Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 18, 2016

• Facebook’s ambitious plan to make you a VR convert: Alongside announcements about drones, bots and other plans to use its Messenger app to take over the world, Facebook also spent quite a bit of time talking about virtual reality. The company, of course, is the owner of Oculus — the VR firm with the most general recognition — and just released its first commercial VR headset, the Rift. The Rift is focused on gaming right now, but Facebook has been saying since it bought Oculus in 2014 that it has broader plans for making Oculus's technology work for more general social interaction. Sheikh laid out a world where users could play a poker game with friends over VR that is so sensitive that you can read their tells. He describes what it could mean to people who live far away from their families to be able to interact with them through a headset. And he said that eventually his team hopes to make VR social interaction "indistinguishable from real life." Of course, this will all take a lot of work. Right now, the commercial Rift doesn't even represent your hands in VR, though that is poised to changebefore the year is out. But Sheikh also described research that would let users put their whole bodies in a virtual world and accurately map facial expressions. The team is also trying to analyze real-world social interactions, to figure out how to let virtual interactions flow as seamlessly as in-person meetings. He also warned that all the visions he laid out in his portion of the keynote speech were far from ready for prime-time. A study released Wednesday by Greenlight VR predicted that it will take six to eight years for virtual reality to go fully mainstream. Given all the research that Sheikh said had to be completed to make social presence really work during the Facebook keynote, that sort of timeline could actually seem a little ambitious.

• Kahoot App Brings Urgency of a Quiz Show to the Classroom: Kahoot, an online quiz system from Norway that is fast gaining market share in schools across the United States, plays out like a television game show spliced with a video game. Cast in the role of game host, teachers introduce a multiple-choice quiz — on, say, plant life or English grammar. Using the Kahoot platform, they project one quiz question at a time onto a whiteboard or screen at the front of their classrooms. Players typically have 30 seconds to click an answer on their laptops, tablets or smartphones. They earn points for correct choices, and extra points for clicking faster. During the answer period, Kahoot emits a catchy countdown tune, reminiscent of retro video games like Monkey Island. A gong sounds when time is up, and the classroom board immediately tallies the class’s correct and incorrect answers. Next, a leaderboard appears, ranking the top five students by points accrued. Kahoot’s gamelike features and easy-to-use format have helped turn it into a classroom phenomenon. Of the 55 million elementary and secondary school students in the United States, about 20 million used Kahoot last month, the company said. “It’s fun. Everyone is doing it. It pulls all the children in,” Tosh McGaughy, a digital learning specialist at the Birdville Independent School District in Haltom City, Tex., told me recently. “They get competitive and excited.”

• Apple Falls on Report iPhone Output Cut for Second Quarter: Apple  shares fell after it was reported that the company would extend an estimated 30 percent cut in iPhone production for another three months. Slower-than-expected sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have prompted Apple to reduce its orders, the Nikkei Asian Review reported, citing unidentified suppliers. The shares dropped as much as 2.1 percent and had declined 1.7 percent to $110.22 at 2:07 p.m. in New York. Apple introduced a smaller, cheaper handset dubbed the iPhone SE last month in an effort to plump up sales ahead of rolling out a new flagship model later this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the biggest suppliers of chips to Apple, on Thursday forecast revenue below analysts’ estimates for the second quarter, saying that demand for smartphones that cost more than $500 is waning. “Ahead of the iPhone 7 people are holding onto their phones a little longer,” said Walter Piecyk, a New York-based analyst at BTIG LLC who recommends buying Apple shares. “But if this is as a result of lengthening product cycles then it could be a structural change for the industry.” In January, Apple said sales would decline for the first time in more than a decade. Global smartphone sales will rise by less than 10 percent this year, the smallest increase since the market’s inception, researcher Gartner Inc predicted last month. Nikkei reported that Apple cut iPhone production by an estimated 30 percent in the January to March quarter and that the reduction is being extended for the subsequent three months. Apple suppliers including Broadcom, Qorvo, Knowles and NXP Semiconductors also fell following the report.

