Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, November 25

• Apple plans to launch Apple Pay in China by February: WSJ Apple Inc (AAPL.O) plans to launch its mobile payment system Apple Pay in China by early February, the Wall Street Journal reported. The iPhone maker has struck deals recently with China's big four state-run banks, the newspaper reported late Monday, citing people familiar with the discussions. When launched, Apple Pay will mainly compete with Alipay, the online payment platform run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, and UnionPay, a state-controlled consortium that has a monopoly on all yuan payment cards issued and used in the country. Apple's plans could still face regulatory hurdles in China, where banking and e-commerce are overseen by a number of government agencies, WSJ said. Launched in the United States in October last year, Apple is bringing its payment service to China, the most important market for smartphones. The company's sales nearly doubled in Greater China in its fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier. The amount Apple would make off such transactions has been a sticking point in negotiations to bring Apple Pay to China, the Journal quoted the people as saying.

• Google’s Answer to Facebook Instant Articles Gets (Tentative) Launch Date, Ad Partners: Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s initiative for mobile news publishing and its open source riposte to similar efforts from Facebook and Apple, is arriving “early next year,” the company said in a post on Tuesday. Last month, Google rolled out a preview version of the product, which Re/code readers learned of first. Google has already roped in marquee publishers, including* the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC. Some 1,600-plus newspapers and television stations have “voiced their support,” according to Google. On Tuesday, the company also announced it had signed up a slew of analytics and advertising providers for the back end.

• Hewlett-Packard ended its life as one public company with a whimper. For the quarter that ended Oct. 30, Hewlett-Packard had net earnings of $1.32 billion, or 73 cents a share. Revenue was $25.7 billion, down 9 percent from a year earlier. The earnings were below Wall Street’s expectations, which used nonstandard accounting popular in analyzing tech companies. By the nonstandard formula, HP earned 93 cents a share. Analysts had expected HP to make 96 cents a share, on revenue of $26.4 billion, according to a survey by FactSet. Shares of HP Inc. were down more than 7 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday, while HPE shares were up more than 2 percent. Of the two firms, Ms. Whitman’s HPE drew more attention, as she is trying to remake a business that sold things like computer servers and data networking into something with more software and high-value services, which can compete in the era of cloud computing. HP, considered the grandfather of Silicon Valley, began November as two separate entities. One, called HP Inc., sells primarily personal computers and printers. The other, HPE, sells computer hardware, software and services that are used by large companies. Meg Whitman, who was chief executive of the old HP and now runs HPE, split the entity in the hope of increasing efficiency and growth. After months of planning, the two companies began operating separate financial reporting systems in August, although they were legally one company until Oct. 30. Ms. Whitman’s strategy now is led by high-value consulting, in particular helping customers in planning, managing, protecting and using hybrid cloud and on-site systems to get and analyze more data, faster. Next week HPE and Microsoft are expected to make a joint announcement that Microsoft is a “preferred partner,” meaning they will make sales calls together and recommend each other to customers. It is a plausible plan, Mr. Bittman said, that only needs revenue and profits. “It’s a good series of slides, but we need to see it in action,” he said.

• Amazon Challenger Jet.com Announces $350 Million Investment, Eyes $150 Million More: E-commerce startup Jet.com announced a $350 million cash infusion Tuesday led by Fidelity Investments, providing money to help the company attract customers during its first holiday shopping season. An additional $150 million investment is “expected shortly,” the Hoboken, New Jersey-based company said Tuesday in a statement. The investment values Jet at $1 billion before the new funding round, the company said. Jet, which began operations in July, offers free shipping on orders exceeding $35 without a membership. Web giant Amazon.com Inc. charges customers $99 annually for delivery discounts. Founded by former Amazon executive Marc Lore, Jet is trying to undercut its chief rival’s prices to attract customers. Last month, it abandoned a $50 subscription membership fee. The total value of merchandise sold on Jet was $33.2 million in October, an increase of 65 percent from September, the company said in the statement. Jet expects to end the year with gross merchandise value of $500 million on an annualized basis. Jet offers customers unique ways to save on orders, including discounts for paying with a debit card or waiving their right to return products they buy. Consumers can also amass savings by loading up their carts with more items, which minimizes the number of shipments. Jet is attracting new customers by subsidizing their purchases with big discounts, which is a lower-cost way of gaining business than advertising, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is considering offering an option to buy online and pick up in a store with its retail partners, which would help Jet compete with Amazon’s larger inventory and faster shipping, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the strategy is private.

• Tango, Chat App Unicorn, Lays Off 9% Of Staff Following Failed Move Into E-Commerce: Tango, the mobile messaging unicorn that reached a billion-dollar valuation when Alibaba invested $280 million in it early last year, has laid off around 9 percent of its workforce after it shuttered a brief effort at e-commerce. The Mountain View-based company launched an in-app commerce feature powered by Alibaba and Walmart back in May of this year, initially in the U.S. market, but it has confirmed to TechCrunch that ‘Tango Shop’ was closed down last month, leading to the lay-off off around 30 employees working on it. “The initiative didn’t really pan out,” Tango CTO Eric Setton told TechCrunch. “We didn’t see the conversations we wanted. [There was a] good amount of traffic but the volume didn’t materialize. [We recently] updated the app to take the e-commerce flow out, but unfortunately couldn’t keep the team working on that initiative.” Following the reorganization, Tango now has 270 staff across its U.S. office and a smaller presence in Beijing, China. Interestingly, one high-profile exit from that reshuffle was Chi-Chao Chang — formerly VP of Tango Labs and the lead on Tango’s commerce initiative — who is now working at Facebook, although he is involved with the social network’s search business not Messenger. Despite the retrenchment, Setton claimed Tango is on track to have its highest quarter of revenue to date. “This year, [revenue] is an order of magnitude above what we’ve ever seen before,” he said, although he declined to provide a specific revenue figure. Setton also declined to give an update on Tango’s current user base. The last figure given by the company came in May, at the launch of Tango Shop, when it claimed 300 million registered users. That wasn’t a big jump on the 200 million registered users that it announced in March 2014, when Alibaba invested and Tango announced its first (and only) monthly active user count: 70 million. The lack of fresh user metrics suggests that Tango’s user growth is stalling, particularly as the mobile messaging scene matures and network effects come into play to drive users to the most established, more popular apps. Because, after all, chat apps are about chatting, which is hard to do if your friends all moved to Snapchat (estimated at 100 million monthly users), Kik (240 million registered users), Facebook Messenger (700 million monthly users) or WhatsApp (900 million monthly users).

