Daily Tech Snippet: Monday January 12

• JD.com and Tencent back the same horse - to invest $1.55 billion in Chinese auto e-commerce site Bitauto: Chinese auto information website operator Bitauto Holdings Ltd said JD.com Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd would invest about $1.3 billion in the company, sending its shares sharply higher in early trading on Friday. E-commerce company JD.com and Tencent, best known for its communications app WeChat, will also invest a total of $250 million in Bitauto unit YiXin Capital Ltd. JD.com, China's No. 2 e-commerce company after Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, will invest $400 million in cash and about $750 million in resources to Bitauto, whose sites offer sales data and other information on new and used vehicles as well as customer reviews. Tencent will pay $150 million for its shares.

• Infosys weighs smart uses of its ~INR 35,000 Crore cash pile; stock up 7% on strong earnings (Q3 Rev INR 13,796 Crore, +6%, NI INR 3250 Crore, +13% Y/Y): Under new CEO Vishal Sikka Infosys, once a trendsetter for India's more than $100 billion IT outsourcing industry, has made a push for new age technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, which the CEO has said will help Infosys hit annual revenue growth rates of 15-18 percent over time. On Friday, Infosys said it was also using its workforce more efficiently, with a utilisation rate of 82.7 percent excluding trainees, its highest in 11 years. Attrition, or the number of people leaving or retiring, fell in absolute terms to 8,900 employees in the third quarter from 10,100 in the quarter before. India’s second largest software company reported a 13 percent on year increase in net profit to Rs 3,250 crore and 6 percent rise in revenue to Rs 13,796 crore for the quarter ended December, sending its shares soaring about 6 percent yesterday. The company’s cash and cash equivalents stood at Rs 34,873 crore as on 31 December. With a change in the top leadership, there are expectations that the company will start using this cash more productively. "We are interested in acquisition of small innovative companies. We are not interested in acquiring technologies from yesterday, but in acquiring technologies of tomorrow," Sikka had told analysts in a recent interaction. 

• Amazon takes 1.3 days on average to return cash, the quickest among online stores, and customers respond, according to new research from StellaService Inc., which tracks e-commerce data. While most Web stores will only pay once a return parcel is on its way, Amazon offers instant refunds for some purchases, issuing immediate credit and 30 days to return a product. Instead of tying up cash and preventing customers from buying other things, Amazon’s aim is to get people spending again. That’s especially critical during and after the annual holiday shopping season, when gift returns spike and consumers are predisposed to buy merchandise. Fast refunds are also important in Internet commerce because shoppers buy things they haven’t touched or tried, making return rates higher than in retail outlets. “Amazon is killing it on refunds and others should follow suit,” said Eduardo Vilar, chief executive officer of Returnly Technologies Inc., a San Francisco company that researches retail returns. “Customers who are given the right experience on a return are more loyal shoppers.” Amazon’s instant refund, which was rolled out quietly last year, gave the Web retailer the fastest refund-processing time out of 40 companies measured by StellaService. Amazon’s closest competitors in refund-processing speed include online furniture and home goods retailer Wayfair Inc. (W) and personal computer and printer-maker Hewlett-Packard Co., which both took about three days to issue refunds, according to StellaService. The average refund-processing time of the 40 companies tracked by the researcher was more than nine days.

• Offline retailers bet on smart in-store tech: Neiman Marcus is reinventing the mirror: The retailer announced Thursday that it has installed a MemoryMirror from MemoMi in its Walnut Creek, Calif. store. It plans to install two in its San Francisco store later this month and then two in Dallas. The mirror* allows for shoppers to compare in real time how different outfits look on them. After trying on clothes in the fitting room, a customer can head to the sales floor where the special “mirror” is located. A customer controls the mirror with an iPad, instructing it when to start recording or take photos. Then he or she can try on additional outfits, and compare video footage. Two outfits can be looked at side-by-side, and the mirror stores as many clips as the customer wants. So a customer could try on a dozen looks, take videos of each, and quickly compare how each look. There’s also the option to e-mail videos or photos to friends for their input, or share on social media. The MemoryMirror isn’t technically a mirror, but a 70-inch screen with a camera on top that films the consumer. MemoMi founder Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky says the secret sauce is its perspective distortion correction, which automatically sizes the mirror to fit the customer. So no matter if you’re standing four feet in front of it or 10 feet away, it proportions the mirror so the customer fills the shot. “The world is going in the direction of in-store devices and personalization. We want to make these devices as cheap as possible and give these services not only for luxury brands,” said Vilcovsky. Nordstrom and Rebecca Minkoff have also dabbled in the smart fitting room space, using eBay technology. MemoMi is working on adding features to its MemoryMirror that allow a customer to see how they look in different colors or patterns of the clothes they’re trying on. Vilcovsky also envisions one day technology such as this being available on consumers’ televisions.

• Box is finally close to $162M IPO, valulation likely lower than last round of funding: After months of delay, Box is finally close to making its stock market debut. Box, the online data storage provider, disclosed on Friday that it was seeking to raise up to $162.5 million in its initial public offering, as the company embarked on a road show for potential investors. (If demand proved high, the company could sell additional shares and raise up to $186.9 million.) In an amended prospectus, Box said that it planned to price its shares at $11 to $13 a share. At the midpoint of that range, the company would be valued at about $1.4 billion — less than the valuation the company fetched in a private $150 million fund-raising round last summer. Founded in 2005, Box became one of the most prominent independent providers of online storage and file sharing services, particularly for corporations. But the company has been somewhat overshadowed by the much bigger Dropbox, a member of the 11-digit club of start-ups with a $10 billion or more valuation, and rival file-sharing offerings from technology juggernauts like Google. According to its prospectus, Box still hasn’t turned a profit. It lost $121.5 million in the nine months ended Oct. 31, a slight narrowing from the same time in the previous year. Sales, however, jumped 80 percent during that same period, to $153.8 million. And Box has asserted that it has won clients like General Electric, DirecTV and AstraZeneca. The company first filed to go public last spring, but put off its I.P.O. plans as a sudden investor distaste for risky technology companies rippled through the markets. Since then, the start-up has waited for a more propitious time to make its stock market debut. Bankers and companies are betting that time is now. Last month, a number of technology start-ups, ranging from the peer-to-peer lending juggernaut Lending Club to the data analysis provider New Relic, enjoyed strong trading debuts. The company is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “BOX.”

