commerce software maker Shopify Inc's (SHOP.N) (SH.TO) shares rose as much as 69 percent in their U.S. debut, valuing the company at about $2.14 billion. Shopify, which also debuted on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday, is the first Canadian company to be listed on a U.S. exchange this year. Alibaba-backed Baozun's shares seesaw in choppy debut: Shares of China's Baozun Inc, in which Alibaba holds a nearly 20 percent stake, traded erratically in their debut on Thursday, sending the e-commerce services company's valuation seesawing. The company's American Depository Shares (ADSs) touched a high of $11.28, valuing it at $548.3 million, before reversing course all the way down to $9.23 per ADS. The 11 million ADSs offered were priced at $10 each, well below the $12-$14 range initially set by the underwriters. "They priced it too aggressively," Francis Gaskins, president of IPO research firm IPOpremium.com said, adding that at the midpoint of the initial range, the shares would have been valued at 500 times annual earnings. Baozun provides website design, digital marketing and logistics services for retailers and brands hopping onto China's e-commerce bandwagon. It counts Haagen Dazs, Nike, Guess and Microsoft among its more than 100 clients that are competing fiercely in China's thriving online market, dominated by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Alibaba's investment arm is Baozun's top shareholder, with an 18.2 percent stake. The company, which raised $110 million from the IPO, falling well short of its initial $129 million target, said it intended to split the proceeds between improving existing operations and making acquisitions. The company reported a net loss attributable to ordinary shareholders of about $25.1 million and total net revenues of about $255.4 million last year.

• New patent lawsuits are down for the first time in five years on tighter patent processes. For months, Congress has moved steadily toward a bill that targets patent trolls — companies that own patents but don't make any products with them. The problem, critics say, is that the patent holders will sue innocent companies in hopes they'll simply settle for a bunch of cash. But even as firms like Etsy and Kickstarter hit Capitol Hill this week to press the case against abusive patent lawsuits, a new study shows that the pace of litigation has actually slipped — for the first time in five years. This is a big deal for a whole range of industries, not just the tech sector. It's happening at a time when the spotlight on frivolous patent lawsuits has never been brighter. And that makes it a surprising find. You can see that in 2014, there was a sharp drop in the number of new patent cases. There were about 5,700 filed last year, according to PwC. That might sound like a lot, but it's actually a 13 percent drop from the year before. We haven't seen anything like this since 2009 — which is about when many companies started getting hit with their first demand letters. The letters are often vague about which patents have allegedly been infringed, leading to confusion and fear among the victims about what they may have done wrong. They can fight the suit and go to court, but defending a case is costly and unaffordable for many companies. The congressional legislation being debated would try to address some of these issues. But here's what else could wind up curtailing patent litigation: The Supreme Court. According to PwC, the sharp decline in new patent lawsuits can be traced almost directly to the outcome of a major case last year known as Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. Most analysts at the time said that Alice didn't matter much. The Court ruled that the software patent Alice Corp. used to sue CLS didn't pass the smell test. That much was obvious to many people watching the case; what they really wanted from the Court decision was a more concrete outline as to what kinds of software patent were patentable. But the fact that Alice put some limits on software patents at all appears to have put major pressure on those who are considering bringing a patent lawsuit, said PwC.Alice effectively "raised the bar for patentability and enforcement of software patents," PwC's report reads.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 21

