Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 13

• Facebook adds dedicated shopping section in continued move into e-commerce: Facebook Inc (FB.O) wants its users to shop for clothes and other products from their mobile phones without ever leaving its app. In an effort to move further into e-commerce and compete with Amazon Inc’s (AMZN.O) retail offerings, Facebook announced Monday it is testing several ad features that allow users to shop directly through its app. Few users make purchases on mobile phones because it is slow and cumbersome, but Facebook hopes to win over more ad dollars by smoothing the process. Mobile purchases make up less than 2 percent of all retail sales, according to research firm eMarketer. Among the new features are ads that take a user through a specific brand's products without redirecting them to another site. For example, a user who clicks on an ad from a boutique could see an expanded page that displays numerous clothing items. Businesses on Facebook will also be able to display products for purchase directly on their own pages. And users will be able to purchase products directly on Facebook through a “buy now” button that will be more widely available. The 1.5-billion-member social network has also added a new section on its app that takes users directly to a shopping page where they can browse among numerous brands from a select group of small businesses that will gradually expand. “From Facebook’s perspective, they’re addressing a pain point for retailers,” said Catherine Boyle, an analyst at eMarketer. “They will attract serious ad dollars with this offering.”

• Dell buys EMC for $67 billion in largest deal in tech history: Dell announced Monday it had reached a deal to acquire cloud computing giant EMC for $67 billion -- the largest acquisition in the history of the technology industry. The deal signals that Dell believes it is best to go big at a time when many older technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard are paring down and becoming smaller, nimbler companies. Traditionally known as a personal PC-maker, Dell has more recently set its ambitions on the high-tech business world and portrayed itself as an all-in-one provider of equipment and services. Dell and equity firm Silver Lake Partners said in a press release Monday that buying EMC, a major data storage company, broadens its appeal to those lucrative corporate customers. In 2007, Dell returned to run the company he founded and took the company private again in 2013 with backing from Silver Lake Partners. The EMC transaction is expected to close in the “middle of next year,” executives said on a call with analysts Monday morning. It will take time for Dell and EMC to integrate their businesses if the deal closes, Hewitt said. For one, he noted that EMC has carved its niche by offering comprehensive — and not inexpensive — software solutions to businesses, which is where Dell wants to go. But, he noted, Dell's philosophy is deeply rooted in providing cost-efficiency. As Dell has struggled to adapt its PC business for the modern age, EMC has also been under pressure from activist investors to spin off its cloud and virtualization business called VMWare for more than year as its faced heavy competition from flash storage and cloud storage firms. It has also faced pointed questions about its "federated" business structure, which strung together three firms -- its traditional business, VMWare and its software development firm Pivotal. Analysts had formerly counted Dell, as well as HP, Cisco and Oracle, as potential buyers for the firm. 

• SAP third-quarter operating profit beats estimates on mature markets: SAP said third-quarter operating profit, excluding special items, rose to 1.62 billion euros ($1.84 billion), beating the most optimistic estimate among 14 analysts, with individual estimates ranging from 1.45 billion to 1.59 billion euros, according to Thomson Reuters data. Third-quarter total revenue of 4.98 billion euros was slightly ahead of the average expectation of 4.93 billion. Europe's largest software maker said it was sticking to its outlook for the full year for non-IFRS operating profit of 5.6 billion euros to 5.9 billion euros at constant currencies, which represents flat growth to a rise of as much as 5 percent from 5.6 billion euros last year.

• Financing in the Dell-EMC Deal: Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, EMC has negotiated a "go-shop" provision in the preliminary deal that gives it the opportunity to seek out other buyers. Yet analysts say that while the Dell deal may slightly undervalue EMC shares, it's still a good deal. Shares of EMC rose about 1.5 percent during regular trading Monday. While the company will be a private concern after the deal is closed, a portion of its shares will continue to trade publicly. EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC’s prize holding, software maker VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share. EMC’s stock climbed 1.8 percent Monday to $28.35. Dell will add almost $50 billion to its debt load to complete the purchase, people familiar with the matter said, on top of the $11 billion it already is carrying. The combined company will be run by Michael Dell, the chief executive officer of the company he founded and took private for about $25 billion two years ago. He is financing the takeover with his MSD Partners investment vehicle, Silver Lake and Singapore state-owned investment company Temasek Holdings. He also is using debt, the VMware tracking stock and cash on hand. The deal will combine EMC’s dominance in devices that store data with closely held Dell’s No. 2 position in servers, the powerful machines that help companies handle big computing challenges.

