Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 23

A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D.: While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls. “It’s remarkable what they can do,” said Blair Hull, a founder of an electronic trading firm who relies on Jane Street to make a market for his recently started E.T.F. “If you look at who provides this kind of liquidity these days, it’s fewer and fewer firms.” It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion. And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital. In a word, these are not your suit-and-tie bond and stock traders of yore, riding the commuter train into Manhattan. They are, instead, the pick of the global brain crop. Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon). Jane Street was founded at the beginning of the previous decade, when a couple of option traders and a computer expert left Susquehanna to start their own business. Harnessing Ph.D.-toting mathematicians to the most powerful computers money can buy has become the accepted way for hedge funds and banks to get a trading edge these days, but Jane Street takes this marriage of high tech and high intellect to a new level. Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm’s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders. Indeed, new traders must complete a monthlong OCaml boot camp before they start trading. And to the degree that the super-shy Jane Street does has have a public face, it belongs to its chief technology officer, Yaron Minsky, who givesfrequent lectures at Harvard, M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, promoting the firm’s ability to manage risk by developing the best software around.

• A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care: John Costik got the call at the office in 2012. It was his wife, Laura, with terrible news: Their 4-year-old son, Evan, was headed into the emergency room. His blood sugar reading was sky high, about 535 mg/dl, and doctors had discovered he had Type 1 diabetes. The first three days in the hospital were a blur during which the Costiks, engineers in Rochester, received a crash course in managing the basics of diabetes care.For starters, they were told to log their son’s numbers on paper forms. It was their first hint that diabetes management did not occupy a place on technology’s bleeding edge. The methods for guesstimating carbohydrate intake also seemed imprecise, Mr. Costik found, and the process generated a lot of wasted data.“The last thing you want to do is find some form and fill it out,” he said. “You’re really just emotionally trying to cope with it, and that data in that book isn’t necessarily useful to the people with diabetes.” Several months later, Mr. Costik fitted his son with a Dexcom G4 continuous glucose monitor. A hair-thin sensor under Evan’s skin recorded an exact blood sugar reading at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day.But all that data left with Evan every morning when he headed off to day care. Mr. Costik wanted something better: continuous access to his son’s glucose readings.So he examined the device’s software code and wrote a simple program that transmitted the monitoring data to an online spreadsheet he could view on a Web browser, Android mobile phone or, eventually, his Pebble smartwatch. Now, as consumer gadgets weave themselves ever more tightly into everyday life, patients and their families are finding homespun solutions to problems medical-device manufacturers originally did not address. Industry executives say the pace of user-driven innovation was one reason the Food and Drug Administration recently reclassified remote glucose-monitoring devices, hastening approval for new models by big companies like Dexcom and Medtronics. James Wedding, a civil engineer who lives outside Dallas, saw Mr. Costik’s Twitter post and used his code to set up a remote monitor system for his daughter, Carson, who is now 12. Lane Desborough, an engineer in California, got in touch with Mr. Costik after seeing his tweet, ultimately creating an open-source system based in part on Mr. Costik’s code. It allows anyone to hack existing glucose monitors so they transmit readings to the cloud, where they can be read by patients and caregivers.Mr. Desborough called the project Nightscout. The Nightscout group onFacebook, known as CGM in the Cloud, provides free tech support for users trying to improve on monitoring devices.About two dozen users have even started a project called Open APS, in which they are pairing insulin pumps with glucose monitors in an effort to create an open-source artificial pancreas system. These wearable devices, which automate insulin delivery, are being tested in academic settings, but these early adopters are not waiting for the results of those continuing clinical trials.Mr. Costik now works at the Center for Clinical Innovation at the University of Rochester, where he works to improve management options for all patients; Mr. Desborough is now the chief engineer at Bigfoot Biomedical, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that plans to create an artificial pancreas.

• Fitbit Forecasts Miss Estimates on Global Rollout of New Devices: Fitbit's current-quarter profit forecast missed Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, as the wearable fitness device maker aggressively invests in new products, sending its shares down more than 16 percent in after-hours trading. The lackluster guidance overshadowed the company's comfortable quarterly revenue and profit beat in the holiday shopping season. Fitbit has been diversifying its portfolio of colorful wristbands and clippable devices that track calories, sleeping patterns and heart rate, to better compete with rivals as well as to tap new markets and demographies.The company last month unveiled its $200 smartwatch, Blaze, to mixed reviews. Earlier this month, Fitbit announced a new wristband, Alta, to appeal to the more fashion-conscious customer.  Fitbit's net income attributable to common stockholders rose to $64.2 million, or 26 cents per share, in the quarter, from $11.9 million, or 19 cents per share, a year earlier.On an adjusted basis, the company earned 35 cents per share. Revenue nearly doubled to $711.6 million from $370.2 million.Analysts on average had expected a profit of 25 cents and revenue of $647.8 million. Fitbit's revenue forecast of $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion and adjusted profit of $1.08-$1.20 per share for 2016 was largely in line with expectations.Shares of the San Francisco-based company were down 15 percent at $14.04 in after-hours trading on Monday after closing up 5.9 percent.The stock, which has lost nearly 70 percent of its value since hitting a high in August, has been trading below the June IPO price of $20 all this month.

• Amazon Raises Minimum Order Size as It Seeks More Prime Buyers: Amazon.com Inc. is increasing the minimum order size for free shipping to $49 from $35, a step that could encourage more consumers to sign up for Prime, the online retailer’s annual service that includes two-day deliveries. The benefit of getting more people to sign up for Prime services -- for $99 a year -- is that they tend to shop more frequently and spend more money, while access to other perks such as online movies, music and other content helps to keep customers within Amazon’s shopping ecosystem. By encouraging non-Prime customers to spend more on a single order, Seattle-based Amazon is also aiming to reduce costs while boosting profits on each sale. The new threshold follows a 33 percent jump in fulfillment costs -- warehousing, packaging and shipping -- in the fourth quarter, which outpaced a 15 percent increase in product sales. Monday’s price increase is the first since 2013, when Amazon raised the threshold to $35 from $25. Amazon’s new minimum order size for free shipping brings it in line with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s online store, which has a threshold of $50, or free pickup in stores. Target Corp. has a $25 minimum, while it’s $35 at startup Jet.com Inc.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 22

• New Chinese Rules on Foreign Firms’ Online Content: China is taking another step to restrict what can be posted on the Internet in its country by issuing new rules barring foreign companies or their affiliates from engaging in publishing online content there without government approval. The rules, which were jointly released this week by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that beginning March 10, foreign companies or foreign joint ventures will be restricted from disseminating a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, animation, audio and video. The rules also apply to digitized books, art, literature and science. The new regulations would allow foreign-owned companies to cooperate with a Chinese partner to publish content on the Web in China, but they must get government approval. China already has some of the world’s most restrictive policies on the dissemination of information. Chinese TV and the news media are censored; the government has censors monitoring popular social media platforms, like WeChat; and American Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been blocked in China for years. One key question is the impact such regulations would have on companies like Apple and Microsoft, which run online platforms in China that provide services and sometimes content. For example, Apple’s Chinese App Store offers games and other apps in the country while Microsoft has a joint venture through which it provides a cloud version of Windows and Office software. Internet companies, like Akamai and Cloud Flare, have operations that work to speed traffic to foreign websites or host them through servers in China.

• Apple Still Holds the Keys to Its Cloud Service, but Reluctantly: In Silicon Valley — if not Washington — Apple is being hailed for digging in its heels on a court order requiring it to aid the Federal Bureau of Investigation in gaining access to an an iPhone used by one of the attackers in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, emphasized on Tuesday in a letter to customers that helping the F.B.I. essentially hack into one of the company’s own phones would be a dangerous precedent. What’s more, Apple said it would have to create new software to do this. But while company executives have embraced the notion that Apple is no longer able to intervene for law enforcement when investigators want access to an iPhone, it has repeatedly cooperated with court orders for access to online services like its iCloud. That may sound like hypocrisy, but to people familiar with how Apple’s products and services work, it is simply a matter of technology. ICloud is an Internet service Apple customers can use to back up information that is stored on their devices. It is helpful if your phone, tablet or computer is lost or badly damaged. And it, like other online services, is a gold mine for law enforcement — as the government spying revelations by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden showed. Every few months for the last few years, tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have published transparency reports, which are lists of instances in which a company turned over data on users at the behest of a court order in the United States or other countries.In its most recent report, covering the first six months of 2015, Apple received nearly 11,000 requests from government agencies around the world regarding information on roughly 60,000 devices. Apple provided some data in roughly 7,100 of those requests, the report said.Apple has stated repeatedly that it would hand over data to comply with a court order when it is technically able to do so. And as that report indicates, it has. Often.But the operative phrase to understand the difference between Apple’s cooperation and its resistance is “technically able.”In the fall of 2014, with an update to its iOS software, Apple switched off its ability to retrieve data from its phones and tablets. By doing this, Apple tried to take itself out of the equation when law enforcement is looking for access to a phone. In essence, the company could no longer fulfill a request if it was technically unable to do so.ICloud is a different story. Apple encrypts that data on its servers and holds on to the key, which it uses to gain access to the data when it is required to do so by a court order.There are practical reasons for managing security in the cloud differently from on an iPhone. ICloud exists, in part, to save backups in the event that, say, you drop your phone in a swimming pool. Apple needs to have that key to get your data back for you.It is not so easy for a company to take away its ability to gain access to your information when that company’s ability to retrieve your information is the reason you are using its service.