• Americans teens switching to Snapchat, but adults are still loyal to Facebook; Instagram, Pinterest gaining, Twitter and LinkedIn losing: Pew study of user engagement: American Teenagers may be spending more time on messaging services like Snapchat, but American adults are still increasing their use of social networks, according to a new survey released Friday by the Pew Research Center. The Pew survey, conducted in September, found that 52 percent of Internet users regularly logged on to at least two social networks, up from 42 percent in Pew’s August 2013 survey. The percentage of adults using Facebook, the most general social network, stayed about the same, at 71 percent of the online population. But Pew found significant increases in the number of people using Instagram, a photo service owned by Facebook; Pinterest, a visually oriented service for “pinning” favorite items; LinkedIn, a business networking service; and Twitter, a microblogging service oriented toward real-time news and information. Facebook users were the most dedicated, with 70 percent logging in at least once a day. Nearly half of Instagram users visit the site daily. Twitter, which has reported slow user growth in recent quarters, saw fewer visits from its American users, according to the Pew study. Only 36 percent of them visit the site daily, the researchers found, compared with 46 percent in the 2013 survey. In a statement after the survey data was released, Twitter disputed the findings, saying, “Pew’s data is so wrong as to be laughable. As we said at our Analyst Day in November, 48 percent of our monthly active users in our top 20 markets use the service daily, and the U.S. is our top market,” said Rachel Millner, a Twitter spokeswoman. LinkedIn users also said they visited the site less frequently, although a dedicated core of 13 percent said they went at least once a day. What the numbers don’t reveal was the time people spent on each service. Because most social networks generate revenue from advertising, more time on the service means a greater opportunity for visitors to see ads. But the researchers did learn that for the median Facebook user, two-thirds of his or her friends weren’t “actual” friends at all. And less than half of adult Facebook users have friended their parents or children on the service.

• Cash collection can make the difference between life and death for a Saas business: how does one achieve rapid growth in a SaaS business while maintaining capital efficiency? By focusing on the timing of cash collection, not just cash spend. The timing of cash collection can drastically influence the cash consumption of a high-growth, recurring-revenue business significantly beyond what one would intuitively assume. This ultimately has implications on the attractiveness of a business or, at a minimum, the level of shareholder dilution it experiences over time and will become an increasing area of focus as the period of cheap growth capital slowly comes to an end. Let’s take two hypothetical early-to-mid stage, high-growth, recurring-revenue SaaS businesses and model them over a five-year period. We assume each company admirably grows annual GAAP revenue from $2M-$6M-$13M-$28M-$53M and enjoys a 100 percent annual renewal rate. Both companies have identical aggregate cost structures that are well over 100 percent of revenue, which is benchmarked on dozens of recent high-growth SaaS businesses we’ve evaluated or invested in, or that have gone public. As illustrated below, the two companies thus have identical GAAP bookings, revenues and operating income. The only difference is that the first company, Company M (“monthly”), is like most SaaS companies in that it gets paid cash monthly and ratably over the one year contract period. The second company, Company A (“advance”), collects the full annual contracted value in advance. The difference in cash consumption between the two companies is staggering. Company A would have burned $36 million less cash over the five-year period due to growing deferred revenue balances, to achieve the exact same revenue and bookings trajectory as Company M. This gap in cash consumption can be the difference between success and bankruptcy or moderate versus significant dilution for the founders and early investors. Company M burned more than three times the amount of capital as compared to Company A despite identical bookings, revenue growth and operating expenses. Who can afford to ignore this?

• Twitter Product Update #1: Twitter Will Launch Autoplay Video, but Here's How It Will Differ From Facebook Marketers have 6 seconds to entice users to click. Twitter is about to give marketers new ways to share videos with a feature the ad world has been asking for: autoplay. Twitter has been working on its built-in video system for months, which would finally give users and marketers a way to shoot footage within the app. However, the video capabilities will be different for users and brands. We spoke with industry insiders who saw Twitter's video pitch at CES, and here's what it will look like: Six-seconds to wow The autoplay feature allows marketers to create a six-second video preview, a quick opportunity to entice users to click. Choose wisely The six-second preview, however, does not have to be the first six of the video. Brands can take the best six seconds, the most captivating, and use that as the autoplay preview. Everyone knows that getting clicks on video is all about an exciting hook from the start. No sound to start The autoplay video will not have sound until a user clicks to watch the promoted tweet. Advertisers don't pay until they get that click. There's a lot of time to play with Brands will be offered up to 10 minutes of video time, which is an eternity in social media. Everyday users will only get 30 seconds.

• Twitter Product Update #2: Twitter Plans To Increase Revenue With Ads On Publisher’s Apps: Twitter reportedly has a new advertising strategy – sell ads within third-party apps. According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media network revealed the new plan to expand advertising revenue during a presentation at CES. The social media company is planning to sell ads within streams of tweets on other publishers’ apps and websites.” It isn’t clear which publishers have signed up so far. The WSJ says there were references to ESPN’s Sports Center app and Flipboard during the meeting. Twitter and ESPN have reportedly been chatting about the idea

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday January 9

• CommonFloor raises funding from Google Capital; prospect of lower interest rates propeling India Real Estate Tech: CommonFloor.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Google Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of tech giant Google Inc. The fresh funding comes just three months after the firm grabbed $30 million (Rs 181 crore) in Series E round of funding from existing investor Tiger Global Management. This is Google Capital’s second investment in India following its investment in SaaS-based customer support solutions startup Freshdesk Inc in mid-2014 and the third ever in Asia. So far, since its launch in the summer of 2013, Google Capital has made just ten bets, seven of them in the US. The only ones outside America are Chinese optical components maker Innolight, India’s cloud-based customer support software maker Freshdesk, which is headquartered in San Francisco, and now CommonFloor. A lowering of home loan rates, a relaxation of FDI (foreign direct investment) in construction, and an improvement in business sentiment after a new government took over in India last year have given the real estate sector a boost.