• Tech Companies Face Greater Scrutiny for Paying Workers With Stock: For the last few years, LinkedIn, the professional social networking company, has doled out increasingly large amounts of stock to pay its workers. In 2014, LinkedIn paid employees $319 million in stock, or 14 percent of revenue; in 2015, that rose to $510 million, or 17 percent of revenue. At the time, those figures were largely met with shrugs from Wall Street. Now that attitude may be changing. As LinkedIn prepares to report its latest quarterly earnings next week, Wall Street is increasingly scrutinizing the number of stock grants that the company pays employees — especially after LinkedIn projected lower growth for this year and its stock price has fallen. The Silicon Valley company’s stock-based compensation “provides additional reason to remain cautious” on LinkedIn, Mark May, an Internet analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a research note. The issue is not limited to LinkedIn. With tech earnings season kicking off on Monday, investors are paying more attention to stock-based compensation at many tech companies. Paying employees with stock is largely unquestioned when times are good, since the move theoretically aligns the interests of the workers with company performance. The practice is technically a corporate expense, but during boom periods, Wall Street typically focuses on a company’s operating results that exclude that expense. Yet public tech companies have had a rockier time in the stock market this year. That has led investors to begin looking more closely at the quality of the companies’ financial results. The scrutiny means examining earnings with stock-based compensation expenses included — and certain financial measures, like earnings and margins, invariably look worse when that expense is factored in.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 13

• Cash burns fast for Uber-like startups that grow city by city - "You have an operations team that is on a city-by-city basis, but you make sure your engineering team is not city-by-city" : The list of city-by-city startups includes mobile car-booking companies Uber Technologies and Lyft, food delivery startup Munchery, parking provider SpotHero, shopping service Instacart and laundry startup Washio. While they rely on technology to deliver new products and services, their business models are a departure from the low-cost ventures built by a few programmers working in a cramped office. Instead, they're setting up kitchens, renting warehouses and hiring local staff. Among the startups that raised a third financing round in 2013 or 2014, 14 are expanding from city to city and have attracted an average of $65 million in funding, more than double the amount raised by the rest, according to PitchBook Data, a financial information provider. Uber is leading the pack, with a presence in almost 300 cities in 55 countries. Valued at $40 billion, the mobile car-hailing startup is on a hiring spree for operations staff, with more than 200 job postings for staff outside of the company's headquarters in San Francisco, from Miami to Moscow. CEO Travis Kalanick's steady ramp-up has required Uber to raise an enormous amount of cash totaling more than $5 billion. In January, Bloomberg News reported the car-booking startup raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt, and that it was still on the lookout to collect more financing. Some investors warn that cash-intensive startups are at risk of flopping, pointing to previous attempts by delivery companies Kozmo.com and Webvan, which also sought to expand city to city in the late 1990s, only to crash when the dot-com bubble burst in the new millennium. Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley investor and startup veteran, cautioned last year that enterprises rapidly burning cash may be unable to survive in an adverse environment.1 Apoorva Mehta, Instacart's CEO, is betting his delivery startup will be nimble enough to avert a crunch. The San Francisco-based company, which raised $220 million at a $2 billion valuation in January, initially sold groceries to customers with a markup. Now, Instacart is more focused on cutting deals with food stores to deliver produce and other goods for a fee. Instacart needs less cash to expand (compared with Amazon, which also delivers groceries in some urban areas) since it doesn't have to build warehouses or large stores. "You have an operations team that is on a city-by-city basis, but you make sure your engineering team is not city-by-city," Mehta said.

• Alibaba hiring in Amazon, Microsoft backyard as U.S. cloud unit expands: Alibaba has begun hunting staff in Seattle, home turf of Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, focusing on savvy cloud computing hires as it ramps up U.S. operations. Several recruiters in the region said they had registered the firm's hiring drive, suggesting Alibaba is eyeing staff at rival Amazon as well as Microsoft and Facebook Inc. According to LinkedIn's data, Alibaba has already hired staff away from Microsoft and Amazon. LinkedIn data list Microsoft as the top company from which former employees have joined Alibaba, not specifying the location of the hires, with 20 recruits for unspecified posts at the Chinese company having previously worked at the software giant. With the job openings Alibaba joins the increasingly fierce fight for cloud computing talent in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where it opened a research and development center in what is Microsoft and Amazon's backyard late last year. The Chinese company's arrival on the tech job market is - for now - unlikely to pose a concern to major industry incumbents, who in past years have resorted to increasingly imaginative tactics to recruit scant human resources. Alibaba's moves in the region are at an early stage, and the amount of hiring still comparatively low, said recruiters. The company has fewer than 300 employees in the United States. But Alibaba is looking at Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook in the Seattle area for new blood, particularly developers, said Jerry Taylor, president of Executive Recruiters Inc in Bellevue, Washington. "I'm sure they're going to be web-based as well as mobile-type folks," he said. "They're trying to get a footprint in the United States. What better place to go than their direct competitor in Amazon?" An Alibaba spokesman declined to give details of recruitment. Alibaba's talent hunt coincides with a broader push in the United States this year to win over U.S. business, offering American retailers new ways to sell to China's vast and growing middle class. On March 4 it launched a cloud computing hub in Silicon Valley, its first outside of China. Alibaba has hired at least 10 software engineers or computing experts from either Microsoft or Amazon since July 2014, all but one based in the greater Seattle area, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Li Xiaolong, one of the 10 and a senior staff engineer at Alibaba, openly advertises for like-minded talent on his profile: "We are actively hiring talents in machine learning, data mining and distributed computing, as well as hardcore software engineers to improve the world's biggest e-commerce platform. The location can be Seattle, Silicon Valley, Beijing or Hangzhou."