• API-for-payments Startup Stripe In Talks For Up To $500 Million In New Funding That Could Value the Firm at $5B: Stripe is raising a new round of funding, according to sources with knowledge of the talks. One source with direct knowledge of the talks tells us that one of the leading investors in the deal is Yuri Milner’s DST Global. While all sources maintained that the round was “big,” there wasn’t a consensus on how much Stripe is looking to raise. The aforementioned source said that the round could be as big as $500 million and another source said the financing round would raise Stripe’s valuation to $5 billion. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment on rumors and speculation. Stripe has seen rapid growth and is known for being very developer-friendly, having impeccable customer service, and being easy to implement. Processing payments can be quite a headache for young startups, and Stripe tries to make the process as easy as possible so that they can focus on what’s important: building a company. So far, the company has raised $190 million from some high-profile investors, including PayPal cofounders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital. Stripe has been adding products and high-profile partners over the past year as it expands across the globe. Earlier this week, Stripe announced a private beta program for Japan, and there are rumors that the company is looking to move to Singapore as well. It also added a new product called Stripe Connect to help marketplace companies — like Lyft, which needs to accept payments from customers and send payments to drivers —and partnered with Twitter and Facebook to power the respective companies Buy buttons. Stripe also inked a deal to support AliPay, which might be coming to the US soon. The fundraising round could be used to further spur global expansion. Milner has invested in social media giants Facebook and Twitter, and more recently turned his focus to international e-commerce and marketplace companies, like FlipKart and Ola Cabs. International expansion costs money — Stripe currently operates in 20 countries, while competitors like Braintree support worldwide coverage. That being said, Stripe will be facing some increased competition from an independent PayPal when the latter spins off from parent company eBay sometime during the Q3 of this year. PayPal acquired payment processor Braintree in 2013 for $800 million, which has some big clients, like Uber and Hotel Tonight, and launched v.zero, a new payment API to help developers. Smaller competitors are itching to go abroad as well — WePay raised $40 million to expand marketplace payment processing across the globe.

• Spotify Takes on Apple and YouTube: to start offering videos: Spotify just laid out its plans to be more than a streaming music service, moving to add videos and podcasts in a new service that will now be available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Sweden. The changes chart a path that puts Spotify into direct competition with YouTube at a time when Apple is planning to relaunch its own streaming service. Spotify touted a wide roster of content partners that include Comedy Central, Vice News, NBC, ABC, ESPN, and MTV The focus is on short clips. Digital video is a much bigger business than streaming music. Subscription revenue from audio service will top $5 billion in 2020, according to Generator Research, and by that date 100 million users will be paying for streaming music. This year, however, advertisers are already set to spend $7.8 billion on digital video, according to market research firm EMarketer. By adding video, Spotify is asking users to interact with its service in a new way: Stare at the app on your phones; don't just press play and stick it back in your pocket. Podcasts are an easier connection. While the podcasting industry can hardly match the financial heft of online video, it is having a bit of a moment. Spotify is launching with a number of high-profile partners in podcasting and radio. Slate, Radiolab, and American Public Media have all signed on. Spotify will also offer some original programming in both video and audio, including radio shows hosted by the rap group Odd Future, a video series showing a new dance move each day, and a podcast about new music. Spotify is taking a cue from Songza, an online radio startup acquired by Google last June, and will offer playlists that correspond to specific moods or activities (such as “chill” or “travel”). The company also announced a new feature that will use the sensors in a user’s phone to determine their pace when they’re out on a jog and then play music with beats that complement the workout. The timing of Spotify’s announcement isn't an accident. Next month Apple is expected to unveil its own streaming service built on its $3 billion acquisition of Beats. Sure, Spotify faces plenty of competitors already, but it hasn’t faced a serious rival since it broke away from the streaming music pack several years ago. Apple is hardly guaranteed success. It launched a music-based streaming service, Ping, which failed. Then it tried a Pandora competitor, iTunes Radio, which has been underwhelming. Nor is it clear how Apple can fundamentally improve on music subscription services that are a pretty good deal for serious music fans. “Subscription music is a good category. There really isn’t a problem here for Apple to fix,” says Andrew Sheehy of Generator. “The only actual advantage that Apple has is the install base and its market power.”