• Apple’s Cut From App Sales Reached $4.5 Billion in 2014: Apple continues to make billions of dollars from mobile apps sold in its App Store. The company said on Thursday that in 2014, billings from app sales rose 50 percent from the previous year, which results in roughly $15 billion in revenue for app developers and a $4.5 billion cut for Apple. Apple takes a 30-percent cut of each app sale made in its App Store. The $4.5 billion sum is a tiny sliver for Apple, which makes more than $180 billion in annual sales. But it is still a considerable sum for providing a storefront for developers to sell their apps. By comparison, Google’s Android is the largest mobile operating system in the world, but its app store, Google Play, generates far less money than Apple’s. That’s partly because Apple’s iPhone customers are wealthier and spend more money than people who own Android phones. App Annie, an analytics firm that tracks mobile app sales, said that in the third quarter of 2014, Apple’s App Store revenue was 60 percent higher than revenue generated from Google Play. App Annie said it had not yet released numbers for annual sales for Google Play. In June 2014, Google said it had paid out $5 billion to developers in the previous 12 months. Gina Johnson, a Google spokeswoman, said the company did not have newer statistics to share. Apple said its App Store serves 1.4 million apps for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. Google Play hosts 1.72 million apps, according to App Annie.

• Activist investor urges Yahoo to dispose Alibaba stake in a tax-efficient manner and return money to shareholders - CEO Mayer seeks to spend and expand instead: In the letter, addressed to Mayer from Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith, the investor said it had become “increasingly concerned” by reports that the Web portal is looking to make major acquisitions. He reiterated that Yahoo should unlock value by monetizing assets -- which include stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan Corp. -- trimming costs and exploring a combination with AOL Inc. Starboard owned less than 1 percent of Yahoo, or about 7.7 million shares, as of September 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Yahoo’s performance has been increasingly in the spotlight since the initial public offering of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in September. Yahoo owned about a 24 percent piece of Alibaba, which had driven much of the Silicon Valley company’s value. Yahoo reaped a one-time boost of more than $9 billion before taxes from selling some Alibaba shares in the IPO and still retains a valuable stake of about 15 percent of the Chinese company. How Yahoo treats that stake has become a major debate, with options including a cash-rich split-off and a tax-efficient spinoff, among others. Starboard expressed “concerns” that Yahoo has made no announcement for a tax-efficient separation of the equity assets and criticized the possibility of a cash-rich split-off structure for those assets as unnecessarily complex. Starboard has spoken with large Yahoo shareholders, who also prefer a tax-efficient spinoff over a cash-rich split-off. In addition, he said Yahoo “must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL.” “Starboard has a point,” said Brett Harriss, an analyst at Gabelli & Co., who has a buy rating on Yahoo. “There are a lot of acquisitions that haven’t generated any financial returns.” He added that there’s a concern that Mayer is “not a steward of shareholder capital.”

• Messaging continues to rise as an eCommerce Platform: Line Launches A Taxi Booking Service In Japan Because Chat Apps Have Become Platforms Line Taxi is built into the existing Line app, just like its recently introduced payments service, and its launch pits the company against dominant player Uber and British rival Hailo. A messaging app integrating a taxi app might sound an odd pairing, but it has been done before. China’s top chat app WeChat tied up with taxi on-demand service Didi Dache last year and there’s been talk of Facebook Messenger integrating with Uber — a chat app launching its own taxi service is something unique, however. Line Japan has introduced taxi booking this week, but it also has plans for on-demand food delivery, it has its own maps app which could support online-to-offline commerce for retailers, and it is dabbling in social commerce too. There are also plans for a music streaming service — which will be global thanks to Line’s acquisition of MixRadio from Microsoft — and more than 30 apps and games are tied into its core chat service. Line isn’t alone in building out its messaging experience. WeChat is doing the same in China. This week parent company Tencent launched an online bank — WeBank — which is likely to become a focus of its messaging platform, alongside existing pushes into retail, payments, taxi-hailing and more.

• Facebook acquires a video startup that enhances low-bandwidth video-viewing and reduces buffering of videos without degradation in quality: Facebook has a acquired QuickFire Networks, a TC Disrupt 2014 Battlefield contestant that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news earlier today, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site. QuickFire’s tech speeds up encoding videos with different profiles for frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms. QuickFire’s solution relied on custom motherboards built to accommodate 11 high-end Intel Core i7 processors. Custom software let these processors work in unison, and a layer on top of that let the startup massively scale up by distributing work among multiple motherboards. For users, the end result of Facebook integrating QuickFire’s tech would be reduced buffering of videos without degradation in quality.

• Quick win for companies on customer support? Pay attention to tweets of complaint: Two new reports – one from cloud-based customer care software maker Freshdesk, and another from tech research firm Gartner – suggest that even the top global brands are doing an amazingly poor job of engaging with their customers on new age channels like social media and mobile. Freshdesk looked at the top 100 brands of 2014, according to consultancy firm Interbrand, and analyzed how they engaged with customers on Twitter during the week leading up to the holidays: December 15 – 22. And this is what it found: The top 100 brands on average responded to just 22 percent of tweets directed at them. These 100 brands each got 1,000 tweets a week on average, but only 37 of them have a dedicated handle to listen to customers. There were exceptions to this, but mostly in America – Samsung Support USA which goes by the handle @SamsungSupport responded to nearly all their tweets, as did @AskAmex for American Express, while @AdobeCare responded to a tweet in 26 minutes on average

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday January 8

• Samsung expects revenue down 12% Y/Y, operating profit down 40% Y/Y in OND as smartphone marketshare slumps; stock is up 1% though - on semiconductor business strength, Won weakness:  Thursday, Samsung said it operating profit and revenue probably fell almost 40 % and 12% in October to December 2014 compared with the same period in 2013. Marking the fifth consecutive quarter of decline in operating profit, Samsung’s forecast reflected continuing troubles for the company’s mobile division. Though it makes more smartphones than any other company, Samsung has had difficulty competing with a swarm of new Chinese rivals, which are offering ever more competitive phones at cheap prices in their home market, now the world’s largest for smartphones. In the period from July to September, Samsung’s global market share for smartphone sales fell 8 percent from the same period a year earlier to 24 percent, according to the research firm IDC. The only handset vendor in the top five to lose market share, Samsung is a sharp contrast to the Chinese upstart Xiaomi, which saw its market share jump 211 percent during the same period. Final fourth-quarter results are expected to be released at the end of January.