• Implications for the Data Center Business: The deal will help Dell raise its profile in data centers, the modern factories of the digital age that house servers, networking gear and storage systems. EMC had 21 percent of the storage market last year, about twice what Dell had, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While Dell has been outperforming some of its rivals, the company is grappling with sagging demand for personal computers. During the third quarter, overall shipments declined 7.7 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Still, Dell was able to post a small gain of 0.5 percent while larger rivals declined.

• Implications for VMWare: EMC investors will receive roughly $33.15 per share — they will receive $24.05 per share and a type of publicly tradeable stock "linked to a portion of EMC’s economic interest" in VMWare. VMware declined 8 percent to $72.27 on Monday amid concern that the creation of a tracking stock will weigh on the company’s valuation. Analysts at Mizuho Securities USA Inc. lowered their target price for VMware to $75 from $95. EMC rival Pure Storage Inc. rose 8.8 percent to $18.06, exceeding its public offering price of $17 for the first time since shares began trading Wednesday.

• Silver Lake Had Explored Sale of Dell’s PC Business Ahead of EMC Deal: Private equity firm Silver Lake, co-owners of Dell, last week approached Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Huawei to explore the possibility of selling off Dell’s personal computing business, sources familiar with the matter told Re/code. But by Monday, Dell proposed to pay a combined $67 billion to acquire the data storage company EMC and its subsidiary VMware in what is the largest proposed technology M&A deal in history. It was not immediately clear if Silver Lake acted alone or if Dell was consulted. It is also unclear if Silver Lake or Dell would continue to explore a sale at this point. The approach comes as the once thriving PC industry grapples with declining sales. That’s partially why none of the parties that were approached engaged further. Nearly half of Dell’s annual revenue come from the PC business, or about $27 billion, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, October 12

• Twitter Is Planning Company-Wide Layoffs for Next Week:  Twitter is planning company-wide layoffs next week, according to multiple sources. It’s unclear how much of the staff will be culled, but insiders say it will likely affect most, if not all, departments. The downsizing comes at the same time Twitter is restructuring its engineering organization to make it leaner and more efficient, these sources say. It’s likely that many of those impacted by the layoffs will be engineers, which make up about half the staff. Those close to the company have argued for years that Twitter has become too bloated. It reported roughly 4,100 employees last quarter, more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO. Twitter’s user base has grown less than 50 percent in that time. Of course, some of the growth has come via acquisitions — Twitter has made plenty over the past two years. But still, the feeling from those close to the company is that Twitter’s engineering team is much larger than it needs to be. The reorg also aligns with what Dorsey has been preaching for the last four months: That Twitter needs to be more focused. In June he told Re/code that the company needed to do a better job of “clarifying ownership” around projects, and he restructured Twitter’s product team in August to do just that. Now, it appears, the rest of the staff will be reshuffled, too. Update: Twitter stock is down more than 3 percent in after-hours trading on the news.

• Apple Is Said to Deactivate Its News App in China: Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there. The Apple News app, which the company announced in June, is available only to users in the United States, though it is being tested in Britain and Australia. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas — but they have found that it does not work in China. Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user’s preferred media, instead see an error message: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region.” Greater China is now Apple’s second-largest source of revenue after the United States, with sales of more than $13 billion in the third quarter. That means the company is most likely taking a careful approach to delivering new content, like that on its news app, within China. Beijing generally insists that companies are responsible for censoring content inside China. In Apple’s case, that would mean it would probably have to develop a censorship system — most Chinese companies use a combination of automated software and employees — to eliminate sensitive articles from feeds. For now, Apple seems to be avoiding the problem by completely disabling the service for users in China.

• How Do You Value A Company Like Uber? I became interested in Uber after reading a news story in June 2014, which reported the company was being valued at $17 billion in its latest venture capital round. I posted my first valuation of Uber in June 2014, viewing it as an urban car service, with local (but not global) networking benefits. Assuming that it would increase the size of the urban car service market by about 40%, while preserving its low capital-investment business model, I valued Uber at just under $6 billion. While some in the VC community were quick to dismiss the valuation, I will remain grateful to Bill Gurley for a post where he took me to task for having too narrow a vision of Uber’s business model. In his counter narrative, he argued that Uber was not just urban (it could create inroads in suburbia), not just a car service (it was in logistics & transportation) and that it was working with other businesses to create global networking benefits. Since Bill, as an early investor in Uber with access to its internal workings, clearly knew far more about the company than I did, I revalued Uber using his narrative and arrived at $54 billion as the value that reflected the narrative. I was wrong about Uber’s value in June 2014, when my estimate of $6 billion was below the $17 billion assessment by venture capitalists then. Correcting for both my cramped vision and the changes that have occurred since June 2014, my estimated value today is $23.4 billion. I know my estimated value lags the $51 billion value that VCs are attaching to the company today. This may very well be a reflection that my vision is still too cramped to capture Uber’s possible businesses, but it is what it is.