• Brands Are Now Posting More to Instagram Than Facebook Photo app is marketers' new fave: Instagram is luring brands away from Facebook, according to a new report from research firm L2, which found that brands now post more content on the photo-sharing app. The reason? Brands know everything they post on the platform will appear in fans' feeds, the study says. But on Facebook, if brands don't pay to promote their posts, much of their content doesn't appear in followers' News Feeds. That trend is turning Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, into a growing marketing force. The report outlines how brands have been building their followings on the app, which recently topped 300 million monthly users. Facebook does not comment on Instagram's growth outside of official announcements. However, considering the Instagram audience was 100 million two years ago, that tripling of users approaches Facebook's biggest leaps. Facebook went from 100 million to 300 million in an even shorter time span. Another reason Instagram is a marketing darling at the moment is it's attracting younger users than Facebook, according to L2. While an estimated 3 million U.S. teens abandoned Facebook between 2011 and 2014, the same demographic now cites Instagram as "the most important" social network, the report says. UPDATE: The survey focused on 250 of the world's top brands, and Facebook counts more than 2 million advertisers. Here's a look at what else L2 and Olapic, the social marketing technology firm, found: Brands post an average of 9.3 times a week to Instagram, up from 7.5 posts a year ago. Facebook posts decreased, meanwhile, from 11.1 to 8.8 per week. Brand fan bases rose an average of 26 percent over the past year. Photos perform better than videos. Users engage with photos 1.03 percent of the time and with videos 0.79 percent of the time. Instagram's Hyperlapse app, which speeds up video into fast-motion action, has fallen out of favor with just 2.4 percent of brands using it since its August launch.

• F.C.C. Sets Net Neutrality Rules: The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday released extensive details of how it would regulate broadband Internet providers as a public utility, producing official wording that almost certainly sets the stage for extended legal fights. The release of the rules had been eagerly anticipated by advocates and lawmakers, as well as broadband and technology companies, since the agency approved new rules for Internet service two weeks ago. The details came in a 313-page document that included the new rules and the legal justifications for them. The rules revealed how the strict laws would be modified for Internet providers, exempting the companies from the sort of price controls typically applied to utilities, for example. But the full text of the new order also raised uncertainties about broad and subjective regulation. One catchall provision, requiring “just and reasonable” conduct, allows the F.C.C. to decide what is acceptable on a case-by-case basis. Opponents of the rules, including many of the leading Internet providers, spent Thursday poring over the document. It was not known who would file the first legal challenges, or exactly what legal arguments would be made. Many experts, though, said the document included plenty of opportunity for different interpretations. The “just and reasonable” provision, said Roger Entner, the lead analyst at Recon Analytics in Boston, “can be stretched like chewing gum.” He suggested that it would inspire a flood of proactive, permission-seeking petitions from businesses large and small. He pointed to mobile-messaging companies like Snapchat or WhatsApp that may be transmitting voice or video and seeking money from investors who want legal assurances before signing checks. “Before acting, you need to know: Is this kosher with the F.C.C.?” The debate about how to preserve the open Internet has persisted for more than a decade, and the F.C.C.’s new rules are not its first attempt to protect it. But the issue picked up momentum in the last year, with President Obama taking the unusual action of publicly urging the independent agency to approve strong regulation. The agency’s order reclassifies high-speed Internet as a telecommunications service rather than an information one, subjecting providers to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act. Its aim is to protect the open Internet, advancing principles of so-called net neutrality by prohibiting broadband providers from elevating one kind of content over another. “Threats to Internet openness remain today,” the agency wrote in the document released on Thursday. “The record reflects that broadband providers hold all the tools necessary to deceive consumers, degrade content or disfavor the content that they don’t like.” Comcast and Verizon, two leading Internet service providers, declined to comment. Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, called the order’s publication the beginning of “a period of uncertainty” that the company was confident would be resolved “by bipartisan action by Congress or a future F.C.C., or by the courts.”