• Facebook Brings 360 Dynamic Streaming To Samsung Gear VR, Forms Social VR Team: Zuck shocked everyone by appearing on stage for the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event for MWC 2016. He wasn’t there to push Samsung’s new phones or talk about Messenger, his time onstage was all about virtual reality. Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is the parent company of Oculus) will be bringing its dynamic streaming technology for 360 video to Gear VR (which, in case if you’ve forgotten, is powered by Oculus). This technology allows significant performance upgrades to streaming content by only playing back what’s in view of the headset at any given time rather than processing the entire 360 sphere of video at once. All of this is done by seamlessly switching between dozens of variants of each 360 video taken from multiple angles. Facebook revealed more about the technology at its Video @Scale event last month. The results speak for themselves, Facebook says their efforts have “quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x.” Another interesting tidbit comes from a Facebook blog post today—they’re building a social VR team to focus “entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR.”

• Uber Driver Held in Killing Spree as Police Probe Tie to Routes: A driver for Uber may have picked up passengers in between incidents as he drove around and shot at least six people dead over the span of several hours, according to police in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While there have been other incidents of misconduct by Uber drivers, the Michigan shooting would be the first to involve a mass shooting. In order to become an Uber driver, Dalton would have undergone, and passed, a background check. Uber said it’s referring inquiries regarding the routes to police given that there is an active investigation. “We are horrified and heartbroken at the senseless violence,” Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “We have reached out to the police to help with their investigation in any way that we can.” 

• Yahoo launches auction process as Starboard gears up for fight: Yahoo Inc officially launched the sale of its core business on Friday, a move seen as a positive step for frustrated investors but not enough to keep an activist hedge fund from pursuing a proxy fight against the struggling Internet company.Yahoo shares jumped after the company announced its board has formed a committee of independent directors to explore strategic alternatives, and that it has hired investment banks and a law firm to run the process. The launch of the auction process, a move activist hedge fund Starboard Value and other shareholders have pushed since late last year, showed the company was moving another step closer to selling its core business, which includes search, mail and news sites, rather than spin it off as previously planned. The move follows more than three years of effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to turn around Yahoo by focusing on mobile apps and trying to boost advertising revenue.  Yahoo had acknowledged during its earnings last month that it was open to exploring options for its core business. Despite the launch, Starboard's founder Jeffrey Smith is not backing down, and will continue his pursuit of nominating a group of directors for the Yahoo board, people familiar with the matter said.

• This glove could make eating easier for those with Parkinson’s disease: Eating can be difficult and embarrassing for those with tremors, but GyroGear thinks it has a solution for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease or essential tremor. The start-up has created a glove that steadies a person’s hand, making it easier to complete everyday tasks such as eating. The glove’s power lies in a bronze disc on the back of the hand, which weighs about as much as a roll of nickels. It spins at up to 20,000 rotations per minute, providing a steadying force. The force of the battery-powered disc is akin to putting one’s hand in molasses. While moving is not as easy, the benefit is that much of the shaking is naturally filtered out. GyroGear is aiming to reduce tremors by 70 percent. In one lab test, the London-based researchers say, it reduced a tremor by 90 percent. GyroGear founder Faii Ong was inspired by a 103-year-old hospital patient who couldn’t eat without spilling food. While cleaning her up, the medical student at Imperial College started to brainstorm solutions.  Ong cautions that there’s still work to be done. The glove hasn’t been tested by outside parties, but they plan to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of the year. They also hope to begin selling the product by year’s end and are raising funds from investors. “The idea of simple, wearable devices to treat tremor and to avoid the side effects from medications or alternatively the dangers of surgery is very appealing to patients and health care providers,” said Michael S. Okun, medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation. “The GyroGlove is an interesting idea, however many of these types of devices fall short of the expectations — especially when faced with very severe and disabling tremor.” There are other efforts to use mechanical solutions to aid those with Parkinson’s disease. Lift Labs, a start-up that Google acquired in 2014, has devised a vibrating spoon and fork to counteract tremors and make eating easier. While having shown promise for mild tremors, Okun said it hasn’t proven the most effective solution for more severe cases. In the long term GyroGear is interested in adapting its glove to other uses, such as for surgeons, physical therapists, photographers or anyone seeking to keep a steady hand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 16

• The Future of Wearables Is Normal Clothes Made Smart: The current crop of wearables has mostly been constrained to your wrist in the form of clunky Apple Watches and Moto 360s. Attempt to vary the where in wearables, like Google Glass — the no-longer-in-production spectacles so nerdy only cast members from The Big Bang Theory dared to wear them out in public — have already been cast to the junk heap of history. When a gadget seemingly straight from the future couldn’t cut it, it speaks to the fact that we need our wearables to be stylish and practical. In the future wearables will most likely be simply known as just clothes. Companies like Intel are already working to make what seems like a far-off vision a reality. "The most exciting thing is going to be when the technology [becomes] so small and tiny that we'll be able to embed it into anything and everything," Aysegul Ildeniz, the vice president of Intel’s New Devices, tells us. "So we’re talking about potentially, one day, fabrics or the stuff we wear on us will be smart... we could put it in a hat, or shoe, or pants."

• Hudson’s Bay Is Said to Consider Buying Gilt Groupe for $250 Million: Gilt Groupe, a onetime darling of online fashion sales, is nearing a deal to sell itself — albeit at a steep discount to its once lofty valuation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue, is in advanced talks to buy the start-up for about $250 million, a person briefed on the matter said on Monday. That is down significantly from the $1 billion valuation that Gilt fetched more than three years ago. A deal could be announced early next year, though people briefed on the talks cautioned that negotiations were still underway and could still fall apart. Gilt is also speaking with a handful of other potential buyers in addition to Hudson’s Bay, according to another person briefed on the talks. Should the two sides reach an agreement, it would cap a long and volatile ride for Gilt, which shook up the fashion industry when it opened for business eight years ago. The company focused on so-called flash sales, in which consumers have a limited amount of time to buy clothes, accessories and furniture sold by the site. The business model was so popular that Gilt raised $138 million from investors like SoftBank of Japan and Goldman Sachs in 2011, even as it remained unprofitable. And the online retailer was regarded as a star in New York City’s start-up community. The company’s early success bolstered the reputations of its founders, including Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Kevin P. Ryan, the former chief executive of the online ad company DoubleClick, who also served as chief executive of Gilt. But flash sale sites, like Gilt, have lost their luster as consumers become increasingly desensitized to deals, analysts say.

• In Virtual Reality Headsets, Investors Glimpse the Future: Magic Leap, a secretive company making wearable technology for mixing digital imagery with the real world, is seeking to raise $827 million. Jaunt, maker of a 3-D camera for filming virtual reality video, has nabbed a total of $100 million, including $65 million in September. And 8i, which makes technology that lets people interact with video of humans as though they were in the same room, has raised nearly $15 million. None of these start-ups is a household name. Few members of the public have had an opportunity to interact with — much less buy — the virtual and augmented reality technology that these companies are developing.Yet investors and entrepreneurs believe that headsets made to immerse people in digital worlds are the next giant moneymakers in technology, setting off an investor frenzy rarely seen since the early days of the web and mobile markets. Virtual reality start-ups are multiplying, venture capital is pouring into them and the believers are expressing blue-sky thinking about how the new products could reshape entertainment, communications and work.