• Canadian eCommerce software maker Shopify valued at $1.27 billion at IPO price: Canadian e-commerce software maker Shopify Inc said its U.S. initial public offering was priced at $17 per share, valuing the company at about $1.27 billion. The company's IPO of 7.7 million class A subordinate shares raised about $131 million, after it was priced above the top end of the expected range of $14-$16. The offering was earlier expected to be priced at $12-$14. The company sold all the shares in the offering. "Pricing reflects big enthusiasm for these type of deals. It's a unique company in a hot area with lots of growth," said Josef Schuster, founder of IPO investment firm IPOX Schuster LLC. "There's going to be a big pop coming tomorrow." Ottawa-based Shopify, which is also expected to debut on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday, makes software that helps small and medium-sized retailers to set up online storefronts. Shopify charges a monthly subscription fees of $29-$179. The company has also created online stores for a variety of retailers ranging from tattoo companies to fashion boutiques and vintage book sellers. Shopify said 162,261 merchants had subscribed to its platform from about 150 countries as of March 31. Shopify's biggest investors are venture capital firms Bessemer Venture Partners, with a 30 percent stake, and FirstMark Capital LP, which has a nearly 12 percent stake.

• Cinematic Pins: Pinterest has launched a new ad format - a new kind of Promoted Pin—one that is animated. The ad updates come more than a year after Pinterest first started selling Promoted Pins, and the changes are a big step for its ad technology. Brands will be able to target about a dozen audience types from foodies to gardening enthusiasts to millennials. The new animated ads are called Cinematic Pins, and they are a bit different from the moving ads developed by rivals like Facebook and Twitter. On those platforms, videos start when you stop scrolling over them and stop when you scroll away. On Pinterest, the opposite happens. The Cinematic Pins are seen in motion as the user scrolls, but the motion stops when the scrolling stops. "Users want to feel like they're in control, and we've done a bunch of user testing—users are delighted by this experience," said Tim Kendall, Pinterest's gm of monetization. "They wind up scrolling back and forth. They love controlling the motion." A number of brands already have tested the feature, including Unilever, The Gap, L'Oreal, Nestlé, Walgreens, Target, Visa and Wendy's. The Cinematic Pins and audience targeting are part of Pinterest's new three-stage advertising offering that starts with awareness marketing. The advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-view basis. Then there's a marketing model based on consumer intent—when they're still deciding on a potential purchase. This type of marketing lets brands buy ads based on a cost-per-click or cost-per-engagement basis—they pay when users click on or share a Promoted Pin. In the third phase, ads are sold on a cost-per-action basis when an app is installed or a sale completed. "We only want them to pay us when the ads create that value," Kendall said. "It takes the risk out of it for marketers." Kendall said Pinterest is showing brands impressive engagement rates—for every 100 Promoted Pin impressions, brands see 30 free views thanks to repinning. "That's a really high rate of earned media," he said. Pinterest does not say how much revenue it generates in ad sales annually, and it still is a private company. But, it gets about 76 million monthly visitors, according to comScore. The platform, which lets people curate digital pin boards for projects and wish lists, is seen as an accurate marketing window into consumer behavior.

• Salesforce Earnings: Quarterly Revenue $1.5B, +23% Y/Y Despite Dollar Strength: Shares Up 3%: Salesforce today reported adjusted profit of $0.16 per share on revenue if $1.51 billion in the first quarter of its fiscal 2016. The market had expected the SaaS firm to report $0.14 in adjusted, per-share profit on revenue of $1.5 billion. Shares of Salesforce are up around 3 percent in after-hours trading, a gain that is tempered by the firm’s 1.85 percent decline in regular trading. For the current quarter, the second of its fiscal 2016, Salesforce expects revenue of $1.59 billion, generating adjusted profit of between $0.17 and $0.18. A $7 billion run rate implies fourth-quarter revenue of $1.75 billion, or around $250 million more than in the now-past period. Salesforce’s revenue grew 23 percent in its most recent quarter. For the full fiscal year, Salesforce expects revenue of between $6.52 billion, and $6.55 billion, numbers that it calculates to include $175 million to $200 million in “FX headwind.” In short, the company is taking a hit, as is nearly every U.S.-based tech shop that sells abroad. The strong dollar can hurt revenue growth, given that top-line earned overseas converts more weakly into dollars. All told, it seems that Salesforce is on solid footing.