• Alphabet Trying to Mix Heft With Start-Up Agility: Alphabet was created to separate Google, the search giant, from the constellation of appendages — the self-driving cars, the pharmaceutical company, the two venture capital funds — that many current and former employees say had made the company too sprawling to manage. The last three months of 2015 were the first quarter of the new holding company’s life, and the contours of the organization are starting to fall into place. It has hired new leaders, such as an auto industry veteran who was recently tapped to run the self-driving-car project. It is developing new processes, like an internal system that would have Alphabet companies pay Google for dull but important services like human resources, accounting or access to Google’s technological infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, something first reported by The Wall Street Journal. These are normal processes in large companies, used to make sure business units have a handle on expenses. But the company is also asking questions about how it might achieve the dream that has eluded so many other big companies: find a way to take advantage of its heft while being nimble like a start-up. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive of Alphabet, has said that he wants his company to be a home for entrepreneurs. If the Alphabet concept plays out as advertised, company chiefs would have more autonomy to make strategic decisions on such matters as whom they hire and how they spend money, or even to raise their public profiles. But the pitch — in particular to acquisition targets — is also about what they would not have to do. They would not have to worry about building a large server infrastructure for their technology to run on. They would not have to worry about whether to use their money to hire another accountant or another engineer. In the case of more mature companies, they could skip the mounds of paperwork and reporting requirements that come with going public. That broad idea — that entrepreneurs do best when they are focused squarely on new technology rather than distracted by corporate building blocks that every company needs but also take lots of time to build — has taken root across Silicon Valley. It is why, in addition to money, venture capital firms now give their companies access to all kinds of marketing, sales and other services in hopes that their start-ups can more quickly become grown-ups. The first good glimpse of all this will come early next year, when Alphabet, for the first time, will separate Google’s search and advertising businesses from Alphabet’s more speculative divisions. But it will take months or years for Alphabet to figure out how to create the best of all possible worlds. If such a thing exists.

• When and Where Do Black Friday's Biggest Crowds Actually Hit? Google's look at foot traffic finds a few surprises:  Google wants to help shoppers navigate the wretched non-holiday known as Black Friday. Today, the online Santa of search is showing when and where people head for doorbusters. Pulling aggregated, anonymized data from Google Maps users, the company is revealing for the first time traffic insights for various retailers in the month leading up to Christmas Eve. The data isn't just relevant to shoppers. Understanding peak traffic for shopping malls, department stores, electronic stores, cellphone stores, discount stores and dollar stores could help marketers better reach consumers when they're keenest to buy. Google also announced today it would provide a more detailed view of offline measurement by giving advertisers the ability to break out store visits at a keyword or ad-group level. "By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits," according to a Google blog post. "For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store." Here are a few key insights from Google's foot-traffic analysis: Store traffic peaks between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Black Friday, with Thanksgiving Day department store visitors peaking between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Shopping malls, superstores and discount stores experience the highest traffic on the Saturday before Christmas. Dollar stores are busiest on Christmas Eve.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 1

• Daily Report: The Buy Button Heads to YouTube and Twitter: On Tuesday, YouTube said it would make it easier for advertisers to pair their ads with videos highlighting a particular product. The new feature, available in the coming months, will allow viewers to get directly to a retailer’s site with a single click. No searching required. The new feature seems to be particularly appealing on the many videos of product reviews and tutorials, a type of video that has been growing in popularity on YouTube. It also, as Hiroko Tabuchi writes, brings “a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs.” If there was any doubt about that trend, Twitter put it to rest on Wednesday. As Vindu Goel reports, the company is making it possible to put a buy button in a tweet. “A Twitter user,” he wrote, “can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase.” It has been a big week for new online ad tools and features, several of which have been announced at Advertising Week in New York. As Sydney Ember wrote on Monday, Madison Avenue might still be the heart of the advertising industry, but much of the money — and influence — is coming from Silicon Valley.

• More on the Twitter Buy Button: Twitter Makes ‘Buy’ Button Widely Available: After two years of testing, Twitter is finally making it easy for millions of merchants to sell products through a tweet. The social network announced Wednesday that its “buy now” button will be available to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations. A store that is a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Shopify can use the software to tweet out a link to a product that will show up with a buy button. A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase. (The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information.) Twitter’s expansion of its buy button, which builds on a partnership with the e-commerce platform Stripe announced earlier this month, comes as competing platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly from their services. On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube service announced that advertisers can now place buy buttons in other people’s videos — allowing, say, Apple to offer a way to buy an iPhone from inside a fan’s video showing the unboxing of a new iPhone (yes, there are lot of videos like that). Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, are also testing buy buttons. Facebook isn’t so sure about Buy Buttons. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, said that Facebook studied the behavior of its 1.5 billion users and concluded that buy buttons should not be a high priority right now.

• More on the YouTube Buy Button: YouTube to Expand Shopping Links to More Videos: YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would introduce shopping ads on its videos that let viewers jump directly to retailers’ websites and buy the products featured in the clips. The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in. YouTube’s new ads bring a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced “buy button” functions that let users purchase the products that appear in the millions of posts and photos shared on their platforms each day. Google itself has pushed to become a shopping destination in an increasingly direct challenge to Amazon, currently the web’s de facto shopping search engine. YouTube’s ads seek to tap into the fast growth in product reviews and tutorials posted by users. Susan Wojcicki, the company’s chief executive, announced the change at an advertising industry event in New York. In the last year alone, viewership for product-related clips on YouTube has jumped 40 percent, she said. YouTube users have already uploaded tens of thousands of reviews of a battery-powered self-balancing skateboardlike device that retailers expect to be a hot holiday gift this year. Once the service is available in the coming months, videos from users who opt into the program, and which contain products that match YouTube ads, will display an icon in the top-right corner. Users can click on the icon to view a list of images and prices of the products featured in the video, and to jump to retailers’ websites for more reviews, information and an option to buy. YouTube matches videos with ads based on the video’s content and audience. Similar to YouTube’s AdWords service, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on a shopping ad. The site will test the ads this fall, and will offer the service to AdWords clients in the coming months, it said. For users who upload YouTube videos, the shopping ads could mean a new revenue stream, the sites said. And for viewers, YouTube promises an unobtrusive way to shop as they surf videos.