• Diagnosing Yahoo’s Ills: Ugly Math in Marissa Mayer’s Reign: Let’s do some basic math about Yahoosince Marissa Mayer took the helm over three years ago. She paid about $3 billion for acquisitions of companies you’ve mostly never heard of, like Aviate, Polyvore and Distill (and one company you may have heard of, Tumblr). She spent $9.4 billion on stock buybacks; over the last two years, when the stock was trading higher, the buybacks have been a $2.5 billion money-losing trade. About $365 million of compensation went to Ms. Mayer herself, assuming she stays for an additional year and a half. And $109 million to an executive she hired to be her chief operating officer, who was then summarily fired 15 months later. An estimated $450 million on free food for the staff. And, depending on whom you believe, double-digit millions of dollars on parties and events, including a “Great Gatsby”-themed holiday party several weeks ago that was held with no apparent irony. Many of those figures come from a devastating new presentation sent to Yahoo’s board over the weekend by Eric Jackson, who runs a small hedge fund called SpringOwl Asset Management and who has long railed about the company’s missteps.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, July 20

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Apple Waits as App Developers Study Who’s Buying Its Watch: In the months surrounding the much-ballyhooed release of the Apple Watch, Apple managers courted Facebook in the hopes that the social networking giant would make a software application for the new gadget. Facebook was not persuaded. Three months after the watch’s release, there is no Facebook app tailored for it. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Facebook’s news feed, said the social network had been studying the Apple Watch but had not figured out how to deliver a good Facebook experience — including the news feed’s stream of posts, photos and videos — on such a small screen. The lack of support from Facebook — and from other popular app makers like Snapchat and Google, which also do not have apps for Apple Watch — underscores the skepticism that remains in the technology community about the wearable device. That puts the watch, Apple’s first new product since the iPad in 2010, in something of a Catch-22: The companies whose apps would most likely prompt more people to buy the device are waiting to see who is buying it and how they use it. Another challenge with the Apple Watch software system is that apps have to process all the data on the iPhone and then beam it to the watch, limiting what the Apple Watch apps can do. The next version of the software, which will be released in the fall, will remedy this by letting developers write apps that run directly on the watch, relying on the iPhone mostly for the Internet connection. That doesn’t mean the Apple Watch lacks apps. Apple released the device in April with more than 3,000 apps — far more than the 500 that were available for the iPhone when the App Store opened in 2008. Yet only five of the 20 most popular free iPhone apps in the United States have versions for the Apple Watch, according to data from App Annie, an analytics firm. And the number of apps for the watch, which now stands at about 7,400, is growing at a slower rate than the explosive uptick of apps that were produced for iPhones and iPads in their early days. While the number of apps for the watch jumped 142 percent in the first three months, that compared to 437 percent for the iPhone and 200 percent for the iPad, according to data provided by App Annie.


• Tesla Offers New ‘Ludicrous Mode’: Zero to 60 in 2.8 Seconds: Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk introduced a new “Ludicrous Mode” for the dual-motor version of the Model S during a call on Friday, allowing the all-electric sedan to go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.8 seconds. The upgrade costs an additional $10,000 for new buyers and results in a 10 percent acceleration improvement. The hold music before the conference call began was a loop of the rap song Beast Mode by Ludacris. Tesla will also offer Ludicrous Mode for its coming Model X SUV, which will probably clock in at zero to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds, according to Musk. “We haven’t tested it yet, so that’s just a guess,” he said. “That’s mad for an SUV, obviously.” Here’s how Tesla squeezed out the extra juice to go from insane to ludicrous. The limiting factor for acceleration during the first 30 mph is traction—basically getting the wheels to stay connected to earth. Tesla had already solved that engineering roadblock. The limiting factor when accelerating from 30 mph to 60 mph, on the other hand, is pulling enough current from the battery pack.


• Google Adds a Record $60 Billion to Its Stock in One Day: The search-engine giant added $65 billion to its market capitalization today, more than the size of Hewlett-Packard Co. The surge, following earnings that topped analyst estimates, is the biggest one-day gain in value ever for a U.S. company, according to data compiled by Standard and Poor's Dow Jones Indices. Apple held the previous record, with a $46.4 billion surge in April 2012. Google’s rally pushed the Mountain View, California-based company further ahead of Microsoft Corp. in rankings of the world’s biggest companies, sending its value to about $468 billion compared with the software giant’s $377 billion. The shares are up 26 percent in five days, the biggest one-week advance since it went public in 2004. Thursday’s report marked the first time since 2013 that Google has announced quarterly adjusted earnings per share higher than expectations. Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, who joined the company in May, also signaled plans to bring more restraint to spending at the Internet search giant.


• Etsy Surges Most Since IPO on Mention in Google Revenue Call: Etsy surged the most since it went public, after Google said the online artisan marketplace is seeing a boost in traffic from mobile-search results. Etsy gained 31 percent to $21.98 at the close in New York, the biggest climb since its IPO on April 16. The shares had increased 5.2 percent from the stock’s debut through Thursday’s close. Brooklyn-based Etsy, a platform where sellers offer homemade and vintage items ranging from jewelry to wall art, has been trying to boost sales after its first-quarter net loss widened. Google’s “deep links,” which redirect users to mobile applications when they click results from a Web search, could help Etsy lure more shoppers to its marketplace.“Developers like Etsy are already seeing a boost in traffic as a result of deep linking,” Omid Kordestani, Google’s chief business officer, said on an earnings phone call Thursday. Etsy’s sudden spike may be creating what’s called a short squeeze -- meaning traders who were betting against the company have to cover their positions at the higher price, leading to swings in the stock.


• China central bank issues guidelines on internet finance development: The central bank called on the government to support internet firms in setting up platforms for expenditures and loans, crowdfunding, the sale of financial products and other financing platforms. It called for broadening channels of financing and supporting private investment funds to back the internet finance industry. The bank also recommended tax breaks for qualifying small enterprises including start-ups, saying that provincial level governments should increase their support for those companies.


• Indian PC market dips as smartphone, tablet sales rise: PC market in the country has declined for the first time to 10.6 million units, falling over 10 per cent, on account of growing consumer preference for smartphones and tablets, industry body MAIT today said. According to MAIT-IMRB report, desktop and notebook market cumulatively stood at 11.8 million units in 2013-14. Smartphone market in 2014-15 grew 33 per cent to 69.6 million units, while phablets and tablets grew 527 per cent (50.8 million) and four per cent (3.4 million units) respectively. In revenue terms, the PC market declined to Rs 21,058 crore in 2014-15 from Rs 25,117 crore in the previous fiscal. For smartphones and tablets, the revenue was up 88 per cent to over Rs 65,815 crore in 2014-15 from Rs 34,900 crore a year ago. “The growth is expected to continue in 2015-16 with smartphones expected to grow 27 per cent, phablets 65 per cent and tablets 16 per cent,” he said. During the year 2014-15, server sales registered a growth of 30 per cent over the last financial year at 1,82,727 units. The overall size of Indian ICT hardware market, which comprises printers, servers and computers among others, stood at USD 15.87 billion, showing a growth of 23.98 per cent over the previous year.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, July 7

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• As Google and Uber Circle Each Other, Google to Test Carpooling Service in Israel: Google said on Monday that it would start testing a carpooling service in Tel Aviv through Waze, the Israeli social mapping start-up that the company bought in 2013 for $1 billion. Unlike similar services offered by the likes of Uber, Google’s carpooling service will allow drivers to recoup only the cost of gas and wear and tear to their vehicles. Drivers will not be able to use the app to offer traditional taxi services. The service, which is currently available only in Israel, is part of Google’s increasing moves into the territory of Uber, the ride-booking service in which the search giant has invested millions of dollars through Google Ventures, its venture capital unit. Over the last year, tensions between the two companies have mounted as both jockey to offer people new services like self-driving cars and on-demand delivery of goods like groceries. Uber, which is valued at roughly $50 billion, has announced plans to develop autonomous cars, and has a team of engineers working on digital mapping technology. The company also has made a tentative offer for Nokia’s digital mapping unit. Uber has started its own carpooling service in the United States, which allows users to divide the cost of a ride when traveling in the same direction.