• Bad news for Google #1: US Search Marketshare at lowest level in years on Firefox's switch to Yahoo: Google dominance of the U.S. Internet search market slipped last month in the biggest drop since 2009 while Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) posted its largest share gain, as the companies grappled with the fallout of a search deal on Firefox browsers. Google’s slice of the U.S. search market fell to 75.2 percent in December from 79.3 percent a year ago, while Yahoo jumped to 10.4 percent from 7.4 percent, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That put Google at its smallest share of the U.S. Web search market since at least 2008, when StatCounter first started tracking the numbers, and the highest share for Yahoo since 2009. The changes were spurred by a deal in November where Yahoo replaced Google as the default search engine on Firefox browers in the U.S. Google had been the automatic search option for Firefox, which was developed by Mountain View, California-based Mozilla Corp., since 2004.

• Bad news for Google #2: Facebook video is freaking YouTube out (Also, 65% of Facebook's Video Views Are Now on Mobile Devices) Here are the other numbers the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company released in a blog post: In the last 12 months, the number of video posts per Facebook user has increased 75 percent globally and 94 percent in the United States. Internationally, clips from consumers and marketers in the newsfeed have risen 3.6 times year over year. On average, more than 50 percent of U.S. users who visit Facebook daily watch at least one video. From a HawkPartners study commissioned by Facebook that surveyed 2,418 Facebook users in the U.S., 76 percent said Facebook is the place where they most often discover videos. Other choices included YouTube, "directly from a friend," Google, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and others. While self-reported, the numbers lend themselves to a narrative that emerged at the end of 2014: Facebook has given Google's YouTube serious cause for concern after the latter dominated the online video space for years. Facebook is also evidently attempting to poach YouTube talent. "Google is freaking out," a media agency executive recently told Adweek.

• Bad news for Google #3: A TechCrunch columnist rips YouTube's product as stagnant and compares it to Yahoo: The great story of Silicon Valley: A company, once ahead of its time, ceases to innovate for almost a decade while continuing to make billions off its legacy business model — ad sales. Then that once-great company dies. In the proud American tradition of AOL, Yahoo, and GeoCities, I present YouTube. Ever notice how its homepage looks almost the same as it did in 2008? For the first time in a decade, YouTube’s dominance as the destination for video content is being challenged by rivals like Facebook. While the press admires the success of Bethany Mota and tours the lush new coastal YouTube studios, Facebook has spotted the company’s many weaknesses and is going on the attack 1. The dominant image is an advertisement (gross). 2. I have no interest in any of that recommended content. 3. I have no idea how that content surfaced to my main pain in the first place, which makes me think YouTube is kinda dumb. 4. I have no way to feed back into YouTube’s algorithm and say I hate their content, as suggested, for “me.” 5. The content is presented void of any context. How about some editorial, ratings, written jokes, or any other myriad ways that it could be made more meaningful? 6. Even BuzzFeed knows point No. 5, and they are the intellectual toilet of the Internet. Fix: Copy the Gawker “bored at work” business model; hire some editors. YouTube should challenge itself to perform more like BuzzFeed, which, for all its faults, does immediately engage the user off of its homepage content and context.

• CES loses its lustre - as smartphones lead, consumer electronics follow: “Today, what every customer expects is for their device to be a platform”: Technology fanatics descend every January on Las Vegas for the International CES, a colossal gathering of gadgetry and geekery where some of the world’s largest companies show off their best ideas for the future. This year, as in every recent year, the show has been burdened by existential angst, with many tech writers saying they planned to skip an event no longer seen as vital. It has been ages since anything momentous was unveiled at CES. But the travails of CES are a symptom of a larger transformation in tech. The era dominated by consumer electronics — what most of us call gadgets — is in turmoil. One reason is that many devices have been superseded by a single, all-powerful tool: the smartphone. Today, just about everything that once required a small, dedicated electronic device — from cameras to portable game consoles to GPS navigators to music players to too many others to name — works better as an app on a phone. At the same time, smartphones have created new categories of capabilities that have eclipsed gadgets as the tech industry’s center of energy and innovation. Photo apps like Instagram, messaging companies like WhatsApp and Snapchat, transportation systems like Uber and Lyft, and Apple Pay, the wireless payment system created by a company best known for its hardware. These services, powered by smart software, use our phones’ constant connection to the cloud, and their powers to connect us with one another, to create tech experiences that wouldn’t have been possible with the gadgets of yesteryear. None of them would ever have graced a stage at CES, because none of these things are really gadgets; they’re way more exciting than that. Here’s the important lesson for consumer electronics companies: The future of tech may not be in flashier, more powerful hardware, but instead in services enabled by clever software. The gadgets matter, but only if they allow for software that can create useful, perhaps groundbreaking services that work across all our gadgets. “Today, what every customer expects is for their device to be a platform,”

• India tech action: social/messaging product features are going mainstream: CommonFloor acqui-hires a college hyperlocal network, and Quikr adds instant messaging to its mobile app: CommonFloor.com has acqui-hired Bakfy, a hyper local Twitter-like social app for college campuses, from city-based Nativebeta Pvt Ltd in a cash-cum-equity deal. As per the agreement, Bakfy team will join CommonFloor as Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs), and will work closely with its founders to build products at the intersection of social and mobile. Bakfy is a mobile app that connects different college campus. It acts as a local Twitter for campuses where students can chit-chat about the daily happenings in their campuses or on any other topics. Bakfy puts the entire college under one roof, without any friend requests. It also connects disconnected colleges by providing an option to post to other college campuses. Students can also post anonymously and share stuff, which they can’t do on Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Typical use cases are gossip about day-to-day stuff, information sharing, college events/fests, jobs/internships, share secrets/feelings, share exam notes, etc. Bakfy is live in over 50 colleges across India. The startup was backed by Yogender Chhibber of Zinnov Management Consulting. Quikr has added instant messaging feature to its classifieds site Quikr.com that allows buyers and sellers to connect with each other. Named Quikr Nxt, the feature enables users to chat with multiple users and share images. Offline consumers get a notification so that they can chat once they are back online. Users can safeguard their privacy by opting to not share their mobile numbers. The new feature is also available on its mobile apps. Last September, Quikr had secured $60 million in funding from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Warburg Pincus and eBay Inc, besides Swedish investment firm Kinnevik. It competes with the likes of OLX among others.