• SingPost Doubles Down on E-Commerce With U.S., European Services: Singapore Post Ltd., which counts Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. as its second-biggest shareholder, plans to expand freight services and warehouses in the U.S. and Europe as Asia’s emerging middle class drives online purchases from overseas. The move comes as other postal companies in Asia also are looking to reinvent themselves. Japan Post Group, a $2.5 trillion behemoth that also function as a bank and insurer, is preparing an initial public offering and looking to expand internationally after buying Australian logistics company Toll Holdings Ltd. earlier this year. SingPost holds a monopoly on mail delivery in its home base, which accounts for about 80 percent of its operating profit, but is looking for new areas of growth as more people use mobile phones and access the Internet. Worldwide business-to-consumer sales could grow 34 percent to $675 billion in 2016 from last year as the global middle class grows, SingPost said, citing data from researcher eMarketer.

• DocuSign CEO resigns as company heads toward IPO: source. The chief executive officer of DocuSign has resigned, according to an internal memo, signaling a leadership change for a well-funded tech company that is on the brink of an initial public offering. Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign, a San Francisco company that makes software to add legally compliant electronic signatures to documents, told employees in a memo the company would begin a search for his successor. Krach became CEO four years ago and has been chairman for seven. Sources familiar with the company say Krach will continue to have a significant presence there. He will stay on as chairman for at least three more years. He is also one of DocuSign's largest individual shareholders. Krach will remain CEO until a replacement is named. A search has begun, and the board is looking at both internal and external candidates. The next logical step for the company is an IPO, according to the source who asked not to be named because the plans are confidential. DocuSign, valued at $3 billion, aims to replace one of the final paper-and-pen aspects of business transactions: the signature. It is available in more than 40 languages and about 188 countries. DocuSign recently closed a Series F funding round that exceeded $300 million and now has well over $500 million in financing.

• Amazon plays a long game with AWS: Amazon Web Services doesn’t just want to dominate the global business in selling computing online. It also wants to be the rarest thing of all in the technology industry: a long-lived company. Its strategy hinges on an unprecedented level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match. The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional “vendor lock-in” of hooking customers on proprietary technology, but by making itself the center of the styles and habits of cloud computing. At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, the chief information officer of General Electric, said, “A.W.S. will be the trusted partner that will run our company’s information technology for the next 140 years.” That’s how long G.E., founded by Thomas Edison, has been around. Mr. Fowler was talking at the annual A.W.S. conference, during a session in which the company indirectly made the case that it would go after all of the existing customers of some of the biggest technology companies around. Among other offerings, A.W.S. plans to send customers machines that will extract an Oracle database, say, and send it to A.W.S. to be transformed to a cheaper cloud product. G.E. had at one point thought of building its own cloud, but it went with Amazon in part because of this know-how. A.W.S. also introduced a range of new technology products, including automated creation of mobile software applications, automated large- and small-scale data analysis systems in real time, and ways of building software that can be managed easily across the globe from a single location. There were, of course, also ways to make these parts fit together, mostly in automated forms that configured and managed most of the underlying technology. To work with it all, last week A.W.S. published a 56-page manual on how to build and run software in A.W.S. “Cloud is the new normal,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, said to a roomful of several thousand software engineers on Thursday. “This is how you will build your applications.” Certainly, a good part of A.W.S. software is open source, which means it could be used elsewhere, and companies like Microsoft and Google also have big clouds. But neither of them, nor IBM, which also wants the cloud business, created more than 500 new features and services last year, as A.W.S. did. That raises an interesting prospect. A.W.S. does not have a lot of the proprietary technology or onerous contracts that have traditionally held captive the customers of big enterprise software companies. Amazon may be creating a kind of casual lock-in of its own: All this automation, features and standardization of practices could mean that in several years most young engineers will know how to work in the A.W.S. system, but none other. That’s not exactly a hostage situation, but it would hold companies.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, October 9

• Facebook to Test Emoji as Reaction Icons: Despite the billions of “likes” bestowed on Facebook posts every month, something has been missing: an option to express a different emotion. On Thursday, Facebook announced it will begin testing six new emotional reactions that you can convey with a simple emoji, similar to the thumbs-up “like” icon that the social networking service has made so famous. The six new emoji depict various expressions, from an open mouth to express surprise to a scowling red face for anger. The other four emotions are love, laughter, sadness and a supportive cheer. The new reaction icons will be available to most Facebook users in Spain and Ireland by the end of this week. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Facebook’s news feed, said the company would evaluate how people in those two countries use the new buttons and refine them, before expanding the rollout to the company’s 1.5 billion users worldwide later this year.