• What it’s like to ride in a Google self-driving car: Google’s cars have been trained to be extremely conservative in unusual situations. “They understand their own limitations,” said Dmitri Dolgov, principle engineer on Google’s self-driving car project, at a briefing later. “They understand that there’s something really crazy going on and they might not be able to make really good, confident predictions about the future. So they take a very conservative approach.” A few blocks away from Google I got another glimpse of the SUV’s cautious nature. A car, also with a stop sign, arrived at the intersection just after us. The Google car inched forward in two spurts. After a pause we drove through the intersection. We got through it fine, but slower than I expect most drivers would have. Soon we pull back in front of GoogleX’s building, a 14-minute ride in the books. “Manual,” calls out the female voice as our driver took control again, and turned the car off. If I was grading the SUV on our brief trek I would give it a B+. It wasn’t perfect driving, but safe and effective. Of course, our route wasn’t especially difficult. The real challenges come when pedestrians, inclement weather, construction sites and cyclists arrive.

• Microsoft, Google stand down in patent battles: Microsoft and Google have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany. In another sign of the winding down of the global smartphone wars, the companies said the deal puts an end to court fights involving a variety of technologies, including mobile phones, wifi, and patents used in Microsoft's Xbox game consoles and other Windows products. The agreement also drops all litigation involving Motorola Mobility, which Google sold to Lenovo last year while keeping its patents. However, as Microsoft and Google continue to make products that compete directly with each other, including search engines and mobile computing devices, the agreement notably does not preclude any future infringement lawsuits, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed.

• Sources: Jack Dorsey Expected to Be Named Permanent Twitter CEO: Jack is apparently back — for good this time. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has been serving as interim CEO for the past three months, is expected be named the company’s new permanent CEO as early as tomorrow, although that timeframe may change, according to sources. Dorsey will apparently continue to run Square, the payments company he founded where he’s also CEO. [UPDATE: Sources said that it’s not clear if the board has officially voted on Dorsey’s appointment, because it was still settling the status of other key execs this week, most specifically revenue chief Adam Bain and CFO Anthony Noto. Bain is widely expected to become COO, although Noto may also report directly to Dorsey. Both have indicated to the board, said multiple sources, that they want Dorsey in the top job. The Twitter board also has what one source called a “Plan B” of a single serious outside candidate, although every single person I have contacted who has been considered and also contacted by the company’s recruiting firm, Spencer Stuart, said that discussions did not progress very far.] Sources added that there is likely to be some shake-up of the board too, most immediately the departure of Costolo as a director.

• Google Is Acquiring Rich Messaging Startup Jibe Mobile: Google said on Wednesday that it has acquired Jibe Mobile, a messaging startup that specialized in helping carriers build support for native video messaging into their services. The effort, designed to make video chat as ubiquitous and interoperable as text messages, is known as Rich Communications Services, or RCS. Google said it is making the purchase as part of a commitment to supporting RCS as part of its messaging strategy. “SMS carrier messaging is used by billions of people every day and enables people to reach anyone around the world, regardless of their device, carrier, app or location,” Android engineer and “minister of messaging” Mike Dodd said in a blog post. “However, the features available in SMS haven’t kept up with modern messaging apps. Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard for carrier messaging and brings many of the features that people now expect from mobile messaging, such as group chats, high res photos and more.” Financial terms were not disclosed.

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, August 12

Alibaba Skids as Revenue Growth Slowest in Three Years; $4 Billion Stock Buyback Is Planned as Stock Plunges 5% to New Low: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's shares fell to a record low after China's biggest e-commerce company posted its slowest revenue growth in over three years as its strategy to shift more services to mobile devices hurt advertising sales. The company's shares declined as much as 8 percent to $71.03 - just shy of their IPO price of $68 - wiping off nearly $16 billion from its market value on Wednesday. The stock has lost declined nearly 30 percent this year, up to Wednesday's close. Alibaba also announced a $4 billion share repurchase program over two years, aimed at offsetting the impact of its share-based compensation programs. The company's results come at a time when China's economy is expected to grow at its slowest pace in a quarter of a century. Adding to investor concerns, China devalued the yuan on Tuesday, guiding the currency to its lowest point in almost three years. mobile was still less profitable than business via personal computers, where profitability also decreased. Revenue for the three months through June rose 28 percent to $3.27 billion, well below forecast. Gross merchandise volume (GMV) -- the total value of goods transacted across Alibaba's platforms -- rose 34 percent to 673 billion yuan ($105 billion), also the slowest growth in more than three years.

Online grocer BigBasket raises $50M from Bessemer, others: Online grocery retailer BigBasket.com, has raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding led by existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The Times of India, which first reported the development citing BigBasket CEO Hari Menon, said BigBasket has also mandated Citigroup to raise $150 million (Rs 950 crore) from new investors. The new round of funding, which values BigBasket at $1 billion, will power the company’s plans to enter 50 more Tier-II cities, the report said. BigBasket.com is an online grocery store with operations in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Mysore. It was founded by a team of five in 2011. The team has both offline and online retail experience, as it had earlier set up India’s first e-commerce site FabMart.com in 1999, and then established the Fabmall-Trinethra chain of more than 200 grocery supermarket stores in southern India. Trinethra was sold to Aditya Birla Group in 2006 and currently operates under the brand name ‘More’. The startup has investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Zodius Capital. It was valued at Rs 1,400 crore when it last raised funds in January. The company is understood to have closed fiscal 2015 with a top-line of Rs 250 crore and a run-rate of 6,000 orders a day with average billing of Rs 1,500 per customer.