• Samsung Profit Misses Estimates on Galaxy S6 Phone Struggles: Samsung Electronics posted second-quarter profit that missed analysts’ estimates as shortages of new smartphones made it harder to lure customers from Apple’s iPhone and cheaper devices made in China. Operating income fell 4 percent to 6.9 trillion won ($6.1 billion) in the three months ended June, the company said in a filing Tuesday. That compares with the 7.2 trillion won average of 33 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Samsung’s seventh straight profit drop comes as Galaxy S6 phone sales have fallen short after winning early praise as a device that could attract users that had shifted to Apple’s iPhone 6. Production constraints for the model with a curved display have led to shortages, trimming sales of the device and forcing the company to rely more on its chip unit for earnings. The company's shares were little changed in trading in Seoul.


• Mood-changing wearable tech sets pulses racing: Doppel is a new breed of wearable device, one that its developers say can actually change the wearer's mood by delivering a tactile beat to their wrist. The makers of 'doppel' call it the next generation of wearable technology - one that can actually change the mood of the user. They say the device taps in to the body's natural rhythm and gives the wearer control over how alert or relaxed they are. Similar to the way that upbeat music can motivate the body, while downbeat music relaxes; doppel provides a tactile beat to the wearer's wrist that they can adjust to make themselves feel more alert or relaxed. Doppel is synchronized to each individual via a smartphone app that measures their resting heart rate. This is all the information needed for the device to tap into the body's natural response to external rhythms. Team Turquoise says prototype models have been successfully tested on hundreds of people. They say doppel was also independently tested by psychologists at Royal Holloway University of London; with their controlled tests showing the device can improve alertness when correctly set to the user's preference. The team is planning further independent tests aimed at validating doppel's ability to calm people down and reduce anxiety. They recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to turn their prototypes in to consumer-ready models, with backers to be the first to get their hands on their own doppel.


• Search After the Search Box: Google Now Pushes Into the Next Frontier of Mobile Behavior: Google Now, an intelligence layer on Android and the Google app that was launched in 2011 is beginning to spring to life. In January, the service started integrating with popular apps, pushing notifications customized around personal data. This summer the product team is rolling out Now on Tap, a new Android feature that weaves Now into apps (and, likely soon, mobile websites). It’s search without the search bar — and, sometimes, without the query. Aparna Chennapragada, the Google executive who has run Google Now, its AI-driven smart personal assistant, since the start of this year, spelled out the three-pronged direction of the product — what she called the “bets” her team is taking. The first bet was embedding Now with Google’s full “Knowledge Graph” — the billions-thick Web of people, places and things and their many interconnections. The second is context. Now groks both the user’s location and the myriad of signals from others in the same spot. If you enter a mall, Now will tailor cards to what people in that mall typically ask for. And this is where the third benchmark for Now comes in: Tying that context to the apps on your phone, or ones you have yet to download. In two years, Google has indexed some 50 billion links within apps. In April, it began listing install links to apps deemed relevant in search. Indexed apps will be included in Now on Tap when it arrives in the latest Android version this fall.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, June 30

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet.

• Amazon looks to offer loans to sellers in eight countries including India: Amazon.com will start a business loan program for small sellers in the United Kingdom on Tuesday and is looking to launch it this year in seven more countries including India. Until now, the e-retailer has offered the service only in the United States and Japan. Amazon Lending, founded in 2012, plans to offer short-term working capital loans in other countries where it operates a third-party, seller-run marketplace business. The countries are Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and China, where credit is becoming a key factor in competing for new vendors and grabbing market share. The service is on an invite-only basis and is not open to all sellers on Amazon's platform. Amazon said it can safely offer loans based on internal data and because it takes loan payments out of the sales proceeds it pays sellers. Amazon offers three- to six-month loans of $1,000 to $600,000 to help merchants buy inventory. It makes money on interest and takes a cut of all sales on its marketplace, which now account for about 40 percent of total Amazon site sales. Amazon said it has offered hundreds of millions of dollars in loans since 2012, with more than half of its sellers opting for a repeat loan. Sellers interviewed by Reuters and writing on Amazon forums cited interest rates on Amazon loans ranging from 6 percent to 14 percent, in line with loans from banks and business credit cards. Stephan Aarstol, chief executive of Tower Paddle Boards, an Amazon seller, said he has taken four loans from the company starting in March 2014 because of the speed and simplicity of the process. It took him five days to get his first loan.


• Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 Jobs: Microsoft is shutting down its Web display advertising business and handing operations over to AOL and AppNexus, a person with knowledge of the matter said. About 1,200 jobs at Microsoft will be impacted, with some positions to be moved to AOL and AppNexus. Some people will be offered other positions at Microsoft, while other jobs will be cut, the person said.


• Uber Bonds Term Sheet Reveals $470 Million in Operating Losses on $415 Million in Revenue: Uber is telling prospective investors that it generates $470 million in operating losses on $415 million in revenue, according to a document provided to prospective investors. The term sheet viewed by Bloomberg News, which is being used to sell $1 billion to $1.2 billion in convertible bonds, doesn’t make clear the time period for those results. The document also touts 300 percent year-over-year growth. Investors in this round will be able to convert the notes at a compounded 11.5 percent discount if the company sells shares on the public market, the document shows. The bonds mature in 2022, with an 8 percent annual return if held through maturity. Uber aims to complete the deal by Tuesday, according to the document. The car-booking startup has been on a spree to raise cash. Uber is negotiating a $2 billion credit line from a group of Wall Street banks, a person with knowledge of the situation said last week. Earlier this year, it raised $1.6 billion in convertible debt from Goldman Sachs wealth-management clients, which valued the company at $40 billion. “These are substantially old numbers that do not reflect business activities today,” Uber spokeswoman Nairi Hourdajian said in an e-mail. Hourdajian declined to say why the numbers are being used to promote a current funding round.


• Uber to Acquire Mapping Technology and Know-How From Microsoft: Uber will acquire a portion of Microsoft’s maps technology and extend employment offers to around 100 engineers on Microsoft’s mapping team. Uber would not discuss the terms of the acquisition, which will bring it a data site outside Boulder, Colo., as well as cameras, image-analysis software and a license to the intellectual property. Although most Uber services rely on digital maps, much of its interest in mapping is focused on how to improve its carpooling service, UberPool. While Uber relies heavily on mapping technology from Apple, Baidu and especially Google, the company has taken strides to bring as much mapping expertise in-house as possible. Microsoft said the deal on Monday was part of a broader strategy to focus on its core products.


• The Apple Watch Hasn't Killed Fitbit: Two months after the Apple Watch launch, the leading wrist-based fitness tracking company is doing just fine. The Apple Watch was expected to be a disaster for companies like Fitbit. It hasn’t been. While Fitbit’s sales dipped as anticipation for Apple’s smartwatch grew, the company has bounced back this spring and appears to be doing just fine, according to data provided exclusively to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. After Apple’s monster first week, Fitbit products have actually outsold Apple Watches, according to Slice. Slice collects data from the e-mailed receipts of about 2.5 million people. Over the past year, Fitbit has outsold the rest of the fitness tracking market combined (excluding Apple). While the entire industry saw a bump during last year’s holiday season, companies such as Jawbone, Garmin, and Samsung saw their wearable sales decline quickly after Christmas. Fitbit’s never dropped to their pre-holiday levels, and began ramping up again this spring. People are seeking out Fitbit products specifically. When people buy Fitbit products online, the most common place they’re doing it is on the company’s own website. More than 43 percent of Fitbit sales take place on Fitbit.com, slightly edging out Amazon, which accounts for 40 percent of online sales of Fitbit devices. Apple Watch's and Fitbit's consumer bases don’t overlap much. Fitbit is tightly focused on fitness. Apple pitches its product as a more general-use device. There's also a significant difference in price, with Fitbit devices ranging from $60 to $250 and the Apple watch starting at $350 and going straight up to ridiculous. According to Slice, less than 5 percent of people who bought a Fitbit since the end of 2013 have also purchased an Apple Watch. For now, it seems like there’s room in wearable computing for both companies—but maybe not anyone else.


• Quikr is reportedly in talks to acquire Housing.com: Online classifieds firm Quikr is in talks to acquire real estate portal Housing.com.When contacted, co-founder and CEO of Housing.com Rahul Yadav confirmed the news but only to retract it later. SoftBank had invested in the promising online realty startup close to $90 million in December 2014 valuing the company around $270 million. SoftBank is said to have initiated talks with the potential acquirer Quikr, which has been looking to strengthen its newly launched property sales vertical QuikrHomes by way of inorganic expansion. The sale efforts seem to have been initiated by its investors as they are trying to salvage their investment in the company.