• Facing China Slowdown, Alibaba and JD Find Solace in Russia: Russia’s plunging currency hasn’t weened consumers off foreign goods. Instead, cash-strapped shoppers are turning to online retailers for imported smartphones, jewelry and clothes, giving an unexpected boost to Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. Alibaba’s AliExpress site posted a 40 percent increase in Russian visitors to 22 million in July compared with a year earlier, according to researcher TNS. JD.com, which gets more than half its sales from electronics and home appliances, started its first international site in June in Russia, exclusively offering devices such as Xiaomi Corp. smartphones for about $214. That’s less than half of what an IPhone or Samsung Electronics Co. model with similar technical specifications costs locally. Millions of Russians are sinking into poverty as the collapse in crude prices drags down the economy of the world’s biggest energy exporter, sends the ruble into a tailspin and cuts government revenue. In August, wages fell 9.8 percent in real terms and Russians now face significantly lower disposable income than a year ago. While the economy may be in recession, Russians are embracing deliveries from China. Some 80 million people go online in Russia, making it Europe’s largest Internet market by users, according to East-West Digital News. However, the number of Web shoppers is still about a third of that, compared with 70 percent to 90 percent in the U.S. and western Europe.

• Netflix is raising its prices again. Netflix announced Thursday that it will raise its prices again, this time by $1 to $9.99 a month, giving the streaming video service more money to develop original content. The price increase will take effect on Nov. 11 for new customers. Existing customers will continue to pay the current rate, $8.99 a month, until October 2016. Longtime customers who still pay $7.99 a month will hold onto that rate until at least May 2016. The change may reflect that it is getting more expensive for Netflix and other video distributors to secure deals for television and movie content. In August, Netflix announced it would not renew a deal with cable network Epix, costing U.S. subscribers access to some high-profile movies including "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," "World War Z" and "Transformers: Age of Extinction." Rival Hulu quickly swooped in to make a deal of its own with Epix. The price hike will allow the company to offer more original content, said company spokeswoman Anne Marie Squeo. This year alone, Netflix introduced more than two dozen new series or films, including “Narcos,” a popular crime drama focusing on the life of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel.

• Microsoft’s Mission to Reignite PC Sector May Be Taking Hold: Shipments of personal computers fell nearly 11 percent last quarter, to the shock of almost no one. Sales have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it is becoming harder to remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Yet despite all that movement — or maybe because of it — something curious has emerged in recent months: optimism. “Initiatives like Surface and Surface Book have helped the industry wake up and say, ‘We’ve got to make the industry cool and sexy again,’ ” said Frank Azor, executive director and general manager of Dell’s XPS line of PCs. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business. The company said the goal was to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative. Analysts and industry executives say the strategy may be starting to work. Dell, which still sells millions of PCs, announced on Thursday several new machines that run Windows 10, a new Microsoft operating system. One of them, the XPS 12, is similar to Microsoft’s Surface Book, a “two-in-one” device that combines the keyboard of a traditional laptop with a touch-sensing screen that can be detached for use as a tablet. The Microsoft event on Tuesday, where the Surface Book was introduced, generated the kind of buzz from the tech press that’s normally reserved for an Apple event. Apple itself generated discussion last month about whether it has begun to imitate Microsoft by announcing a new big-screen tablet with a stylus, the iPad Pro. The Surface has been available with a big screen and a stylus for some time.  It remains to be seen whether these efforts will result in more sales. Microsoft has seen terrific growth in its Surface business, which has jumped to $3.6 billion in annual sales from nothing three years ago. But most other big PC makers have not been able to get customers to spend on PCs as they once did. PC owners are holding on to their machines longer, making do with systems that are good enough for their needs. At the same time, they are relying on mobile devices for more of their computing tasks. On Thursday, IDC, the technology research firm, said that global PC shipments declined 10.8 percent in the third quarter from the same period a year ago, slightly worse than the research firm had expected. (Another research firm, Gartner, had pegged the decline at 7.7 percent.)

• Amazon launches platform to build apps for 'Internet of Things': Amazon.com's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, has launched a service to help customers build applications to connect devices through the cloud, the so-called "Internet of Things". The service, called "AWS IoT", will allow factory floors, vehicles, health care systems, household appliances among other "things" to connect through cloud services, the company said on Thursday. The beta version of the service is available from Thursday, Amazon's Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels said at a company event in Las Vegas. The connection to the cloud will be fast and lightweight, making it a good fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life, Amazon said.