Strong U.S. sales help Cisco beat estimates: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit as strong demand for its products in the United States more than offset weakness elsewhere. Shares of Cisco, considered a bellwether for the performance of the broader network gear industry, rose nearly 4 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. The company is the market leader in selling network equipment to businesses, controlling about half of the $38 billion global market and overshadowing rivals Hewlett-Packard and China's Huawei, according to market research firm Gartner. For the fourth quarter, the company earned 59 cents per share on an adjusted basis, while revenue rose nearly 4 percent to $12.84 billion. Cisco's latest results also underscore an ongoing recovery in sales of the company's switches and routers, which were hit by a slowdown in spending by telecom carriers, its traditional customers, in the second half of 2014. The company has also been investing in new products and services such as data analytics software, security and cloud-management tools. Cisco said in June it would buy cloud-based security firm OpenDNS for $635 million. The company also said revenue from telecom providers rose 2 percent in the quarter but added that it did not expect an increase in capital spending by its traditional customers.

Lenovo quarterly revenue misses expectations, announces 10% cuts: Lenovo missed quarterly revenue expectations on Thursday and said it plans to lay off about 10 percent of its global non-manufacturing workforce, after posting a steep sales decline in its mobile division. The world's No. 1 PC maker said it plans to cut about 3,200 non-manufacturing positions to save $650 million in the second half of 2015 and about $1.35 billion on an annual basis, reflecting intense competition among global smartphone makers. Chief executive Yuanqing Yang said Lenovo would also restructure its lagging smartphone business at a one-time cost of $600 million, and was facing its "toughest market environment in recent years". Lenovo, which last year spent $2.91 billion to buy handset brand Motorola from Google in a bid to solidify its position in smartphones, pointed to "intensifying competition and long product development lifecycles" in the business.

Tinder Invokes North Korea in Strange Response to Vanity Fair Article, then Backtracks: Like a person scorned after a bad date, the tech company Tinder went a little bit crazy on social media on Tuesday after Vanity Fair published an article blaming technology for the death of dating. The article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” was not just about Tinder — there is a wider Internet at work, the writer Nancy Jo Sales suggested. But the app, which lets users quickly swipe left to signal rejection or right to signal interest, was used to illustrate the problems young daters face when technology fuses short attention spans with too many options. On its official Twitter account, Tinder took issue with the report’s suggestion that its dating app was fueling a culture of casual sex. Tinder’s defense continued for more than 30 posts. The outrage was not lost on Twitter users, who relished the opportunity to point out that Tinder was being awfully thin-skinned. One post came under particular scorn. Tinder said it helped people find friends and make connections in places where Internet use is restricted. The claim that Tinder had “many users” in North Korea prompted a few creative memes featuring that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and many derisive questions about the extent of Tinder’s user base in China and North Korea. Both countries maintain strict controls on the Internet, and information in general. On Wednesday, Tinder issued a statement acknowledging its outburst. “Our intention was to highlight the many statistics and amazing stories that are sometimes left unpublished, and, in doing so, we overreacted,” the company said

WeChat’s Growth Shows Why Messaging Apps Attract Big Valuations: For an idea of why messaging applications are attracting valuations in the tens of billions of dollars, look no further than WeChat, a 600 million-user messaging application that’s part of Tencent. WeChat, a smartphone instant-messenger, digital wallet and car-booking service rolled up into one, is probably worth $83.6 billion1, or about half of TenCent's value, according to HSBC. As people spend more and more time sending short messages to each other—instead of, say, browsing websites or shopping online—such services have become some of the hottest technology businesses around. WeChat's user count jumped by 37 percent in the latest quarter, according to Tencent's results—and it isn't even the Internet company’s biggest messaging product. That honor goes to QQ, which has 843 million users. Facebook’s own Messenger has 700 million users. Skype, the Internet calling service operated by Microsoft Corp., also lets people exchange messages and boasts 300 million users. By comparison, Twitter Inc., which is projected to generate $2.24 billion in revenue this year, only has 316 million users. When it comes to innovation, however, WeChat may be far ahead of the pack in terms of money-making opportunities. It already includes shopping and in-app games, features that other services are rushing to replicate, according to Adley Bowden, senior director of analysis at Pitchbook Inc. "WeChat's success is a little bit of a game-changer in the take on messaging as a platform," Bowden said. Line, a messaging app popular in Japan, may soon offer a better picture of how investors are valuing messaging apps. The company, controlled by South Korean search portal Naver Corp., is preparing for a dual listing in Tokyo and New York next month, people with knowledge of the matter said in May. Line, which makes money by selling teddy bear icons and games to its 211 million users, had $223.9 million in revenue in the latest quarter. Competition for users remains fierce. Viber, a popular messaging app, has 249 million users. Kik, a Canadian messaging service, has more than 200 million, while South Korea’s KakaoTalk has 48 million people exchanging messages and photos. Eventually, within three to five years, there will be a few winners that survive, said Gartner's Blau. That will probably involve more acquisitions by the biggest messaging service providers, with the main question being how much further valuations can go.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 1

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

• Snapchat Said to Be Valued at $16 Billion in New Fundraising: Snapchat raised $537.6 million in a sale of common stock, with the funding round valuing the messaging startup at about $16 billion. The company may raise as much as $650 million in the round, according to a filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That would bring Snapchat’s total financing to more than $1.2 billion, according to Crunchbase, as the company builds its business in pursuit of an eventual initial public offering. By raising the latest funding in common stock, Snapchat is bucking convention for later-stage venture deals, which tend to include preferred-stock provisions that allow investors to decrease their risk. “Investing in common stock, especially at a $16 billion valuation, is not normal,” said Anand Sanwal, chief executive officer of venture-capital data firm CB Insights. “It highlights the leverage that Snapchat had in these negotiations because the investors aren’t getting the protections they normally ask for.”