• With New Budgeting Tools, AWS Makes It Easier For Developers To Manage Costs: Amazon today announced two new tools that make it easier for developers to control their expenses on its AWS cloud computing platform. The first tool, called Budgets, allows AWS users to define a monthly budget for their AWS cost. As the name implies, this means you can now set up a budget for all of your AWS spending, or set up a specific budget for just the EC2 service, for example. Then, when you get close to exceeding your monthly budget — or when your forecasted cost exceeds 100 percent — AWS will send you an alert. In addition, AWS is launching a new tool for its Cost Explorer service today that tries to forecast monthly cost up to three months into the future. This service can look at data on an aggregate level, but more interestingly, it can look at specific services, tags, availability zones, purchase options and API operations. Given that there is probably some variability in how you use AWS in a given month, the service will also show confidence intervals for its prediction. Estimating AWS cost is something of an arcane art, which is only complicated by Amazon’s granular pricing structure. The more complex the app you’re hosting on AWS, the harder it gets to figure out how much it’ll cost to run it on Amazon’s service (which also makes it hard to compare AWS cost to other cloud platforms). These new services will hopefully make it a bit easier to at least keep track of AWS cost without having to resort to third-party tools.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, June 18

• Here is an MP3 version of this snippet

• Profitable and Growing Fast, Fitbit Prices I.P.O. at $4.1 Billion Valuation, Above Top of Its Range: Fitbit begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the symbol FIT. The company, which sells popular wearable fitness-tracking devices like the Fitbit Surge bracelet, priced its initial public offering at $20 a share on Wednesday, a dollar above its already heightened price range of $17 to $19 a share. At that level, the company will raise $732 million for itself and its selling stockholders after increasing the number of shares to be sold to 36.6 million from 34.5 million. The price values Fitbit at $4.1 billion. Its debut is a bet that consumers will continue to buy fitness bands as other, more complex smartwatches like the Apple Watch and various Android competitors hit stores. In addition to tracking users’ heart rates and steps, the newer devices offer access to email, text messages and other applications. Fitbit faces another challenge in the form of legal fights from a rival, Jawbone, which filed two lawsuits over the last month. One accuses the company of patent infringement, which could lead to a ban on importing Fitbit devices or important parts. The other accuses Fitbit of poaching employees who then illicitly stole confidential information from their former employer. Fitbit has denied those accusations. Investors for now appear undaunted by those challenges. Last year, Fitbit earned $131.8 million, reversing a nearly $52 million loss in the previous year. Its sales more than tripled during that same period, to $745.4 million.


• GitHub to Seek $2 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round: GitHub, a startup that helps companies and developers build software, is seeking to raise about $200 million in a new Series B round that may value San Francisco-based GitHub about $2 billion. The company works as a social coding platform, where a software developer can display a project and others can contribute. The company says more than 8 million people use the service, and it charges monthly subscriptions to store programming source code.


• Uber driver is an employee, not a contractor, California regulators say: California's Labor commission has ruled that an Uber driver was an employee, not a contractor, a potentially costly precedent for the ride-sharing company. Uber unsuccessfully argued to the commission that drivers on its ride-hailing smartphone platform aren't employees, because it doesn't set their hours or force them to pick up riders. The commission ruled that Uber was more than a passive platform connecting drivers and riders. Instead, the commission said in its ruling, Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation,” vetting drivers, setting standards and establishing non-negotiable rates. The company can also kick drivers off the service if customers give them a low rating. Currently, Uber drivers take an 80 percent cut of fares, but they cover their own costs and pay their own taxes. The ruling could set a broad precedent if it is upheld. For Uber, the implications of counting its drivers as employees rather than contractors are substantial. It would suddenly have to pay for employees' health care benefits, worker’s compensation and payroll taxes, and be on the hook for costs like gas and car maintenance.


• Oracle sales, profit miss estimates; shares fall: Shares of Oracle, often seen as a barometer for the technology sector, fell 6 percent to $42.15 in extended trading after the company's earnings report.Revenue fell 5.4 percent to $10.71 billion. Revenue rose 3 percent on a constant currency basis. Net income fell to $2.76 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended May 31, from $3.65 billion, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales from Oracle's cloud-computing software and platform service, an area keenly watched by investors, rose 29 percent to $416 million.


• Location Intelligence firm AdNear expands into Europe: Bangalore and Singapore-based AdNear Pte Ltd, which helps brands reach out to audiences by analysing time-bound location data, has ventured into Europe by establishing a beachhead in London. The company has appointed Ken Parnham, former managing director of data privacy management company TrustE, as general manager of Europe. AdNear was founded by Anil Mathews, who is also the company’s CEO, back in 2009. The company’s advertising platform is built on a proprietary hybrid geo-location platform, which helps to provide location awareness on mobile phones without GPS or operator assistance. It serves clients in India, Singapore, Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. AdNear leverages real geo-location, combined with consumer behaviour, to target relevant users within a geo-fence. All ads are displayed within mobile apps and they ensure further engagement as users can find their way to the advertised stores and use coupons among other things. Recently, the company had raised Series B funding of $19 million from Telstra Ventures, Global Brain, Sequoia Capital and JPM Private Equity Group. In November 2012, Adnear had raised $6.3 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners.


• 4 Microsoft Executives to Leave in Top-Level Shake-Up: Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under Satya Nadella, its chief executive. Mr. Nadella said that three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into fewer groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, former chief executive of Nokia, who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, head of its business solutions group. While Microsoft has a long history of bureaucratic reshufflings, they do not typically involve the departure of so many executives at once. Mr. Nadella’s decision to merge several groups into others effectively left a handful of Microsoft executives without clear roles. By far, the most significant of the changes is the merging of devices, which includes Xbox, Surface tablets, smartphones and other hardware products, with the Windows organization under Mr. Myerson. By grouping hardware and operating systems under one leader, the move undoes part of the reorganization by Mr. Ballmer.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 16

• Boomerang Commerce Launches A/B Testing Platform For Pricing: Boomerang Commerce, a startup that helps online retailers optimize their pricing and a 2014 Disrupt NY Startup Battlefield finalist, today announced the launch of its A/B testing service for pricing. Marketers love A/B testing to see which message works best, but when it comes to pricing, offering two different customers two different prices for the same product can quickly become a recipe for disaster. You’re bound to upset some customers, after all, when they find out they paid more for a product than somebody else. Boomerang CEO Guru Hariharan acknowledges as much. “You can’t just use standard tools,” he said. “If you do that, you’ll lose trust. More often than not, it’s a bad idea.” So what Boomerang does is allow retailers to test different pricing strategies and algorithms across a small group of products, for example, to test which ones maximize the retailers revenues and profits. The idea here then is less about charging customer A one price and customer B another, but to see which pricing strategies work better. Say you have 100,000 products in your inventory (the company only works with very large retailers that do $25 million or more in online sales). Boomerang now lets them take a representative set of 500 of these and test different pricing strategies on them. “Merchandizers and analysts at click and mortar retailers have had to wait months to draw conclusive results from price tests,” Hariharan said. “In the digital world, you don’t have that kind of luxury with time and need to make decisions as quickly as possible – often with limited data. This is why we believe that facilitating rapid testing of pricing strategies would help them figure out a way to set the right prices for their products in a timely manner.” Besides A/B testing, Boomerang also launched a number of other new products over the last couple of months, including a price optimizer that helps retailers manage a product’s pricing lifecycle from introductory pricing all the way to clearance markdowns. The company also recently launched an improve competitive pricing intelligence service that helps retailers stay on top of what their competitors are charging. The company has grown from 15 employees a year ago to 70 employees now. Hariharan tells me Boomerang’s software now manages about $2 billion in sales every year.