• Educational toy maker LeapFrog, once unique, is battered by the app disruption: Battered by a growing variety of cheaper alternatives, LeapFrog, a dominant maker of educational toys and games, has watched its sales plummet. It has become the target of short-sellers, investors who bet on a company’s failures, and was most recently sued by shareholders who claimed it had drastically overestimated consumer demand for its products. “As each year passes by and more apps are for free and they’re lower priced, it becomes a tougher sell,” said Jim Silver, the editor in chief of TTPM, a toy review website. Slow to adapt, critics say, LeapFrog has become something of a modern-day fable for how quickly technology has unseated the toy industry’s titans. Mike Wood, a lawyer, created the company upon realizing how few educational products existed for his 3-year-old son, who was having trouble learning to read. He founded the company in 1995, and in 1999 introduced the first LeapPad, an electronic book with audio and pen that helped children learn to read. As technology evolved, LeapFrog seized the opportunity to create a tablet just for children: no web-browsing abilities and a limited set of games. It introduced the original LeapPad tablet in 2011 for $100 at a time when the average tablet in the United States sold for about $470, according to data from Euromonitor. Sales skyrocketed. Sean McGowan, an analyst with Needham and Company, estimates that the company sold 1.2 million tablets the first year, and more than doubled that in 2012, when the LeapPad 2 came out. The hardware, combined with its software and content, most likely made up more than half of the company’s revenue, Mr. McGowan said. “Back then, not every family had an adult tablet they were willing to give to their child,” said Gerrick Johnson, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets. Just a few years later, however, the idea of a tablet that appeals precisely because it can do a limited set of tasks seems almost quaint. Older generations of iPads have become hand-me-downs from parents to children, while tablets get cheaper every year. Parents can program their grown-up devices with educational games, instead of buying a separate specialized system. Sales of various LeapPads to retailers began to plateau in 2013, according to Mr. McGowan, who estimates that they dropped more than 40 percent in 2014. On a weekday afternoon, Flora Bojadziev, a chef from Harlem, browsed through a Toys “R” Us in Manhattan. She was looking for educational toys for her 2 ½-year-old son, who plays with her iPad. But she balked at the idea of spending $130 on LeapFrog’s LeapPad Ultra XDi, an educational tablet for children, on sale in the aisle a few steps away. “With that money, I’ll buy him so many apps,” said Ms. Bojadziev, who is 33. That is precisely the problem for LeapFrog, which built a multimillion-dollar company on children’s devices before babies learned to swipe the screens of iPads.

• Intel cuts revenue forecast as desktop demand weakens - shares down 5%: Intel Corp (INTC.O) slashed nearly $1 billion from its first-quarter revenue forecast as small businesses put off upgrading their personal computers, sending the chipmaker's shares down more than 5 percent. Fewer companies than Intel had expected replaced desktop PCs running on outdated Microsoft operating systems, leading to weak demand for its chips. Intel also cited "challenging" macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe. "The macro environment is not robust enough for people to upgrade their PCs the way they normally would," Topeka Capital Markets analyst Suji De Silva said. Intel said on Thursday that it expected first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion, plus or minus $300 million - about 7 percent lower than its earlier forecast of $13.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million. Though dominant in the market for chips used in PCs, Intel has been slower than rivals such as Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) to adjust in recent years to the growing popularity of smartphones. When Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) wound down support for its Windows XP operating system last April, Intel had expected a bounce in demand from small- and medium-sized businesses. But this has not happened. Businesses and consumers are taking an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude to their old PCs, Summit Research analyst Srini Sundararajan said. According to BlueFin Research Partners, 75 million-76 million PCs will be shipped worldwide in the first quarter, a decline of 8-9 percent from the preceding quarter. Intel, whose historic "Wintel" alliance with Microsoft once delivered breathtakingly high profit margins, has been trying to offset the impact of slower PC upgrades by making chips for devices such as "2-in-1s", which function as both laptop and tablet. Intel said the mid-point of its gross margin range would remain at 60 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points. Intel's shares were down 4.8 percent at $30.76 in late afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday March 3