• Intel is close to clinching a takeover of fellow chip maker Altera for more than $15 billion, the latest sign of consolidation in the semiconductor industry. Intel is expected to pay about $54 a share for Altera, whose specialized chip designs would help Intel expand beyond chips for personal computers. An agreement could be announced as early next week, though sources cautioned that talks are continuing and might still collapse. The two sides had been in talks already this year, though the discussions were eventually delayed when Altera rejected an offer in the ballpark of $54 a share. But after the talks ended, Altera reported quarterly earnings that fell below expectations. Meanwhile, one investor, TIG Advisors, began to publicly campaign for a resumption of talks with Intel. If completed, a takeover would be the latest among chip makers as companies seek larger scale and more diversified offerings. Growing and having more products can give those manufacturers greater savings and negotiating leverage with customers. On Thursday, Avago Technologies struck a roughly $37 billion acquisition of Broadcom to break into the top tier of semiconductor companies. Intel and Altera both make semiconductors, but vastly different types. Intel is known primarily for the standard chips that go into personal computers and computer servers. They consist of millions of transistors, and once created, their performance can be adjusted only slightly by changing the software that works with them. Altera’s chips — known as field programmable gate arrays, or F.P.G.A.s — are lower in power and performance but can be altered after manufacturing to carry out different functions. That gives them far greater flexibility. Intel may be seeking Altera to create computers that combine the power of a standard semiconductor with the flexibility of an F.P.G.A., by means of a board with both types of chip. This could potentially give Intel the ability to build, for example, a computer server that can add functions so it lasts longer inside a corporate data center. This move would reflect several recent trends in the industry. Giant cloud computing centers have become an increasingly large part of Intel’s business, made even more significant as smartphones have lowered the demand for “Intel Inside” personal computers. Intel now has dedicated sales teams working with big chip consumers, like Amazon.com, that tell the company its specific computing needs for its giant cloud systems. In addition, Intel is now concentrating on at least 200 companies that are building significant computing clouds. Adding F.P.G.A.s might be a good way to help companies customize those data centers.

• Social Networking App Path Sells Itself To Korean Messaging Heavyweight Daum Kakao. It isn’t often that a company in Asia acquires a U.S. rival, particularly one that has surfed a wave of hype in Silicon Valley. But that’s exactly what happened this week after Path announced the sale of its flagship app to Korea’s Daum Kakao. The deal is undisclosed, but, as a real acquisition involving two consumer messaging apps, it is notable, particularly as the mobile messaging space transitions from a period of hyper growth to one of consolidation and services. Most people interested in tech are familiar with Path. The five-year-old service burst onto the scene as a beautifully designed, mobile-first alternative to Facebook with a number of features to set it apart from the social network. Ultimately, Path didn’t break out of Silicon Valley and go mainstream in the U.S., but it did make inroads in Asia — particularly in Indonesia. The company is said to have 23 million registered users, four million of whom are in the Southeast Asia country, as of October last year. Path began to focus more intently on Asia with its redesign in 2013, while it took money from Indonesia’s Bakrie Global Group as part of a $25 million Series C last year. Daum Kakao is less known, particularly in the U.S.. The organization was formed when Korean internet firm Daum merged with domestic messaging app company Kakao in a $2.9 billion deal last year. The company’s Kakao Talk app is perhaps the best example of how a messaging app has impacted media and internet distribution — which is where the trend is moving in the U.S. and other countries. Though it has a small global presence — its 160 million registered userbase is far lower than key rivals — the app is installed on over 95 percent of smartphones in its native Korea, where it offers free texts and calls, games, a payment service, taxi-hailing and more. The 2015 Mary Meeker internet trends report, released this week, ranked Kakao Talk as the top messaging app worldwide based on user engagement. Another indicator of its stickiness is that its games business utterly dominates Korea’s iOS and Android app stores, according to data from App Annie. Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia with a population of over 250 million. It was well-known for being the last major market where BlackBerry had any kind of mainstream presence but that’s changed now. The rise of affordable Android smartphones — particularly glamorous sub-$300 devices from the likes of Xiaomi — sent BlackBerry’s sales plummeting. But, the result of BlackBerry’s years of dominance is that there is no single messaging app that dominates Indonesia. That’s unlike other parts of Asia — China (WeChat), India, Singapore and Malaysia (WhatsApp), Japan, Thailand and Taiwan (Line), Philippines (Viber) — where the leadership has been established. With a large population up for grabs and the sizable following that Path enjoys in the country, Daum Kakao is buying itself a larger chunk of the market with this deal. It may also bolster its presence in other parts of Asia, where Daum Kakao claimed Path has 10 million registered users.

• Netflix now accounts for almost 37 percent of American Internet traffic: Netflix's share of Internet traffic is exploding. The streaming service now accounts for 36.5 percent of all bandwidth consumed by North American Web users during primetime, according to the Canada-based network firm Sandvine. That's way up from even last November, when Sandvine estimated Netflix's bandwidth footprint at 34.9 percent of Internet traffic. Sandvine's regular reports on Internet usage — based on traffic as it passes through its systems — have become a reliable indicator of which services are taking up the most bandwidth. Both the season five premiere of "Game of Thrones" and the most recent "Call of Duty" downloadable content led to massive spikes in data consumption, the latest report also finds.

• Netflix, for better or worse, has become the symbol for net neutrality, which has become a key issue in how regulators analyze proposed cable and telecom mergers. To many in the cable and broadband businesses, the invisible hand of Netflix has been apparent in the failed Comcast-Time Warner Cable combination; in likely restrictions on the merger between AT&T and DirecTV; and in the Obama administration’s embrace of net neutrality, to cite just three prominent examples. A pivotal moment in the net neutrality struggle came last year when Netflix agreed to pay Comcast so-called interconnection fees, a deal that Netflix’s Mr. Hastings last month called a “deal with the devil.” (While Comcast has drawn the brunt of Mr. Hastings’s ire, Netflix also reached similar interconnection deals with every other major Internet service provider.) But securing payment from Netflix for fast and more reliable access may have been a Pyrrhic victory for Comcast and the other the broadband providers. Until then the notion of net neutrality had been something of an abstraction. But when Netflix subscribers found their programs constantly interrupted for “buffering” (an interruption to download more data), the ability of Internet providers to play favorites seemed all too real. Once Netflix started paying fees to Comcast, its customers suddenly found their service improved substantially. Netflix’s experience with Comcast became Exhibit A with the F.C.C. when Netflix opposed the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. “The combined company would possess even more anti-competitive leverage to charge arbitrary interconnection tolls for access to their customers,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders opposing the merger. It probably didn’t hurt Netflix’s case that just about everyone in Washington watches the hit Netflix series “House of Cards,” and Comcast is the dominant Internet provider there. Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, said he, too, had suffered buffering problems, which he called “exasperating.”