• Six percent of U.S. adults plan to buy Apple Watch - that would out-pace Wall Street estimates - according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll: About 6 percent of U.S. adults plan to buy Apple Inc's smartwatch according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, with men twice as likely as women to purchase Apple boss Tim Cook's first new major product. If calculated based on 2014 U.S. Census projections, and excluding younger teens, this could mean potential sales of about 15 million watches, if those who said they intended to buy follow through with an actual purchase. Wall Street estimates had varied widely between 10 million and 32 million worldwide sales in 2015. Van Baker, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner, said the Reuters poll results indicated a "pretty high percentage" was interested in buying. "It should serve Apple well if they can even get close to that," he said. The poll showed the watch, marketed by Apple as a high-fashion item as well as a new frontier in technology, appealed to fewer than 4 percent of women compared with 9 percent of men Samsung Electronics, Sony Corp and LG Electronics have all released their own smartwatches, many of them powered by software developed by Internet company Google Inc. None have given sales figures but independent researcher Smartwatch Group estimates that 6.8 million smartwatches were sold worldwide last year, led by Samsung with about 1.2 million units. The Apple Watch, priced from $349 for a basic Sport model to a $17,000 gold timepiece, lets users check email, listen to music and make phone calls when paired with an iPhone. Reviews have generally praised its style but criticized battery life and slow-loading apps. According to the poll, adults aged between 30 and 39 were the most likely buyers, with 13 percent saying they planed to buy an Apple Watch, followed by 10 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds. Just under a third of respondents said they already own an iPhone. Not surprisingly, iPhone owners are more likely to spend money on the new Apple gadget, with about 15 percent saying they planed to buy.

• The EU formally accused Google of abusing its dominance: The European Union’s antitrust chief on Wednesday formally accused Google of abusing its dominance in web searches, bringing charges that could limit the giant American tech company’s moneymaking prowess. How Google responds in the case — the biggest since the case against Microsoft in the 2000s — and to what degree the accusations hamper its own business or aid its rivals remain to be seen. Google holds a roughly 90 percent share in the region’s search market, and the company contends that in both web searches and Android software it plays fair. If Google fails to rebut the formal charges, Ms. Vestager could levy a fine that could exceed €6 billion — about 10 percent of Google’s most recent annual revenue. But the largest single fine yet levied in such a case falls well short of that mark: The record is €1.1 billion in 2009 against Intel for abusing its dominance of the computer chip market. The Google case is the most weighty decision by Ms. Vestager since she took office late last year. But the decision to open a separate investigation, into whether Google’s use of its Android operating system, might turn out to be as significant. Regulators will look into whether Google abused its dominant position by pre-installing its apps and services onto Android smartphones that potentially gave Google preferential treatment compared with its rivals. The investigation could take years. More here: The European Union accused Google Inc on Wednesday of cheating consumers and competitors by distorting Web search results to favor its own shopping service, after a five-year investigation that could change the rules for business online. It also started another antitrust investigation into the Android mobile operating system, a key element in Google's strategy to maintain revenues from online advertising as people switch from Web browser searches to smartphone apps. Europe is very important to Google: The European market contributes about 35 percent of Google’s revenue, according to Carlos Kirjner, a New York-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Its market share in search exceeds 90 percent in most European markets, compared with about 65 percent in the U.S. Google dropped as much as 1.4 percent to $523.22 in New York trading. The shares fell 1 percent to $525.30 at 10:25 a.m. local time.

• Netflix Q1 earnings: Revenue +24% at $1.57B, shares soar 12% as subscriber count stands at 62M: Netflix Inc. said its video-streaming service topped 62 million subscribers worldwide, as original shows such as “House of Cards” drew new viewers globally. The shares soared to a record high. U.S. subscribers jumped by 2.28 million in the first quarter, while international accounts rose 2.6 million, the Los Gatos, California-based company said Wednesday on its website. Both figures beat the company’s Jan. 20 forecast. Sales grew 24 percent to $1.57 billion, matching analysts’ projections. Netflix is investing heavily in original programming to keep the U.S. business growing and support Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings’s international expansion. While new shows such as “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Bloodline” drove U.S. viewing, the rise of the U.S. dollar trimmed sales and contributed to losses overseas, the company said. “Netflix remains a subscriber growth momentum story,” Paul Sweeney, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said in an e-mail. “As long as domestic and international subscribers continue to grow, bulls will have a reason to buy the stock.” Netflix rose 12 percent to $534.07 in extended trading after results were announced. If that holds Thursday, it will mark an all-time high, with the market value of the company exceeding that of CBS Corp. The stock fell 0.7 percent to $475.46 at the close Wednesday in New York. So far this year, Netflix has advanced 39 percent, fourth-most among members of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. First-quarter net income fell to $24 million, or 38 cents a share, from $53.1 million, or 86 cents, as the strong dollar contributed to losses outside the U.S. Excluding that, profit was 77 cents, the company said. Analysts forecast profit of 63 cents, the average of 35 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Original programming is taking larger slice of Netflix’s content budget. The company’s obligations, which grew 30 percent last year, now total $9.8 billion. The growth in subscribers justifies the increasing costs, according to Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research. Netflix extended its service to Australia and New Zealand in March. It rolls out its streaming service in Japan later this year, its first market in Asia. The company plans to offer its service worldwide by the end of 2016, though it is unclear if that will include China. A report this week by UBS AG projected Netflix would reach 87 million subscribers outside the U.S. by 2020. That total now stands at 20.9 million. In total, Netflix forecasts 2.5 million new subscribers this quarter, including 600,000 in the U.S. and 1.9 million overseas.

• Hyperlocal grocery delivery startups are hot in India: Grofers raises $35M in Series B round, and PepperTap bags $10M two days after ZopNow’s $10M round: Hyper-local grocery and fresh food delivery platform Grofers, has raised $35 million (Rs 218 crore) from its existing investors Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital, the company said on Wednesday. Its second round of funding comes just two months after it closed a Series A fundraise worth $10 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia. The startup had previously raised seed funding from Sequoia and Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Zomato. Separate media reports, citing sources, pegged Grofer’s valuation in the new funding round in the $110-115 million range. The company said it will use the funds to add products in addition to expanding services to more cities. Founded by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa, Grofers allows users to order products ranging from grocery to pet supplies and baby care products online and enables delivery within 90 minutes. It allows consumers order products available at brick and mortar stores through the Grofers mobile app. The smartphone-based grocery delivery platform currently partners with more than 400 merchants in Bangalore, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. It expects to start delivering products in Hyderabad and Pune by next month. Grofers claims to have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of orders and expects to execute over 20,000 orders this month.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 13

• Apple Watch Sold Out Despite Scarce In-Store Crowds: (More here) Few people lined up at Apple Inc. stores from Beijing to New York to get a peek of the company’s new smartwatch, while online pre-orders pushed delivery dates for some versions into July. The Apple Watch, a test of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s ability to innovate, arrived Friday in stores in eight countries and Hong Kong for customers to preview. It officially goes on sale April 24, when delivery begins of devices that have been ordered. Delivery times quickly pushed passed that date, after Apple began taking online pre-orders about 3 a.m. in New York. By about 9 a.m. shipments of high-end versions, which can cost as much as $17,000, were delayed until June. All 10 versions of the entry-level Sport, which starts at $349, were delayed until June, according to the company’s U.S. website. Mid-tier models were being promised for delivery in four to six weeks, with four versions stretching into June or July. “We view this as an indication of solid demand paired with very limited supply, with supply being the most significant limiting factor,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos., said Friday in a note to investors.

• Amazon, Google aim to be Home Services Marketplaces: Some of the biggest names in e-commerce, along with a growing pool of start-ups, are vying for a chunk of the fragmented, quotidian, heretofore entirely local market of electricians, plumbers, dog walkers and other manual labor, known broadly as home services. The work may be mundane but the money and stakes are huge. Angie’s List, the 20-year-old subscription service that offers reviews of local service providers to members, estimates the home services industry is $400 billion. Others put it at more than $800 billion. “There are few pots of gold left as big as this on the Internet,” said Marco Zappacosta, chief executive and a co-founder of Thumbtack, a start-up that connects consumers with providers of a multitude of services, who then bid for their business. The idea is to bring the efficiency and capabilities of the web to some of the lowest-tech and least-transparent enterprises by connecting consumers with vetted service providers through online marketplaces. Most companies will then take a cut of each transaction that ensues. Last summer, Thumbtack received a big lift with a $100 million investment from Google Capital. Now, Google is exploring entering the same business itself. How Thumbtack fits into those plans is unclear, Mr. Zappacosta said. Other start-ups, like Pro.com, Porch and Redbeacon, are creating similar online marketplaces. Angie’s List, meanwhile, is elevating its game — last year it introduced a mobile app, called SnapFix, that lets a homeowner take a photo of, say, a broken screen door and receive bids to fix it. The efforts shuddered last month when Amazon announced it was starting Amazon Home Services, which provides consumers with a list of vetted and insured professionals to do things like mount a new television. Price quotes and scheduling are available during the checkout process. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, had already invested in Pro.com, and Amazon is working in partnership with TaskRabbit, another player. Already, said Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace, the company has 2.4 million serve offers covering more 700 types of services. “I can tell you that with 85 million customers purchasing products from Amazon that needed installation or assembly, customers have told us that Amazon Home Services fills an important need,” he said. Of course, this is not just about building your cat tree or mounting your TV. For Amazon it is another step toward becoming the conduit through which we buy everything, not just goods but services and entertainment as well. Amazon also takes a cut of each transaction, 20 percent for a TV mounting job, for example. Meanwhile, the offerings are veering away from the everyday and into the wacky. Amazon’s “other services” section lists goat grazing and “silk aerialist.” “Amazon is always focused on having the widest selection on earth,” Mr. Faricy said, “and we will do the same with services.”