• Small/Specialty Retailers were big winners in US December 2014 eCommerce sales analyzed by respected blog ChannelAdvisor: Other Winners: Amazon, Google Product Listing AdsLosers: eBay, Google Search: December 2014 Same Store Sales Results Amazon - Amazon’s December SSS came in at 21.8%, a decrease compared to November’s 35.7% . eBay - eBay’s December came in at 5.8% down from November’s 9.8% and below the e-commerce growth rate. Further in the report, we have details of the eBay internals. Other 3PM -3PM continued strong growth in December coming in at 28.5% a decrease from November’s 41.6%. CSE - Comparison Shopping Engines came in at -2.3% for December down from November’s 12.3%. This was largely driven by weakness in the traditional CSE segment that overshadowed strength in Google Shopping / PLA (details later). Search - Search came in at 9.4% for December a decrease from November’s 15.6% y/y growth. Later in the report we have more search details. The winning channels (those that grew in-line or ahead of this trend line) were: Other 3PM – Other 3PM grew more than 2X the baseline holiday growth rate, coming in at 34% y/y this year; and the fastest-growing e-commerce channel we track. I always get questions on this one so will restate here that ‘Other 3PM’ includes those marketplaces that are not eBay and Amazon such as NewEgg, Sears, BestBuy, Rakuten, Play, LaRadoute, etc.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday January 7

• After stellar year, Facebook stock finds doubters on rising opex, slowing growth (2015F 37% Y/Y, 2014F 57% Y/Y) : Facebook, up 195 percent in two years and trading at a record last month, is starting to draw skeptics in the options market. Options betting on a decline in Facebook cost the most versus bullish contracts since July 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Options with an exercise price 10 percent below the shares cost 3.1 points more than calls and climbed to 3.3 points above on Dec. 23, according to three-month implied-volatility data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with the one-year average of 1.3 points. “We’re not banking on seeing Facebook repeat the same great performance it had in 2014,” said Uppington, a technology portfolio manager at Lombard Odier in Geneva. His company oversees $50 billion. “It’s also seeing an increase in operating expenses. The company needs to invest in growth to overcome the law of large numbers.” Operating expenses rose in the third quarter at the fastest pace since the first three months of 2013, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The Menlo Park, California-based company has purchased applications such as Instagram and WhatsApp Inc. to increase its appeal to younger users and drive mobile advertising sales. Now analysts predict profit and revenue growth in 2015 won’t keep pace with the increases from last year. Facebook earnings will gain 12 percent this year after nearly doubling in 2014, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales will climb 37 percent after rising 57 percent last year, the projections show.

• Can Apple Do for Wearable Ads What Facebook Did for Mobile? Marketers predict brands will latch onto smartwatches TapSense this week unveiled what its programmatic ads for the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch will look like, exhibiting a buy-one-get-one-free mock offer from Starbucks. It's at least the second tech company to reveal a programmatic offering for wearables in the last few months, coming on the heels of FitAd's debut with Amtrak. This will be a space to watch in 2015—especially if Apple Watch becomes remotely close to as popular as the iPhone. Wearable device sales are generally expected to achieve significant growth over the next few years, according to researchers. Rest assured, marketers will pay to test return on investment with the emerging formats, and the additional revenue stream could be a boon to CEO Tim Cook's company. "Apple has the opportunity to seize this market of wearable ads, just like Facebook has seized mobile," said Esha Shah, manager of mobile strategy and innovation at Fetch. "Hyper-local ads and coupons could be part of that, as should larger ad opportunities, like voice-based mobile search," he added. Indeed, advertisements on one's wrist seem ripe for direct-response opportunities.

• Glassdoor raises $70M, valuation ~ $1B, preps for IPO: Glassdoor Inc, the operator of jobs website Glassdoor.com, said it raised $70 million from Google Capital and existing investors Tiger Global, Battery Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. Glassdoor, whose rivals include Monster Worldwide Inc, said it had raised about $160 million so far. Glassdoor has a valuation of close to $1 billion and is planning for an initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal said. Glassdoor said it had more than 27 million registered members worldwide. The company has over 2,000 employer clients including Groupon Inc, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Facebook Inc, Chevron Corp, Procter & Gamble Co and Twitter Inc. Glassdoor raised $50 million in December 2013 from a group led by Tiger Global.

• Payments story#1: Kickstarter abandons Amazon as payment processor, opts for Stripe instead: Crowdsourced fundraising site Kickstarter has dropped Amazon.com Inc as its global payments processor in favor of Stripe, the fast-growing startup used by Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc and Apple Inc. The switch comes as the Internet retailer begins to move clients from its customizable checkout service to an Amazon-branded one. In a blog post on Tuesday, Kickstarter said it made the switch after Amazon decided to drop its Flexible Payments Service, which allows a company to develop its own checkout process. The new Amazon-branded Login and Pay service does not offer as much flexibility. Some analysts have said Amazon has been held back in payments because merchants are wary of handing over customer data to the company, which is rapidly expanding into new areas and competing with sellers. In early December, Stripe raised $70 million from Sequoia Capital and other investors that valued the startup at $3.5 billion, double from a year earlier.

• Payments story #2: Rocket ties up with Philippines telco for payments solution in SE Asia: Ecommerce giant Rocket Internet and Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) today took a big step towards their goal of becoming a strong contender in online payments in the region. In a joint statement, the companies announced they’ve inked an agreement to form a 50-50 joint venture for online and mobile payment solutions, with a focus on emerging markets. This follows PLDT’s US$445 million investment in the Germany-based startup incubator. The joint venture particularly targets Rocket Internet’s ecommerce operations under brands such as Zalora and Lazada in Southeast Asia. Prior to this deal, the companies had begun making use of PLDT’s MePay. MePay is a payment service for shopping on Zalora’s site without a credit card.