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, May 13

• Tango, Messaging Startup and Alibaba Investee, Makes Big eCommerce Play with Alibaba's Backing: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has been investing quite literally all over the map. In March of 2014, the company sunk a huge sum – US$215 million – into American messaging app Tango. At the time it seemed a bit odd: why would Alibaba invest so much into an American chat app with no real footprint in China? The picture has become a bit clearer today with the announcement of Tango shops. Tango VP Chi-Chao Chang told Tech in Asia that the goal is to make the in-app shopping experience convenient and social: Tango users will be able to browse and search merchandise. They will be able to share personalized catalogs or collections of merchandise with other Tango users, and securely purchase from millions of products available. To start, Tango shops will feature products from two partners: Wal-Mart and AliExpress. AliExpress, of course, is Alibaba’s consumer-facing global ecommerce platform, and Tango users will have access to the entirety of AliExpress’s offerings via the in app-search feature. Chang said that Tango will also curate special deals from both providers that will be made available to users on a daily basis. It should come as no surprise that as an investor and now a partner, Alibaba has been heavily involved in the development of Tango’s new shops feature. Chang said Alibaba has even given Tango “special access” to products most other companies don’t have access to, and I got the impression that without Alibaba, the launch might look quite different. “They have been extremely involved,” Chang said of Alibaba. More here: Tango Offers Shopping on Its Messaging Service: Tango, a peer-to-peer mobile messaging service, planned to announce on Tuesday it would start offering shopping services. Its catalog includes most of what is sold by Walmart and Alibaba, a total of two million products.Tango, which last year received an investment of about $250 million from Alibaba, may be making the strongest move yet. The shopping application involves a button on the screen that opens access to a wide range of products.People can browse the catalog in a number of ways, create personal selections for friends to browse, buy items, or message the details to friends. Payments are handled through credit card information stored in Tango. The company appears more interested in gathering customers, and data on them, rather than profiting directly on commerce. It is taking no commission on the mobile sales.Out of the gate, it is quite a range of goods. In a brief test of the service, from Walmart I found a casket with Yankees logos on the lining, for $2,399. There was also a $4.58 box of honey nut breakfast cereal. Alibaba had women’s dresses and antifreeze, among many products (things like guns and alcohol are not available.)Should this method of commerce catch on, it could have profound implications for brands that make their own mobile apps, hoping to attract shoppers. “Would you keep a Levi’s app and a Best Buy app, and an app for every merchant, or would you go to one place where it’s all there?” Mr. Setton said. “I’m biased, but I think this interface rules.”Maybe, but only over a limited empire. The catalog will initially be available only in the United States. Tango has about 300 million registered users, about one-quarter to one-third of whom are in the United States. It seems to be the first such messaging commerce app for the American audience, though Japan’s LINE and WeChat of China offer commerce capabilities.Tango, which started in 2009, has previously offered video calling, games and photo sharing, among other things. Tango’s technology enables it to send a lot of data at low cost to the company, offering free services to customers.

• Aliyun, Alibaba's Cloud Unit, Makes Push in the Middle East, to set up Data Center in Dubai: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud-computing subsidiary is teaming up with Dubai-based Meraas Holding LLC as the company uses its technology to extend its influence beyond China. The joint venture of Alibaba’s Aliyun and Meraas will provide a broad swath of technology to businesses and governments in the Middle East and North Africa. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s executive chairman, and the rest of the Hangzhou, China-based multinational’s management team, laid the groundwork for the deal in a meeting last September with the ruler of Dubai, Aliyun President Simon Hu said in an interview. The joint venture will provide technical services for transportation, communication, urban infrastructure, electricity service, economic development, and urban planning, as well as cloud computing, Hu said. In a presentation to investors this month, Alibaba said that an expansion of cloud computing services was a priority for the coming fiscal year. “At the end of this year or next year, no matter where you are when you go to Dubai, no matter whether eating or sightseeing, you will encounter one of the infrastructures that is provided by Aliyun,” Hu said. As part of the venture, Aliyun and Meraas will build a technology hub consisting of a data center, along with hospitality, residential and commercial spaces. By expanding its cloud abroad, Aliyun ratchets up competition with companies such as Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. These U.S. firms haven’t put large data centers in the Middle East. More here

• After Big-Bang Start, Can Tesla's Battery Hit $1 Billion Faster Than the iPhone? Tesla’s new line of big, stackable batteries for homes and businesses started with a bang. The reservations reported in the first week are valued at roughly $800 million, according to numbers crunched by Bloomberg. If Tesla converts even a fraction of those reservations into actual sales, the battery roll-out could measure up as one of the biggest ever for a new product category. The new line of storage batteries is designed to extend solar power into the night and save companies money on its electric bills during expensive peak hours. Any comparison of batteries to smartphones and erection pills is, of course, a stretch. Most of Tesla’s battery revenue will come from utilities, not the consumers who snapped up iPhones and Viagra. The price of the new batteries is also much higher. Tesla’s Powerwall units designed for home users cost $3,000 to $3,500 per unit, not including installation, while the commercial batteries are sold in roughly $25,000 incremental blocks. Tesla hasn’t even defined what qualifies as a "reservation" at this point. Of the $800 million in reservations from the first week, almost $625 million came from businesses and utilities that would seem likely to complete the transaction. The remaining reservations from home users are little more than expressions of interest made through a no-strings online reservation system. Manufacturing giant batteries will also be much more difficult to scale than Pfizer’s little blue pill, which was filling 46,000 prescriptions a day by the end of its first month on the market. Tesla won't begin shipping batteries until this summer, and it’s already sold out through mid-2016. Still, approaching $1 billion of interest, just days after introducing path-breaking product, marks a significant achievement. Tesla is going to need that battery revenue as soon as it can get it: The company is burning through cash to invest in the Model X electric SUV due later this year, the more affordable Model 3 slated to arrive 2017, and a $5 billion battery factory to power it all. In a call with analysts last week, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the battery business could someday exceed electric-car revenue. Electricity storage products aren't new. But Tesla’s price, power, and packaging set these batteries apart in a way that echoes the gap between the first iPhone and the smartphones that came before it. Now Musk has brought an Apple-launch level of public interest to what's essentially a infrastructure product, albeit one with potential to transform the way electrical grids are managed and the speed that solar power is adopted. The next daunting challenge will be to turn that interest into bookable revenue for Tesla.