• Twitter Opens Up Its Amplify Video Ad Program: Twitter just announced an expansion of its Amplify ad program that should make it accessible to more publishers and advertisers. Amplify is the company’s two-year-old program for video ads. Initially, it involved a direct and somewhat complicated relationship — the publisher would embed a short video clip in a tweet, then the advertiser would both include a short pre-roll ad in the tweet and pay to promote the tweet in Twitter. In the new, open version of Amplify, an advertiser no longer needs to work with a specific publisher. Instead, they choose a content category, then Twitter will automatically include their pre-roll ads in videos tweeted by relevant publishers. (Advertisers can also use Twitter’s other ad targeting capabilities at the same time.) This isn’t just about making the process easier for advertisers — it also gives publishers a monetary incentive to share their video clips on Twitter. We’ve heard that the revenue split is 70 percent for publishers and 30 percent for Twitter, and that publishers will be able to blacklist certain advertisers or categories if they feel like they’re not a good fit.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 8

• Singapore Post, Like Amazon, Tests Package Delivery by Drone: Singapore Post Ltd. is testing package delivery by drone, echoing attempts by Amazon.com Inc. to extend the commercial capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The company known as SingPost said a drone it developed with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore carried a packet containing a letter and T-shirt on a five-minute, two-kilometer (1.2 miles) flight. This marks the first time any postal service has successfully used a drone for “point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery,” it said in a statement Thursday. SingPost is looking to such unmanned aircraft as online transactions increase in the Asia-Pacific region and as Singapore plans to develop itself into a so-called Smart Nation through technology usage. There is “immense potential” in drone technology for last-mile mail and e-commerce delivery, Bernard Leong, SingPost’s head of digital services, said in the statement.

• An Amazon Rival, Jet.com, Eliminates Its Membership Fee: Just three months after its introduction, Jet.com, the much-hyped rival to Amazon and Costco, has done a 180-degree turn in its business model by making its members-only shopping club freely accessible. On Wednesday, Jet said it would eliminate its $50 annual membership fee, but continue to provide better prices on items, along with high-quality customer service and free shipping on orders of more than $35, among other benefits. The about-face raises questions of whether Jet was struggling to gain the traction it needed to expand its business. But Marc Lore, the company’s chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said. While eliminating a membership fee may help expand Jet.com’s customer base, the move could diminish the company’s chances of turning a healthy profit. Mr. Lore had raised more than $200 million from investors to fund the site. In an interview with The New York Times, he had predicted that the company would take five years to grow to a point where it was not losing money on every shipment. The $50 membership fee would have been a major revenue stream contributing to Jet’s profit. Now Jet’s revenue will rely on raking in commissions on sales from retailers. Discounts for customers come from what Jet calls Smart Cart savings, which let shoppers lower costs by adding more products to their shopping carts, resulting in orders that are more efficient and cheaper to fulfill.

• Amazon Seeks Cloud Computing Growth With New Data Products: Amazon Web Services announced products Wednesday that give businesses new ways to transfer, manipulate and derive insights from data they store in the company’s cloud. The products span diverse areas of information technology from a business intelligence service named Quicksight, to security systems, to new tools to help people migrate databases from proprietary versions into free ones hosted within Amazon. The company also unveiled a new product, called Snowball, that is a hardware device that lets businesses securely transfer large amounts of data into the Amazon Web Services cloud. And Amazon announced a deal with consulting giant Accenture Plc to focus on corporate customers. The products and services shown at the company’s re:invent customer conference in Las Vegas represent a further expansion by Amazon into competitors’ territories, whether database vendors such as Oracle Corp. or business intelligence companies such as Tableau Software. The effort also keeps the pressure on traditional hardware providers, who are seeing their businesses slow as more of their customers opt for cloud computing offered by Amazon and others. Amazon’s Web Services division generated $1.8 billion in sales in the Seattle-based company’s most recent quarter and almost $400 million in operating profit. The e-commerce company created the AWS division almost 10 years ago, giving it a lead on competitors such as Microsoft, Google  and IBM. that were slow to release their own cloud services. In recent years that has changed. Microsoft is now a major competitor to AWS via its Azure service, and companies like Oracle are converting more applications to run in the cloud.