• Big news in the US TV Market: Dish to launch Sling TV, a web TV service: What is Sling TV? Sling TV is a service by Dish Network, one of the country's largest satellite TV providers. When it officially goes online in a few weeks, it will cost $20 a month. For that you'll get access to about 30 channels — including TNT, Cartoon Network and CNN. These channels will be streamable over the Internet — or "over the top," in industry parlance. But the real kicker is that Dish is throwing in ESPN (more on that in a second). Why is Dish launching something like this? Dish wants to go after cord-cutters — a growing segment of TV watchers who don't subscribe to pay-TV and instead watch only free, over-the-air television, on-demand services like Netflix, or a mix of both. The drawback to being a cord-cutter is that you sometimes sacrifice channel choices. You don't get to watch HBO, for example, if you're a cord-cutter. But many people, particularly young viewers, don't seem to mind — and that's a problem for traditional pay-TV companies. What's the big deal about ESPN? Live sports is pretty much the foundation for all paid television.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday January 6

• Facebook buys a voice recognition platform that simplifies making a voice-enabled Facebook app; part of a bet on a "Build-Grow-Monetize" loop for app developers: Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it seem that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop where they get help building apps, but eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads. As part of Facebook, Wit.ai could help the company offer voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform, aid with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s understanding of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app you can navigate through speech. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in speech recognition and voice control. Without it, developers would need the expertise, time and resources to build a whole voice-recognition system themselves.

• Start-ups, giants rush to break down ‘Deep-Linking’ walls between Apps and Web: Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them. Say you want a hotel for a weekend stay. You could Google for deals or go to a travel site. But wherever you go on the web, you will not find the rooms on HotelTonight, an app that offers steep discounts for last-minute bookings. The only way to get those listings is to use the app. And if you find a few hotels on HotelTonight, you cannot email them to your spouse, because there are no links to send. As people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines. In tech speak, the problem is known as “deep linking,” the technological hurdle of giving apps some sort of links — those identifying lines of letters, dots and slashes that make up a web address or URL. Though deep linking is a worry for large tech firms, it is a big opportunity for start-ups looking to unseat them. For web giants, deep linking is a way to protect their businesses by creating mobile versions of things they do on the web. Take Google, which makes money helping people search the web. When people search in apps, it is mostly left out. And while the company has a fast-growing business selling apps through devices that use its Android operating system, that pales in comparison to its business selling search advertising. Google’s solution is App Indexing technology, a way to catalog app pages, letting Google’s search engine retrieve information from mobile applications as well as from web pages. Twitter has Twitter Cards, which make it possible to go from the Twitter app to another app in the user’s phone, rather than from the Twitter app to the web. If the user does not have the app he or she wants installed on a phone, Twitter will ask if the user wants to install it immediately. Facebook is trying to create an open standard of deep links to help apps connect to one another, so, for instance, someone could go from listening to a band in the Spotify app to finding information about the band’s live appearances in the Songkick app.

• "Unbundling" is causing US eCommerce order values to fall, as consumers spread purchases across multiple transactions: While sales were up overall this year, order value was down 8 percent from 2013, with the average order costing $119.33. Experts say these offers can prompt shoppers to "unbundle" their orders, meaning that shoppers may spread out their purchases over several transactions instead of scooping up slippers for Mom and "Frozen" pajamas for the kids in one order. According to data released Monday by IBM, sales on mobile devices rose by 27 percent in November and December over the same period last year. And yet sales made through smartphones and tablets still only accounted for about 23 percent of online sales overall, with a whopping 77 percent of sales coming from desktops and laptops. IBM also studied how social sites Facebook and Pinterest drive retail sales. The analysis found that shoppers who came to retailer's Web site through a Facebook post spent an average of $101.38 per order, while those who came from Pinterest spent $105.75. Henderson said a key difference might be that Facebook included a mix of sponsored ads and posts from friends, while Pinterest did not contain ads, a sign that perhaps the more curated, trusted content from friends was more effective at driving sales. (Pinterest began selling ads on Jan. 1, so that could sour some users' experience with the site in the future.) IBM found that total online sales were up a healthy 13.8 percent this holiday season compared to 2013, an uptick that was about in line with the 15 percent growth IBM had predicted. This year's increase was significantly larger than the 8.5 percent online sales increase recorded by IBM last year.

• Snapdeal invests in comparison site Smartprix - follows investments in recommendation engine Wishpicker, discovery platform Doozton: Snapdeal, has quietly picked a stake in Smartprix Web Private Limited, which runs online product and price comparison site Smartprix, sources privy to the development told Techcircle.in. This comes as yet another strategic move for Snapdeal in acquiring or getting an exposure to third-party e-commerce enabling ventures over the last year or so. It had recently acquired gifting recommendation venture Wishpicker besides snapping fashion products discovery platform Doozton around a year ago. It is learnt that Snapdeal had initially acquired 10 per cent stake in Smartprix in FY14 with the understanding to acquire a majority stake eventually. “Snapdeal’s VP engineering Amitabh Misra had joined the board of Smartprix as one of the directors,” said one of the sources. Smartprix was founded in May 2011 by then IIT-Delhi students Choudhary and Khandelwal who have dual degree in computer science and engineering. Smartprix.com is an online comparison shopping that helps users compare different products and choose the best product according to their needs. It also presents the pricing information of the product on different online stores and provides review, ranking and recommendations. Its product categories include mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras personal care appliances, accessories and books. The firm also features deals on all kinds of products and plans to introduce newer categories. The firm earns commission from the affiliates for every sale. To date, it has tied up with over 50 online stores. Snapdeal is not the first firm to eye a piece of a product price comparison engine. Amazon already runs a India specific price comparison site called Junglee.com There are several startups in the price comparison space, many of whom have managed to grab VC attention. Among these, Zopper.com raised $5 million led by Tiger Global Management LLC, PriceBag.com raised $2 million from angel investors, MySmartPrice raised $1 million from Accel and Helion, YouTellMe.com recently raised $100,000 from Dutch early-stage fund Bright Ventures, among others.