• Verizon Bets on Video Ads in $4 Billion Deal for AOL: The nation’s biggest wireless operator sees its digital future in a company that still offers dial-up Internet service. However backward that may seem, Verizon Communications’ $4.4 billion all-cash deal for AOL, announced on Tuesday, illustrates how the communications industry has changed — even if the underlying rationale has not — from the days when the Internet pioneer told users “You’ve got mail.” AOL may be known for its dot-com rise and fall and for current web content like The Huffington Post , but Verizon is looking to gain the company’s powerful but little-known mobile video and advertising technology. That could make Verizon’s own phone and Internet offerings more appealing to consumers, and to advertisers. The motive is clear. Consumers are increasingly watching videos — from YouTube to HBO — on mobile phones, tablets and laptops. And big media companies and advertisers are only beginning to grapple with this rapidly evolving market. By layering AOL’s technology atop its 109 million wireless connections and growing cable television business, Verizon is betting that it can make billions of dollars by selling ads against streaming video. Comcast, the biggest cable operator, acquired NBCUniversal, the big television and movie studio company. AT&T, Verizon’s nearest rival, is acquiring DirecTV, the satellite television business. And Sprint, another wireless operator, is making its own forays into content. “The telecoms are clearly saying, ‘We’re not going to be dumb pipes,’ ” said Jonathan Miller, the chief executive of AOL from 2002 to 2006, who is now a venture capitalist. Yet in acquiring AOL, Verizon gets more than just new advertising technology. It also takes ownership of a company with a troubled legacy and a muddled present. AOL operates the dwindling but still profitable dial-up Internet business, runs a collection of news websites and employs big personalities including Arianna Huffington and its chief executive, Tim Armstrong. Verizon covets two main pieces of AOL’s mobile and video technology offerings. One is its big network of original video content, which is home to lucrative online video advertising. The other is its so-called programmatic advertising business, a system that matches online advertisers with consumers across different platforms, and collects valuable data along the way.

• Will It Be a Summer of Consolidation in Ad Tech? AOL could just be the beginning as rumors fly. Verizon's $4.4 billion purchase of AOL spark a summer of acquisitions in the ad-tech space? It depends on whom you ask. Yahoo has reportedly considered making Foursquare a big offer in recent weeks. The Google-purchasing-Twitter chatter has gone on for months and won't die. Yelp is reportedly entertaining suitors from Yahoo to Google and Amazon, with some analysts speculating that foreign companies Alibaba and Rakuten are in the mix. Even mighty Salesforce.com has found itself the subject of speculation about a Microsoft takeover. Rich Guest, president of North American operations, Tribal Worldwide, said the Twitter-to-Google hubbub makes the most sense. "I think that there were first rumors of an AOL-Verizon tie-up during CES 2015, which gives credence to the school of thinking that believes 'where there is smoke, there is likely fire,'" Guest explained. "Twitter is an amazing platform, which could add value to the product portfolios of many media or technology companies. Given all of the rumors of a Twitter-Google tie-up, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened sometime in 2015." MediaCom CMO Stephanie Fierman said, "I think many expect a transaction involving Yahoo at some point in the foreseeable future."

• GoDaddy Earnings: Quarterly Revenue $376M, +17% Y/Y; Net Loss Narrows to $43M; Shares Gyrate, end 3% down: Web-hosting company GoDaddy Inc (GDDY.N) posted a 17.5 percent rise in revenue in its first quarterly report as a public company, helped by customer additions and an increase in revenue per average user. GoDaddy forecast revenue of between $390 million and $395 million for the second quarter and between $1.60 billion and $1.61 billion for the full year. The company, which manages about 59 million Internet domains, nearly a fifth of the world's total, said it had 13.1 million customers at the end of the first quarter ended March 31, compared with 11.9 million a year earlier. Average revenue per user rose to $115 from $105. GoDaddy, known for its racy TV commercials, said bookings rose about 14 percent to $498.7 million in the first quarter. The company's net loss narrowed to $43.4 million, or 34 cents per share, for the first quarter ended March 31, from $51.3 million, or 40 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $376.3 million from $320.2 million. The company's shares rose as much as 5.5 percent in after-market trading, before reversing course sharply to trade down as much as 3.7 percent. Up to Monday's close, the stock had risen more than 33 percent since GoDaddy went public on April 1.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, April 22

• Zomato rolls out online ordering of food in updated app, to allow cash-less payments at restaurants: Zomato.com, has entered the online ordering space as a mobile-only offering. Its updated version of mobile app comes integrated with a meal ordering option. The service has gone live with 1,000 restaurants currently and users can look for those outlets offering the option within the ‘Nearby’ tab in the app. It then throws up those names which offer online ordering as a sub-set of the overall list of restaurants in the location. We have not checked the process throughout but it involves a mobile verification while placing the order. The users would have to make cash payments as restaurant delivery boys come with the package. The updated app also shows an option of cashless payments which is not active yet. Zomato spokesperson told Techcircle.in that this option is currently active only in Dubai and will soon be launched in India. This would allow users to pay after a meal at a partner restaurant through the Zomato app, instead of paying cash or using credit/debit cards to settle bills at the restaurants.

• Alibaba Expands Seller App - Wants Merchants to Ditch their PCs: The ecommerce titan has rolled out new tools into its Taobao mobile app (pictured above) that allow the marketplace’s 8.4 million annual active merchants to run their stores solely from their phones. The shift to mobile-only is optional for now, but an Alibaba representative tells Tech in Asia that two million merchants have already opted for the smartphone-only method in the two weeks since the new tools have been available in beta. “The growing adoption of smartphones and mobile shopping in China means that online merchants should shift their focus from PC to mobile,” said Zhang Kuo, director of Alibaba Group’s mobile business division, in a statement. That means an online seller will run their store and add new products to it just from their phone rather than using the desktop browser-based interface. To make that process easier on mobile, merchants can scan a new product’s barcode with their phone to add it to the store’s inventory using the Taobao app. “To complete product dispatch procedures, merchants can simply scan barcodes on shipping bills to enter package tracking numbers, without the need to manually input them,” added a spokesperson. Brand-new Taobao merchants can even start their store from scratch within the Taobao app without the need to fire up a laptop. Across Taobao and sister site Tmall (a marketplace aimed at larger merchants and major brands), Alibaba has 334 million shoppers. Of the total RMB 787 billion (US$126.4 billion) in consumer spending (GMV) on the two estores in Q4 2014, 42 percent of that tally was spent by people shopping on mobile devices.