• Snapdeal invests $20M more in logistics firm gojavas: Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, which runs online e-com marketplace Snapdeal, has invested $20 million (Rs 131 crore) more in logistics firm QuickDel Logistics Pvt Ltd, which runs operations under the gojavas brand, it said on Wednesday. Snapdeal had first invested in gojavas, which was previously a part of Jabong, a lifestyle e-tailer incubated by Rocket Internet, in March this year. It had not disclosed the investment amount but said it has picked a minority stake in the logistics firm. “The company’s average timeline for delivering Snapdeal orders has reduced by a full 24 hours in the last six months and our teams have worked closely to come up with innovative solutions that are enhancing customers’ shopping experience on Snapdeal. With the freshly infused funds, our aim is to help gojavas become more successful and expand their reach,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal. Snapdeal said it has invested $100 million in the last six months to improve it delivery timelines by 70 per cent and it will invest $200 million more in next 12 months to strengthen its supply chain. gojavas will be using the capital for expanding its operations to 100 more cities within 12 months. Vijay Ghadge, COO at gojavas, said the partnership with Snapdeal has helped it become one of the largest independent logistics players in the country with a revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore currently. gojavas currently manages over 1 lakh sq ft of fulfilment centres and helps more than 400 companies reach consumers in close to 350 cities and towns in more than 3,000 PIN-codes. It claims to deliver over 1.8 lakh packages every day and closed FY15 with revenues of over Rs 200 crore. It was originally an in-house delivery venture of Jabong but later spun out as a separate third-party logistics firm.

• Pandora Buys Ticketfly, a Competitor to Ticketmaster: Pandora Media, the biggest player in Internet radio, has moved into the ticketing business with an agreement to buy Ticketfly, an independent firm that competes with Ticketmaster and is popular with clubs and festivals in the United States and Canada. Pandora announced early Wednesday that it would acquire Ticketfly for $450 million, in a mix of cash and stock. The deal further expands Pandora’s interests in providing services to artists. Last year, it introduced a data system, the Artist Marketing Platform, or AMP, that shows musicians which songs are most popular on the service and where. And in May, Pandora bought Next Big Sound, another data service, which studies the listening and searching patterns of streaming music customers. Pandora, which has nearly 80 million regular listeners, said that its acquisition would benefit artists and listeners. The deal will also add a level of complexity to the sometimes delicate system of alliances in the ticketing world, which is dominated by Ticketmaster, a unit of Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketfly, which was founded in 2008 and was an early proponent of using social media and the web to market tickets, has become a popular choice for promoters that want to avoid the Ticketmaster system. Last year, according to its announcement with Pandora, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets worth more than $500 million. Among Ticketfly’s clients are the club Brooklyn Bowl and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. This year, the independent ticketing world was jolted when Ticketmaster bought Front Gate Tickets, another service popular with clubs, festivals and acts, a move that led some bands, like Wilco, to shift their alliances to other companies. Pandora’s control of Ticketfly could pose a challenge to Ticketmaster, particularly given Pandora’s history of using its user data for marketing. The company, which derives about 80 percent of its revenue from ad sales, has long pitched advertisers on its ability to identify its users based on their demographic data and listening habits — even going so far as to say it can predict its listeners’ political affiliation. “The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse.”

• Amazon considering online TV service: Amazon.com Inc is considering the creation of a live online TV service and has reached out to networks such as CBS Corp and Comcast's NBCUniversal to express interest in carrying their channels, Bloomberg reported. The e-commerce giant's talks with the networks are in preliminary stages, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Such a move would increase Amazon's already growing presence in online video. Amazon currently offers an on-demand video streaming service similar to that of Netflix. Amazon signed an exclusive deal with former "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson in July to present a new motoring show for its Amazon Prime subscription service. The company last month said it would launch six TV show pilots for its video streaming service in the United States, the UK, Germany and Austria for the 2015 fall pilot season.

• If Your Wi-Fi Is Terrible, Check Your Router: Bob McConnell, a retired engineer, set up a new wireless router in his home this year to get faster Internet speeds. Instead, he got the opposite, with his iPad often getting no wireless connection in his bedroom. For days, he tinkered with the router’s settings, but couldn’t figure out a fix. “It was totally ruining my life,” said Mr. McConnell, who lives in a condominium building in Kirkland, Wash. “Things would work, and then the next morning they wouldn’t work again.” What Mr. McConnell experienced is a situation we call “Wi-Fi headache,” and it’s an ailment that many can relate to. The condition is rooted in the networking devices called routers that people install in their homes for Wi-Fi connectivity. Most routers are difficult to configure for anyone who doesn’t work in an information technology department. Jargony tech terms like 802.11 or dual-band add to the confusion when people upgrade a router or try to decide which one to pick. So to diagnose and cure Wi-Fi headaches, we teamed up with The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website. The Wirecutter put dozens of top-rated routers and devices through hundreds of hours of testing to pick out the best router for most people and come up with other recommendations tailored to different living situations and budgets. It also ran new tests for The New York Times to come up with best practices for getting a stronger, faster Wi-Fi signal. The bottom line: People with devices both new and old will see an improvement by upgrading to a recent router that supports the latest Wi-Fi standards. But they should be wary of buying a cheap router that isn’t any good, or spending too much on one that is too complex for their needs.