• Why did Amazon send 405 reps to CES 2014? Why did Apple send just 4? The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of largest trade shows around: Amazon.com, the third-biggest consumer-electronics retailer in the U.S., sent 405 representatives to CES 2014. Apple, the fourth-biggest, sent four, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the conference.Back in 2009, when Amazon was only eighth among U.S. electronics retailers, it sent 69 reps to the annual nerd festival. Apple, then the third-largest electronics retailer, also sent 69 that year. Apple hasn’t introduced a product at the dog and pony show in more than a decade—after debuting a series of flops there in the 1990s, including a video-game console and the Newton—but it had steadily increased its number of reps at CES from 2009 to 2011 as the company grew its retail operations. While Apple Stores mostly sell the company’s brand-name products, it does carry accessories from other hardware makers. U.S. electronics sales at Apple Stores last year rose to more than $11 billion, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. But for some reason, Apple cut its badge count to four in 2012, where it’s remained ever since. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Amazon, which also didn’t respond to a request for comment, sent more employees last year than Best Buy and Wal-Mart Stores, the top two gadget retailers. Amazon sells its own products, too, but it’s a retailer first and foremost. If CES’s influence in waning, nobody told Jeff Bezos.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday January 5

• Xiaomi 2014 revenue ~$12B (+135% Y/Y), smartphone shipments up 227% Y/Y; Huawei 2014 revenue $46B (+15% Y/Y), smartphone shipments up 40% Y/Y Xiaomi booked 74.3 billion yuan ($11.97 billion) in pre-tax sales last year, up 135 percent from 2013, the firm's chief executive Lei Jun said on his official microblog account on Sunday. Xiaomi sold a total of just over 61 million phones in 2014, up 227 percent from a year earlier, Lei added in a post on his Sina Weibo microblog account. The post did not give a related profit figure, although a filing last month showed that the firm was grappling with razor thin margins as it rapidly expands. A part of the business made around 347.5 million yuan net profit last year on revenue of 26.6 billion yuan and an operating margin of just 1.8 percent. Huawei: China's Huawei says 2014 sales revenue to rise 15 percent to $46 billion. Huawei's smartphone shipments rose by more than 40 percent last year, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters, failing to match its own target and the performance of faster-growing rivals such as Xiaomi.

• Separately, Xiaomi announces the Redmi 2, an improved version of its sub-$150 smartphone: The company’s flagship Mi devices may attract all the attention, but the sub-$150 Redmi family is its biggest seller. Back in July of last year, Xiaomi revealed it had sold 18 million Redmi (/Hongmi as it is known in China) phones and 3.56 million Redmi Note phablets. The Redmi alone accounted for one-third of total sales at the time. The Redmi 2 keeps much of the original model’s ingredients. It has the same 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 display, but under the hood there’s an upgraded 64-bit Qualcomm 410 quad-core processor. The device sports an 8-megapixel rear camera, improved 2-megapixel front camera, 1GB RAM and 8GB on-device storage. There is now dual 4G SIM support too. The Redmi 2 — which runs Xiaomi’s own MIUI version of Android — also gives a few more options for color-loving customers. ‘Lime green’ and ‘powder yellow’ are the new additions to the palette. The phone will cost 699 CNY, which is around $112, when it goes on sale on January 9. There’s no word on when it will be released outside of China, but you can be sure that the Redmi 2 will make its way to India, Indonesia and Xiaomi’s other overseas markets soon.

• IBM's stock is in a funk, and analysts call for the firm to invest in R&D rather than do share buy-backs: IBM requires an atypical activist fix. The company’s strategy of cost cuts and debt-fueled buybacks is no longer working – even though the company keeps trying. A tarnished balance sheet, lean staffing and a history of disposals rule out typical activist wheezes. Encouraging Virginia M. Rometty, the chairwoman and chief executive, to invest in IBM’s core businesses could pay off. IBM has run the same playbook for two decades. It sells low-margin businesses, cuts expenses, buys some profitable software companies and returns a lot of cash to investors. Over the last four quarters, the $152 billion company has spent more than $23 billion on dividends and buybacks. The problem is that IBM is investing too little. It has spent only about $11 billion over the last four quarters in total on research and development, capital expenditure and acquisitions. That’s a problem in technology, where old products soon become obsolete. Google spends about 16 percent of its sales on R.&D., but IBM spends 6 percent. The effect is becoming clear on the top line. Revenue has shrunk for 10 consecutive quarters. Costs have been cut to the bone, sending customers fleeing to better service providers. In a good year for stocks, IBM’s shares have fallen more than 15 percent. That means IBM has overpaid on its last three years of buybacks.

• Big data firms are starting to focus on 'unstructured data' that resides in presentations, memos and reports: data analysis is great if your information is in formats that are easy for computers to read, such as spreadsheets with numbers, or responses on a scale from one to five. But a lot of information isn't organized like that. Instead, it's in presentations, memos, reports, comments or just plain e-mail. Analysis of that kind of information -- often called "unstructured" or "dark" data -- is really tough to do by computer, and companies including Intel, SAP and HP are looking for a more reliable way to do it. Another firm, uReveal, thinks that it's cracked the code. Charles "Bucky" Clarkson, uReveal's chairman and CEO, said that software such as his makes it easier to to parse all those government reports and organize the data so that analysts can get more out of it, and more quickly. He also claims that the software is so simple to use that (gasp!) even liberal arts majors can use it.

• Tech patents are increasingly in the news: Story #1: Priceline.com's founder attempts a marketplace for tech patents, and China announces plans to triple the number of patents filed by 2020: In 1997, Jay Walker founded Priceline.com — the Web site many people use to get cheaper airfare by "naming your own price." Patenting the solution, and allowing others to use the patents for a fee, helped drive Walker's success. But, Walker argues in an interview, many patents remain underused. Now, the man who smoothed transactions for buyers and sellers of airplane tickets wants to do something similar for a key part of the nation's information economy. Walker is developing something called the United States Patent Utility. "We're going to form a utility, which works as a neutral party for both inventors of technology and users of technology. So you would be listing your patents as available for use. Then the next thing we're going to do is, we're going to say to people who are small to medium sized companies, get on the phone with us and talk to us for about 10 or 15, 20 minutes and tell us about your products and services. Send us PDFs of your sales manuals, your technical literature we can ingest, and we'll build a model of the technologies and products you use. If you're a shoe manufacturer, we can take all your specifications, all your sales materials, and we can read it all into the system. And then what we do is use a set of Big Data algorithms to take your specifications of all your products and services and run it up against the entire U.S. database of patents, which is about 2-plus million active patents. We run it against all the inactive patents, all the expired patents. Think of it as a natural-language kind of way. You don't need to be a programmer any more for it to run up against the entire database.