• Amazon Targets Priceline, Expedia With New Hotel Booking Site: In its push to expand beyond an online store for books and merchandise, Amazon.com Inc. is entering the travel-reservations business. The e-commerce retailer Tuesday introduced Amazon Destinations, which provides maps, lodging deals and information about restaurants at popular weekend getaways near Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. The new site is a travel-focused expansion of the Seattle-based company’s Amazon Local, which connects Amazon shoppers with deals close to them. The world’s biggest online retailer by revenue will be competing with Priceline Group Inc., Expedia Inc., startup Airbnb Inc. and others for a piece of the online hotel booking market. Tourism in the U.S. is a $960 billion industry, according to researcher IBISWorld.

• Yahoo Q1 Earnings: Revenue $1.23B, +9% Y/Y, Net Income: $21M, down from $312M Y/Y; Shares Fall, Then Rise on Hope of Alibaba Stake Sale: At Yahoo, the turnaround that investors are hoping for remains elusive. The Internet company reported first-quarter financial results that showed strong growth in newer areas like mobile advertising. But costs rose even faster, depressing profits. Yahoo posted net income of $21 million, or 2 cents a share, down sharply from the $312 million, or 29 cents a share, the Internet company reported a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, Yahoo made a profit of 15 cents a share, falling short of the 18 cents a share that Wall Street had expected on that basis. Revenue for the first quarter was $1.23 billion, up slightly from the $1.13 billion that the company brought in during the same period last year, as search revenue and even old-fashioned display ads increased. After deducting payments to advertising partners, however, revenue was $1.04 billion, below the $1.07 billion predicted by analysts. Yahoo’s stock initially fell in after-hours trading following the release of its results. But it rose during Yahoo’s conference call with analysts, when Ms. Mayer said that Yahoo had hired advisers to explore how to maximize the value of the company’s 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, which is worth nearly $9 billion. Since Ms. Mayer joined the company in 2012, Yahoo’s stock has traded more on the value of its investments in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, a leading Chinese e-commerce company, than on its core business. In January, she announced plans to spin off Yahoo’s 15.4 percent stake in Alibaba. In Yahoo’s operating businesses, Ms. Mayer is trying to refocus the company around mobile apps, native ads, video services and the Tumblr social network, while reducing staffing in the company’s other divisions, like its traditional web offerings. In the first quarter, Yahoo cut net employment by 1,100 jobs, Ms. Mayer said on the call. Since her arrival, she has reduced the number of full-time employees by 2,800 jobs, or 20 percent. Last week, Ms. Mayer renewed the company’s partnership with Microsoft on search results and advertising, which accounted for 35 percent of Yahoo’s revenue last year. Under that deal, the two companies will continue to work together for five more years, with Yahoo now getting the ability to serve up its own search results and ads for up to 49 percent of queries.

• Shyp, an On-Demand Mailing Service, Raises $50 Million: Shyp, a company that lets customers summon workers to quickly pick up, pack and ship parcels, said on Tuesday that it has raised $50 million in venture capital, the largest funding round in the start-up’s history. The new round values Shyp at just above $250 million, according to two people with knowledge of the financial terms, who requested anonymity because the deal talks were private. A Shyp spokesman declined to comment on the company’s valuation. The funding is another significant bet on the future of on-demand start-ups by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied venture capital firm that led Shyp’s new financing round and that recently won a case against a former partner who alleged gender bias at the firm. With the round, which also includes participation by previous investors Homebrew and SherpaVentures, John Doerr, a Kleiner executive, will join the board of directors at Shyp. Kleiner has also put money in to other on-demand companies like Uber and DoorDash. Uber, the on-demand ride-hailing service, has also dabbled in the business of moving goods from one place to another, signaling its ambitions to become a way to transport anything and everything to different places around the world. Shyp, on the other hand, piggybacks on existing transportation networks like UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service. Instead of doing all of the shipping itself, Shyp hires contract workers to pick up items from customers, and pack and ship them, eliminating the hassle of standing in line at the post office or finding the proper packaging supplies to send the items. “We asked ourselves, what is the ideal way to ship something?” said Kevin Gibbon, chief executive of Shyp. “Can we scale this business to happen in multiple cities? Can we improve operations and logistics to make it cheaper and faster?” Mr. Gibbon said his service was complementary to the shipping networks already in place, as Shyp’s local logistics networks gather many packages together to hand them off to the actual companies doing the transportation, a task that he said would cost companies like DHL and FedEx much more in time, labor and resources to offer. Shyp makes a $5 service fee on each package it delivers. Shyp also announced it is opening up a pilot version of its service in Los Angeles; it currently operates in San Francisco, New York City and Miami.

• "Notifications Are The Next Platform" TC Columnist Opines Push Notifications Replacing Search as Primary Engagement Point: Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.” This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and without any real category killers, consumers are swapping new apps in and out at a regular pace. Most importantly, our engagement is now defined by push-driven notifications rather than the traditional pull-driven experience. We’re “hunting and pecking” through our app grid a lot less; the apps that notify us (without over-notifying to the point of uninstall) are rewarded with our engagement (and our dollars). Based on this data, our fundamental belief is that notifications represent the future access and discovery point for mobile services — that notifications will be the starting point (or “front door”) for all of the interactions on your phone. Snowball data shows that over 60 percent of notifications are social messages (almost 40 per day). Will Facebook Messenger subsume the notification panel? Our data shows some interesting trends. As noted above, 60 percent of all notifications are social messages. However, our data also shows that users on average interact with 5.5 messaging apps weekly (does not count email)*. Though users regularly use over 5 social messaging apps, Facebook + WhatsApp represents an astounding 79 percent of all messaging by volume. This is incredibly high. Notifications represent the future app interface, and Facebook is making a bold play to own them. Whatever party is successful will have to be thoughtful about social messages, as they represent the bulk of notifications by volume. What we’re seeing today is the first step toward monetization of the OS and the emergence of a new important distribution channel, and apps and platforms would be wise to think critically about it.