• Twitter - which already makes 10% of its revenue from data licensing - shuts off its firehose to boost its data analytics business: Late on Friday, Twitter announced that it would no longer license the full stream of half a billion daily messages on its service to third-party resellers. Anyone who wants access to the stream, known as the fire hose, will soon have to license the data from Twitter directly. On the surface, the announcement affects just the two remaining buyers of Twitter data, DataSift and NTT, and also suggests that Twitter no longer wants to sell its data wholesale, just retail. But it’s also a deeper sign of the company’s intention to compete with — and perhaps cut out — many middlemen that profit from helping marketers make sense of the flood of tweets to run their businesses more intelligently. In a blog post, Twitter said the decision was a natural outgrowth of its acquisition of Gnip, the leading reseller of Twitter data, about a year ago. “Direct relationships help Twitter develop an understanding of customer needs, get direct feedback for the product road map and work more closely with data customers to enable the best possible solutions for the brands that rely on Twitter data to make better decisions,” wrote Zach Hofer-Shall, head of the company’s ecosystem program. What he didn’t say is that Twitter also thinks direct relationships will make more money. Last year, the company generated $147 million, or roughly 10 percent of its revenue, from data licensing and other services, and Twitter’s leaders see data as an area that they have only begun to mine. Chris Moody, the former chief of Gnip and now Twitter’s vice president for data strategy, sketched out the data vision at a November meeting with Wall Street analysts. “In the future, every significant business decision will have Twitter data as an input, because why wouldn’t you?” he said. “Why wouldn’t you add into your business decision-making, ‘What does the world think about this topic at this particular time or at a previous moment of time, maybe last year when we ran this campaign,’ that type of thing?” As an example, Mr. Moody described how T-Mobile scanned tweets from customers suggesting they were planning to dump the carrier because it didn’t offer the iPhone. T-Mobile later used that data to target those customers and persuade them to stay, cutting its churn by 50 percent. While Twitter primarily works with dozens of data analysis and software companies, such as Adobe, Spredfast and Salesforce.com, as a data supplier, it also wants to move up the value chain and eventually compete with those very same companies. It is already packaging its feed with data from other social sources, such as Yahoo’s Tumblr, and wants to expand that further. That’s a service that DataSift, one of the two resellers that were just cut off, also provides. And Twitter is working with business services companies like IBM to train thousands of consultants and conduct case studies of how Twitter data can transform specific industries. “We see the data licensing business as extremely complementary to the advertising business,” Mr. Moody said in a February interview. Once businesses understand the customer insights they get from tweets, he said, “when I want to advertise something, where would I turn? Twitter.”

• China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet: Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country. Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon. The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published on Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit. The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. The attacks against the services continued on Thursday, the researchers said, even though both sites appeared to be operating normally. But the researchers suggested that the system could have more powerful capabilities. With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content. “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.” The researchers, who have previously done extensive research into government surveillance tools, found that while the infrastructure and code for the attacks bear similarities to the Great Firewall, the attacks came from a separate device. The device has the ability not only to snoop on Internet traffic but also to alter the traffic and direct it — on a giant scale — to any website, in what is called a “man in the middle attack.” China’s new Internet weapon, the report says, is similar to one developed and used by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, a system outlined in classified documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former United States intelligence contractor. The American system, according to the documents, which were published by The Intercept, can deploy a system of programs that can intercept web traffic on a mass scale and redirect it to a site of their choosing. The N.S.A. and its partners appear to use the programs for targeted surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for an aggressive form of censorship.

• Spotify Said to Seek Financing to Value Music Site at $8 Billion: Spotify Ltd. is in the process of raising new financing that would value the largest subscription music-streaming service at about $8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That valuation is double what the company was worth when it raised money in November 2013. The latest round totals about $400 million, according to one of the individuals, and comes from a group that includes Goldman Sachs Group and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Spotify continues to raise money as it tries to build a global subscription music service before Apple Inc. or Google Inc., which are both pursuing the same market. Spotify has more than 60 million users, a quarter of whom pay $9.99 for a monthly, ad-free version. Like Pandora Media Inc., a public company valued at $3.55 billion, Spotify pays a large percentage of its revenue to record labels and publishers for the right to license their music. With sales of both CDs and digital downloads in decline, the three major record labels -- Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Corp.’s Sony Music Entertainment and Access Industries’ Warner Music Group -- view streaming as the key to future growth. Though the labels own a stake in Spotify, they have complained about the money they receive from the company and pushed for greater restrictions to its free service. Spotify has resisted those overtures, arguing that an appealing free service is the best way to lure customers who will then subscribe. Listeners must have a subscription to access the full offering on a mobile phone.

• Whatever Happened To PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Why do people still spin up and set up their own AWS and Compute Engine instances? Why have App Engine and Heroku and Elastic Beanstalk not conquered all? Is fine-grained control really that important? I suspect the reason is three-pronged: cost, lock-in, and culture. App Engine’s prices drop regularly, but they’re voluminous and confusing, and a single instance — a pretty puny virtual machine — costs more than a dollar day, not counting storage or bandwidth. Same for Heroku. You get more bang-per-buck by simply buying and running your own servers. You also get enormously larger headaches, and significantly slower development time; but that tradeoff isn’t worth it for many. Then there’s lock-in. Once you build your app atop App Engine’s custom APIs, you’re committed; there’s no easy way to back away and go to another provider. The lock-in is less for other PaaS providers, but it’s still there. There is no universal PaaS equivalent of de facto IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) standards such as OpenStack or Docker. The third, least valid, and arguably most powerful reason is culture. Companies don’t want to give up perceived control over their systems–even if that control is never worth its associated complexity–and sysadmins, understandably, don’t want to evolve themselves out of a job. The thing about all three of those reasons not to go PaaS, however, is that they’re temporary. Costs keep dropping. Culture keeps changing. And there are signs of slow movement towards interchangeable PaaS services and standards. (You could argue that Docker itself is a stride in that direction.) In the early days of electricity, factories all had their own generators; then, eventually, they moved to the grid. IaaS is the equivalent of every individual company getting their raw electrical power from the grid … but stepping it down with their own transformers and converting from three-phase to one-phase in-house. I suspect we’re still en route towards a largely PaaS world where server code mostly just runs, without developers knowing or caring about the servers in question. It’s just happening a little slower than I’d like.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, April 9

• Apple Watch Reviews: You’ll Want One, but You Don’t Need One: Should you buy an Apple Watch? The first reviews are here. The first reviews of the Apple Watch are in, and the verdict is: This is a good product with a bright future. But maybe don't buy one quite yet. That's not to say the reviews weren't glowing, because they were. Anyone who was hoping that the Watch would flop out of the box and fall short of the high standard that Apple boasts for its products is going to be disappointed. There's also no doubt, from these reviews, that Apple's smartwatch is immediately the best of its kind on the market. "[The] Apple Watch is, above all, a satisfying indulgence," writes Yahoo Tech's David Pogue. "It’s a luxury. You might buy it to bring you pleasure — and it will — much the way you might buy a really nice car, some really nice clothes, or a really nice entrée." Overall, reviewers say that the Watch works well, has the battery life it needs and features such as Apple Pay work well. Plus, the Watch just feels nice. But there are criticisms, and strong ones, about how far the product needs to go to appeal to everyone. At the very least, it certainly is -- to quote the headline on The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo review-- a device that comes into its own after a "steep learning curve." The gripes, as always, are the most telling part of the reviews. Manjoo, for example, warns that this is not necessarily a simple device to understand. That's contrary to Apple's normal reputation -- the iPhone, for example, is a great smartphone for technophobes because it's so easy to navigate. But that's not the market that should (or probably would) pick up the first generation of the Watch. Other criticisms range from the fact that the device is a little slow (Nilay Patel, The Verge) to complaints that it's still a little too clunky to be fashionable (Lauren Goode, Re/Code), which could pose a hurdle for wider adoption. Ed Baig at USA Today says that he also doesn't particularly like making phone calls on it -- though that's not going to stop him from buying one of his own. There are also some greater concerns about smoothly it actually works. Several reviewers said that apps made by companies other than Apple were slow to load and work on the Watch. That will improve over time as software developers get more comfortable with the platform, but is an early hiccup worth noting. It also relies on other Apple software such as the company's Siri voice control software, which Manjoo notes fails to work as often as it's successful. Mashable's Lance Ulanoff says that it's not spectacularly good at working as a fitness tracker, either. That's one of the main draws of the wearable market right now, as products such as Jawbone and Fitbit have shown, and one of the easiest markets for Apple to pick up. The convenience of having a fitness tracker with some phone functions might be enough to win converts, but it seems that, for now, fitness management isn't exactly a killer app for the Watch.