• Tech patents are increasingly in the news: Story #2: China announces plans to triple the number of patents filed by 2020: China is aiming to triple the number of patents it files by 2020 as Beijing looks to boost the country's high-tech economy in areas from agriculture to pharmaceuticals, according to a notice from the central government on Sunday. China is targeting 14 invention patents per 10,000 habitants by 2020 compared to four in 2013. It published 629,612 patents in 2013, over 200,000 more than the United States, according to a Thomson Reuters study in December. Beijing is also looking to reduce the length of the review process for patent and trademark applications. Patent reviews will decline to 20.2 months in 2020 from 22.3 months in 2013, while trademark reviews will fall to 9 months from 10 months. "Intellectual property (IP) is increasingly becoming a vital component of China's strategic resources and competitive ability," the statement posted on the Central People's Government website said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday January 2

• Snapchat is raising funds in an unusual manner - has raised $485M from >23 Investors since April 2014, valuation >$10B, 200M MAU:  “[Snapchat] goes after individual investors at different valuations. It’s a rolling investment and a rolling close. In theory you could say he’s already done 40 rounds.” (40 is likely figurative rather than literal.) What this means is that, if it’s true, then yes, Snapchat may have raised nearly $500 million in the last six months. Of that $500 million, it may be that only 75% of it is closed, and with portions at different valuations, some getting in pre-$10-billion, like Yahoo, and some above it and closer to $20 billion.The SEC filing notes that the date of first sale was in April 2014. We’ve also heard that the current post money valuation is $20 billion, although others have disputed this and said it’s closer to $10 billion. The cash is much-needed. One source said that Snapchat has an over $30 million-per-year burn rate, and pays half of that to Google Apps Engine to host all its photos, though this number seems low to us. Another noted that at one point the company was paying $3 million each month in legal fees alone. Snapchat’s had its share of lawsuits. Monthly Active Users are now at 200M, up from 100M in August. Amazon was not one of the investors in this round

• 'While you were away' - Twitter's recap feature is rolling out to significant numbers of users: ‘While you were away’ works much like Facebook’s Timeline and is the first major non-chronological feature to hit Twitter. Back in November, the company said it would look at the ‘best’ tweets from your network since you last opened Twitter, and put them at the top of your timeline so you don’t miss them. The algorithm that Twitter uses to source your ‘best’ tweets from your friends is crucial to its success. As someone who doesn’t use Twitter every minute of every day, I’d appreciate a recap but only if it is able to surface content that is relevant and interesting to me. There are already some services that exist solely to do that, while Twitter has email alerts for the purpose too. Nuzzel, for example, taps into your Facebook and Twitter network to surface news stories and other items that are popular with people you know. I’m skeptical that Twitter’s feature can be as effective, particularly since it only serves up a single tweet and that takes up precious real-estate at the top of your feed. Nonetheless, the addition looks like it will be more useful for users than many of Twitter’s recent features — which include sponsored accounts appearing in following lists, tweets from people you don’t follow in your timeline, and a test that meddled with the retweet button.

• VMWare, Workday testing a data-driven technology to predict employee attrition: VMware has been testing a new prediction technology from Workday, which makes software for human resources departments. The system delivers notifications about when employees might be getting ready to quit, and allows managers to intervene before it's too late. It looks for trends within employee activity, when promotions were last handed out, regional factors, changes in the industry and other data to make its predictions. The recommendations can improve over time as employers train the system. "We've had some great results to date with the data,” Amy Gannaway, VMware’s senior director for worldwide human resources information systems, said at a Workday conference in September. The tool gave VMware "a very high percentage" of accurate predictions for which employees would leave the company, she said.

• The Indian Railways will soon launch an iOS app, as mobile travel bookings are surging in India: According to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the number of mobile Internet users has witnessed a steady rise to 159 million in October. This is estimated to reach 173 million by the end of December. There were 119 million users in urban India accessing the Internet on mobile devices in October. Rural India is not that far behind, with a base of 40 million mobile Internet users in October 2013. Indian Railways, which has the largest share in online bookings, is witnessing surge of mobile bookings as well. According to sources at IRCTC, its mobile ticket booking app receives 8,000-9,000 bookings a day through mobiles. The numbers are low compared with the 600,000 tickets booked online every day, but officials say they expect this segment to grow. "Our mobile app has been downloaded 15,00,000 times on the Windows platform. On Android it has been downloaded 10,00,000 times. In a month's time we will be launching an app for iOS too," says a senior official on condition of anonymity.

• The 10 Most Innovative Digital Ad Products of 2014: (1) Google Shopping Campaigns took on Amazon with Product Listing Ads in early 2014, and then AdSense for Shopping, which shows product ads on third-party websites, in September 2014. (2) Snapchat's sponsored updates and live feed, which crowdsources Snapchat messages at events like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, now features commercials mixed in with the snaps from everyday users. For instance, Amazon sponsored Black Friday on Snapchat. (3) Instagram's autoplay sponsored videos, and brands from Disney to Electronic Arts to Banana Republic were the first to try them out. The video offering comes on top of sponsored photos, which were first served in 2013. (4) Facebook's Premium Video Ads didn't fully launch until March. These ads are autoplaying videos that are attracting a number of brands such as Macy's during Christmas. Video is the future of Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and billions of videos from users and marketers are seen everyday.(5) Twitter's app-install ads and e-commerce ads that have Buy Now buttons and video ads with View Now, and the list of potential actions is only growing. (6) Tumblr Sponsored Dot: Tumblr was full of new ad ideas this year, perhaps the most intriguing was the Sponsored Dot (that period at the end of its logo). Now, brands can buy it, dressing their logo as the punctuation mark for special occasions, like Starbucks did on National Coffee Day. (7) Kik Promoted Chats: The paid chats launched this year and let properties like Funny or Die and electronics brands like Skullcandy to message one-on-one with followers who opt in. It's a new kind of marketing built for mobile and messaging, two increasingly relevant areas. (8) Pinterest's Promoted Pins are the platform's first ad product, which launched fully earlier this year after being tested in late 2013. Brands like Kraft, Dell, Home Depot and Walmart are paying to boost their Pins, and there are now self-serve tools, too, for managing marketing campaigns on the platform. (9) Pandora's Sponsored Listening product, which offers users ad-free listening for an hour in return for watching a sponsored clip. In October, Fox helped promote new shows on Pandora with the help of the format. (10) Google Giferator: shows that Google is allowing advertisers to be more creative on the digital platform. The Giferator was generating dynamic ads in real time that could be highly targeted to select audiences. The ad technology was developed as part of Google's Art, Copy and Code program, where it tries to blend the creative and technical sides of digital advertising. Also, the Giferator let users create their own Gifs, a format that marketers couldn't get enough of this year.