• Pure Storage Falls In Public Debut, CEO Optimistic: Pure Storage, the enterprise storage company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. After pricing at $17, shares traded down in its debut, closing the day at $16.01. CEO Scott Dietzen spoke to TechCrunch about why the company executed an IPO during what has been a lackluster year for tech stocks. “We were ready to be a public company,” said Dietzen. “We don’t worry about market conditions. Great companies can come out when it’s right for them.” The company’s IPO performance, slipping in its first day’s trading, isn’t big news. Other recent IPOs that have seen sharp declines in value following their flotation have performed more strongly. For example, Box, a tech company that went public this year, surged on its initial day as a public company. In the ensuing months, its shares have sagged. For industry watchers, any current public technology offering is a bellwether. The IPO cadence for technology firms has been infamously slow in 2015, causing concern among those both seeking liquidity for their investments, and executives worried about where their private valuation might square with the public markets. To underscore that point, Dropbox, a company that could formerly do no wrong, recently endured an embarrassing haircut. Pure Storage’s offering went off mid-range. It fell a modest 5.8 percent. These things are not the end of the world. But they may describe public investor uncertainty about the value of firms that are burning large quantities of cash to expand their top line. Box, MobileIron, and a host of others have endured related declines.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, October 7

• Twitter’s Next Hail Mary, Project Lightning, Has Arrived..is Uncannily Similar to Snapchat's Live Stories: Just 24 hours after Jack Dorsey officially took over as the new CEO, Twitter is finally rolling out Project Lightning, the multimedia update it has aggressively pitched for months, to resuscitate growth and get Twitter back on track with Wall Street. In many ways, Lightning is Twitter’s most important product update ever. The new product, which Twitter is now calling Moments, is the kind of product that will shape how Dorsey is remembered in his third stint at the company he helped create. A Moment is a group of tweets stitched together around a specific topic, such as the Super Bowl or a breaking news event. These Moments are curated by Twitter, or Twitter partners like BuzzFeed and the New York Times, and primarily exist within a new tab inside the Twitter app, although they can be shared as links within tweets as well. Moments tend to be multimedia-heavy, with lots of photo and video tweets included, although that isn’t necessarily a requirement. Unlike your Twitter timeline, in which tweets are typically read in reverse chronological order, Moments are constructed in the same way you’d read a book — with a beginning, middle and end. If you’re familiar with Snapchat’s Live Stories feature, which have become very popular with its users, you’ll notice some striking similarities. (Very striking.) The purpose of the product is twofold. For starters, it’s a way for Twitter to play to its strengths by creating more content and engagement around live events, an area where Twitter truly does dominate other social platforms, including Facebook. When you follow a Moment, Twitter will temporarily insert tweets about that topic into your feed from people you don’t actually follow; as soon as the event is over, you’ll stop seeing tweets from those people. There’s no easy way to follow a bunch of people talking about a breaking news event, for example, so Twitter is trying to do that for you. Twitter is also looking for ways to entice new users, and believes Moments may serve as the bait. Twitter can be underwhelming when you first sign up, admits Madhu Muthukumar, product manager for Moments. But if you can immediately follow a Moment — and all the important people contributing to that event — it’s easier to find interesting people and feel like you’re part of the conversation right away, he added.

• Bill Gurley on Tech Bubble: I’m a Pragmatist, Not a Doomsayer:  Bill Gurley, general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, has developed a reputation as the Nostradamus of Silicon Valley. He has repeatedly called out startups and fellow investors for over-the-top valuations, warning of an impending tech bubble. He isn’t ditching that reputation. “It’s kind of my responsibility to call it out,” the venture capitalist said at the Vanity Fair Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. “If you’re in a car heading over a cliff and I say, ‘Hey, slow down’ — that’s being a pragmatist, not being a doomsayer.” New York Times reporter Nick Bilton, who moderated the panel, asked Gurley how he squares that view with the fact that Benchmark is among the venture firms priming startups with cash. Gurley’s retort: The founders he backs could raise money in any condition — and could do it even better when funding dries up. “Most of the great CEOs I work with want this to stop. They’re forced to play this game,” he replied. “Great entrepreneurs raise money in any cycle. When there’s less money available, the better entrepreneurs have the advantage.”