• Alibaba finance arm Ant Financial to launch online private bank in June: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's finance arm will launch its private internet bank, to be called MYbank in June, Yuan Leiming, Ant Financial's general manager of its finance division, told Reuters in an interview in Beijing on Thursday. Ant Financial will hold a 30 percent stake. Other shareholders will be: Shanghai Fosun Industrial Technology Development Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of Fosun International Ltd, with a 25 percent stake; a subsidiary of Wanxiang Group will hold 18 percent; and Ningbo Jinrun Asset Management will own 16 percent. Alibaba and affiliate Ant have big ambitions for financial services in China, which have traditionally been geared toward larger and state-owned businesses and neglected individuals and smaller enterprises.

• Facebook Launches Dedicated Web Interface For Messenger: Ever try to read a Facebook message on the web and get distracted by your News Feed and notifications? Well now Facebook has a way to let you use Messenger in peace from your web browser. Today it launched Messenger.com as a dedicated chat interface. It’s rolling out worldwide for English users, with support for more languages to come. You can still send messages from Facebook.com as always, but Messenger.com could become a favorite of busy users concerned with productivity, or those that use Facebook to chat with friends but don’t like the social content chaos of its main site. The company tells me the “dedicated desktop messaging experience” is “meant to be complimentary to the Messenger mobile app”. The move follows the launch of Facebook acquisition WhatsApp’s web interface in January. One big question is whether Facebook will release a desktop client for Messenger. That could rescue chat from the crowded web browser and make it instantly accessible with a single click from people’s desktops.

• YouTube Story #2: Google Plots New YouTube Subscription Service as Soon as This Year: Google Inc. plans to offer a subscriber version of YouTube as soon as this year, letting viewers see millions of videos without having to sit through ads. Revenue from the new feature, which will put Google into more direct competition with streaming services such as Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, will be shared with video creators, Google told them in an e-mail that was obtained by Bloomberg. The service may debut by the end of the year, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. "By creating a new paid offering, we'll generate a new source of revenue that will supplement your fast growing advertising service," the letter said. Google has been moving closer to charging users for content; the Web company introduced a subscription-style music service within YouTube in November, and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on talent and production facilities to boost original content on the video website, which has more than 1 billion monthly viewers. With ad-free subscriptions, Google is moving closer to competing with streaming services, including HBO Now (which debuted this week), for people's attention as they spend more time watching videos on the Web and on mobile devices. YouTube will offer all the same videos without ads for a monthly fee, which hasn't been set yet, according to the note. The service is also likely to include offline access. Google is alerting content creators because it wants them to agree to new terms that would let it include clips in the subscription product. "We're increasingly moving into an age where consumers are learning to avoid advertising," said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG. "Between DVRs, Netflix and now Amazon, we're increasingly learning to lead an ad-free life." The move to introduce subscriptions is part of a broader shift at Google to generate more income that isn't based on advertising.

• YouTube Story #2: YouTube video-sharing service is adding tools to make advertisements running on mobile devices more interactive, while cutting down on errant clicks. YouTube’s TrueView ads, which give visitors the option of skipping promotional clips before they’re over, will add a feature called cards to let advertisers highlight related content during videos, YouTube said Wednesday in a blog post. The new tools will also allow direct links to outside websites on mobile devices or desktop computers. In the past, only ads on desktops showed links and annotations. All YouTube video ads will also limit clickable links to boxes near the edge of the video player. In the past, viewers could click on any part of the display, making it more likely that they might accidentally engage with the video with a tap of a finger or mouse. Google is investing in YouTube’s services as it seeks to attract marketers to its platform amid competition from rivals such as Hulu LLC and Facebook Inc. The number of advertisers using TrueView ads, which aim to give users more control over how they watch promotions, jumped 45 percent last year, the Mountain View, California-based company said. The new tools aim to make it simpler for marketers to make their clips more engaging on any device, said Phil Farhi, the director of product for YouTube ads. “It allows us to do interactivity in a cross-screen world,” Farhi said in an interview. “The advertiser doesn’t have to create new assets for every screen.”

• Measuring Social ‘Trust’ to Make Loans: Alternative consumer lenders tend to fit into one of two camps: peer-to-peer marketplaces like Lending Tree and Prosper, and start-ups using data science to parse credit risk, like Affirm, Earnest and Zest Finance.Vouch Financial, which is emerging from its pilot testing phase this week, has an unusual spin on the data science approach. Big data lenders often analyze a person’s social network on LinkedIn or Facebook as one signal, among many, for hints about how reliable a payer a loan candidate is likely to be. But Vouch wants you to construct a social network of people who trust you financially — people who will, yes, vouch for you.The Vouch formula looks to back to a bygone era of banking when community bankers routinely asked their customers for “social character” references before granting loans. “We’ve taken that principle and digitized it,” said Yee Lee, co-founder and chief executive of Vouch.It also borrows from the concept of co-signing for loans, when a relative or friend is liable for repayment if the borrower turns out to be a deadbeat.Founded in 2013, Vouch made its first loan last October. By now, Mr. Lee said, Vouch has made “hundreds” of loans ranging in size from $500 to $15,000. They are installment loans with repayment typically stretched over 12 to 36 months.Borrowers build online trust networks by sending messages to friends and family members to vouch for them, and typically to commit some amount of money if the borrower does not repay. The people in the network are not asked to co-sign the loan in a traditional sense. But they are asked to explain their relationship to the person and commit an amount of money they will pay if the borrower does not repay. The commitment can be as little as $25 but has been up to $1,000 or more.So joining a person’s vouch network is an expression of trust in that person with a dollar amount placed on it. The vouchers sign an electronic agreement to pay, if necessary, that is legally enforceable, Mr. Lee explained.The members of a trust network fill out online surveys, identifying themselves — which is then verified by Vouch — and they agree to have their own credit histories looked up. Several thousand people, Mr. Lee said, have already joined the company’s networks of reciprocal trust. “We’re ingesting a lot of data,” Mr. Lee said.The company is really just getting started, but the idea is to collect data on trust signals and experience on lending, and build increasingly refined and accurate predictive models. Richard Lewis, Vouch’s chief risk officer, said the goal was to bring the concept of community banking reference checks into the digital age. “We want to make it analytic, quantifiable, scalable and fair,” he said. Mr. Lee provided a simplified example of different trust networks and lending decisions: Take two young people, both 22 years old, both living in Westwood, Calif., and both with 620 FICO scores — just into subprime territory by the traditional FICO yardstick of creditworthiness, which relies heavily on a person’s credit history. One borrower is a young man and has assembled a 10-person network. It’s a sizable number of trust connections, but they all come from the same address, the fraternity house at the university from which the borrower recently graduated. The second loan candidate is a young woman with only three people in her network. But one is her mother who is willing to vouch $1,000, and Mom has an 800 FICO score. And the other two people in her network live in Austin, Tex., and Newark., and have the same last name as the young woman. The 22-year-old young woman, Mr. Lee observed, would get somewhat better terms on her loan, given the strength rather than the breadth of her trust network. The start-up’s borrowers range in age from their 20s to 50s, across a demographic spectrum, but the most common loan use so far has been to pay off high-rate credit card debt, Mr. Lee said. Vouch has apparently done a lot of spade work with regulators. It is chartered, Mr. Lee said, in 50 states. To date, it has raised $3.6 million from venture capital firms including IDG Ventures and Greylock Partners.