• Consolidation in the colocation business: NTT buys German data center operator, while Rackspace seeks tie-ups with Amazon, Microsoft: NTT: Japan's NTT Communications Corp said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy German data center firm e-shelter, becoming Europe's third biggest operator in the sector, in the latest in a series of overseas acquisitions to counter sluggish growth at home. NTT Communications, an unlisted division of Japanese telecom firm Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) (9432.T) didn't disclose the deal's financial terms. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this month the NTT unit was in talks to buy e-shelter for about 100 billion yen ($832 million). In a joint statement, NTT Communications and e-shelter said the Japanese firm will acquire 86.7 percent of the German company, founded in 2000. Operating data centers in four major cities in Germany including Berlin, as well as in Zurich and Vienna, e-shelter is Germany's biggest provider of data center services, they said. The European deal stretches the NTT brand further across the globe. In 2010, parent NTT bought South Africa's Dimension Data for 382 billion yen, while in 2013 NTT Communications signed deals with a combined value of 85.5 billion yen to take over two U.S. cloud computing firms, Virtela Technology Services and RagingWire Data Centers. Rackspace Rackspace Hosting Inc. is open to forging partnerships with large cloud-computing operators such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as the company seeks to bolster slowing revenue growth. Rackspace, which has faced price cuts by Amazon, Microsoft and other competitors, decided in September to reject approaches by multiple groups interested in a partnership or acquisition. Since then, Rhodes hinted that the company has had a team looking at supporting customers who are renting computing services from other providers. Rhodes confirmed on Monday that Rackspace intends to provide third-party support for users of rival cloud-computing services via a combination of people and custom-management software. “There are future versions of our model that will be more capital light and more service oriented,” Rhodes said.

• Dating app Tinder launches slew of product features, dynamic pricing: Tinder’s “Rewind” functionality just went live, finally giving users the ability to go back in time and swipe right instead of left. The “Rewind” feature is included in the premium tier of the service, Tinder Plus, which was unveiled today and costs anywhere between $9.99 and $19.99 in the United States, depending on the age of the user. That’s right. Tinder Plus costs $19.99 for users older than 30, while it costs just $9.99 for folks who are younger than 30. However, in the TechCrunch office we’ve seen Tinder Plus offered at the price of $14.99/month for a 30+ female user. We’ve reached out to Tinder to get a clearer picture of the Tinder Plus pricing structure and will update as soon as we know more. For now, however, we do know that pricing not only ranges based on age but by location. Users in emerging countries (Tinder is currently available in 140 countries across the globe) will pay as little as $2.99/month, while users older than 28 in developed markets like the UK will be paying approximately $23/month (and nearly 4x as much as their over 28-year-old counterparts). Tinder has been testing pricing in various markets for the past few months, but even without the complete information, it’s easy to get an idea of the general landscape here. Older users, who theoretically have less supply and offer less demand, should pay a greater amount for extra dating tools. Plus, they likely make more money than younger users. It’s Uber’s Surge pricing model applied to romantic endeavors. Tinder Plus also includes Passport, which allows users to search for matches anywhere in the world through the drop of a pin, as opposed to being locked into your current location. Tinder Plus also allows users to buy themselves out of advertisements, though Tinder has yet to launch any ad products just yet. Sources say that the ad product will launch later this month, but it’s unclear what exactly those ads will look like. As for the features launching today, they make a lot of sense given the current user behavior on Tinder. Rewind, in particular, appeals to just about anyone who has swiped left when they meant to swipe right. The company has seen over 6 billion matches in total, though it’s hard to say how many of those matches become anything. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Tinder. The point is that it has become an addiction, with people mindlessly flipping through potential suitors and swiping based on a gut reaction.

• India’s Mobile Carriers Head Into $14 Billion Fight for Survival: What happens when a wireless operator with millions of customers loses the airwaves it needs to provide service? We may soon find out thanks to an unusual government auction taking place in India. The government will open the bidding Wednesday for airwaves already in use by the biggest carriers, including Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Vodafone Group Plc. They’ll have to compete to keep their licenses in the auction against Mukesh Ambani, who is India’s richest man and has signaled his determination by making the largest deposit of the competition. India’s approach, which is unlike what happens in the U.S., could mean seismic change for the world’s second-largest smartphone market. The airwaves up for auction serve more than 300 million customers and account for almost half of the $19 billion in combined revenue for the four largest operators. “For some of the telcos, renewal of spectrum is a key for survival,” said Nitin Soni, a director at Fitch Ratings in Singapore. Bharti, India’s biggest carrier, and second-ranked Vodafone could each spend as much as $4.5 billion for the spectrum, Soni said. Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. submitted a 45 billion-rupee ($726 million) bank guarantee, the most of any carrier, to participate in the auction, according to data from Mjunction Services Ltd., which is running the sale. Bharti Airtel was second with 43 billion rupees, and Vodafone gave a guarantee of 37 billion rupees. Any company losing previously held airwaves will probably have to shut down business in that region and abandon any investments or infrastructure it’s made. Companies also will lose revenue if they can’t switch to other bands, a move that would probably require new towers or technology. If companies shut down their business in a particular circle, their subscribers will have to look for new cellular operators, said Rishi Tejpal, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in New Delhi. “For some operators, it’s a do-or-die situation,” Tejpal said. “And with Reliance Jio in the picture, nobody knows their strategy.”

• It’s official #1: Google says it wants to offer cellular service: A top Google exec has confirmed what many have been speculating for months: That the search giant wants to start offering wireless service. Google isn't necessarily looking to become the next Verizon and AT&T, said Sundar Pichai, Google's head of Android, at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But, according to various news reports, Pichai said we'll begin to see more details trickle out in the next few months as Google announces partnerships with wireless carriers and other businesses. Analysts say Google is likely to partner with firms such as T-Mobile and Sprint rather than build its own network from scratch. Asked whether Google's aim was to drive wireless prices down for consumers, Pichai responded that the experiment's goal is to showcase new mobile innovations, according to the Verge. An example: Technology that can automatically reconnect dropped calls. But by adding wireless service to its very long chain of mobile offerings, Google would be showcasing something nobody else has tried: A totally unified cellular experience that's entirely within the Google ecosystem. Google already sells a combination of hardware and software with its line of Nexus phones. Now, Google's wireless service — combined with a Google handset, the Android operating system, the Google app store and Google's own mapping, search and e-mail apps — stands to create a formidable vertical silo that goes far beyond the Nexus experiment.

• Its official #2: Olacabs acquires TaxiForSure for $200M in cash and stock: Online cab booking service Olacabs.com run by Mumbai-based ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, has acquired Bangalore-based Serendipity Infolabs Pvt Ltd, which runs rival service TaxiForSure for $200 million (Rs 1,240 crore) in a cash and stock deal, as per a company statement. The breakup of the cash component of the deal could not be immediately ascertained but with the stock swap, TaxiForSure investors—Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Blume Ventures would get small minority equity stakes in Ola. Ola’s backers include SoftBank, Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital and Steadview Capital. Ola is already the top player in its business and TaxiForSure is believed to be among the other large firms in its space. Both are locked in a pitched battle against global giant Uber and other local players such as hybrid venture Meru. The company said TaxiForSure will continue to operate as a separate entity, at least for now, with Arvind Singhal (currently COO) being appointed CEO. Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G, co-founders of TaxiForSure, will contribute in an advisory role for a certain period. This is the second largest deal in the consumer internet/e-commerce business behind Flipkart’s acquisition of Myntra last year. That deal was reportedly worth over $300 million. TaxiForSure is currently present in 47 cities with over 15,000 vehicles registered on its platform. Ola said the deal compliments the two companies, as TaxiForSure follows a different model of supply and distribution by working with cab operators compared to Ola’s model of working with drivers who own their own cabs.

• Alibaba and top Chinese university launch new education portal for MOOCs: One of China’s most highly regarded universities has partnered with the country’s biggest ecommerce company to create a new website for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The generically named Chinese MOOCs was just launched by Peking University and Alibaba as schools around the country begin their new semesters following the Chinese New Year holiday (h/t to TechNode). Chinese MOOCs lists 26 courses, covering subjects in science, law, literature, music, and IT. The website lists six other universities that are apparently on board, including the University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, and Beijing Normal, but all the courses currently offered are from Peking University (note: Peking University is also known as Beijing University, or Beida, for short). Using a model similar to Coursera, Chinese MOOCs combines video lectures, quizzes, and other coursework to educate students, who can take courses for free and opt to pay for certificates upon completion. There’s no limit to the number of students per course.

• U.S. millennials post ‘abysmal’ scores in tech skills test, lag behind foreign peers: The test is called the PIAAC test. It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to 65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in America, they're poised to claim the title of largest generation from the baby boomers. U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34 years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head on.” The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom. But surely America’s brightest were on top? Nope. U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality. The study called into question America’s educational credentialing system. While few American test-takers lacked a high school degree, the United States didn’t perform any better than countries with relatively high rates of failing to finish high school. And our college graduates didn’t perform well, either. “Abysmal,” noted ETS researcher Madeline Goodman. “There was just no place where we performed well.”