• Data Transfer Pact Between U.S. and Europe Is Ruled Invalid: Europe’s highest court on Tuesday struck down an international agreement that allowed companies to move digital information like people’s web search histories and social media updates between the European Union and the United States. The decision left the international operations of companies like Google and Facebook in a sort of legal limbo even as their services continued working as usual. The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, said the so-called safe harbor agreement was flawed because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans’ online information. The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy. The court said data protection regulators in each of the European Union’s 28 countries should have oversight over how companies collect and use online information of their countries’ citizens. European countries have widely varying stances toward privacy. Data protection advocates hailed the ruling. Industry executives and trade groups, though, said the decision left a huge amount of uncertainty for big companies, many of which rely on the easy flow of data for lucrative businesses like online advertising. They called on the European Commission to complete a new safe harbor agreement with the United States, a deal that has been negotiated for more than two years and could limit the fallout from the court’s decision. Some European officials and many of the big technology companies, including Facebook and Microsoft, tried to play down the impact of the ruling. The companies kept their services running, saying that other agreements with the European Union should provide an adequate legal foundation. But those other agreements are now expected to be examined and questioned by some of Europe’s national privacy watchdogs. The potential inquiries could make it hard for companies to transfer Europeans’ information overseas under the current data arrangements. And the ruling appeared to leave smaller companies with fewer legal resources vulnerable to potential privacy violations. “We can’t assume that anything is now safe,” Brian Hengesbaugh, a privacy lawyer with Baker & McKenzie in Chicago who helped to negotiate the original safe harbor agreement. “The ruling is so sweepingly broad that any mechanism used to transfer data from Europe could be under threat.”

• Microsoft is making its first-ever laptop: Under the leadership of chief executive Satya Nadella, the message out of Microsoft has been one of collaboration rather than competition. Since Nadella took over in February of last year, the historically sharp-elbowed firm has seemed to soften. A humbler Microsoft emerged, putting a greater focus on helping consumers use its products on whatever device they wanted, rather than being its own cheerleader. But Microsoft showed that its competitive spark is alive and well Tuesday with the announcement that it's making its first-ever laptop. The laptop, called the Surface Book, has a 13.5-inch screen and weighs 3.34 pounds with a detachable keyboard -- clearly putting it in competition with Apple's MacBook Air and the many, many Microsoft partners who make the class of lightweight laptops known as ultrabooks. (So does its starting $1,499 price tag.) The Book can be used as a tablet or as more traditional laptop.

• Samsung Electronics third-quarter profit guidance beats estimates:  Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday its July-September operating profit likely leapt 79.8 percent from a year earlier, beating expectations and pushing the South Korean tech giant's share price sharply higher. Samsung, in a regulatory filing, estimated its third-quarter profit at 7.3 trillion won ($6.29 billion), its first quarterly profit gain in two years and its biggest since the first quarter of 2014. This compared with a 6.7 trillion won profit tipped by a Thomson Reuters SmartEstimate poll of 30 analysts. Samsung's shares opened 4.1 percent higher after the guidance release. Smartphone earnings likely improved from a year earlier, analysts said, partly due to the launch of new lower-end models and the August launch of the Galaxy Note 5. Semiconductor sales were also expected to be strong, driven by the launch of new smartphones including the Galaxy Note 5 and Apple's iPhone 6S models. The weaker South Korean won likely also boosted profits, analysts said. Samsung expects third-quarter revenue to rise by 7.5 percent from a year earlier to 51 trillion won.

• Adobe 2016 forecast disappoints, shares slump: Adobe lowered its profit forecast for 2016 below analyst estimates partly due to a strong dollar, sending its shares down as much as 13 percent in extended trading. The Photoshop maker said it expects full-year revenue of about $5.7 billion and an adjusted profit of $2.70 per share. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $5.93 billion and earnings of $3.19 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. In 2013, Adobe forecast an adjusted profit of $3 per share for 2016. The company is expecting a $200 million hit on revenue as a result of the stronger dollar, and a $100 million hit as Adobe's "last material businesses are transitioning to ratable revenue." Adobe has been switching to web-based subscriptions from traditional licensed software to help attract more predictable recurring revenue.

• Etsy doubles down on manufacturing as it faces off with Amazon: Etsy, the online store that made its name selling handmade crafts, is trying to stop merchants from defecting as giant rival Amazon.com Inc prepares to attack it on its own ground with a new site for artisanal items called Handmade. But Etsy's policy of allowing sellers to use outside manufacturers continues to anger some of the smaller vendors of handmade items who helped make it successful. Even changes to that policy have done little to address the criticism or hold off defections, analysts and sellers say. "Until now, Etsy sellers had nowhere else to go," said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities based in Los Angeles. "But what Handmade at Amazon represents is a trip back in time to Etsy's original vision." Etsy disputes that sellers had no other outlets, saying it knows that while about half of its sellers sell only on its site, the other half also use other venues - from craft fairs to their own websites. But on average, even those who sell in many venues make the majority of their income on Etsy, the company said. Etsy, launched 10 years ago, became popular as an alternative to Amazon and eBay, tapping into shoppers' appetite for handmade items. But since its April initial public offering, which valued the company at $4 billion, Etsy's shares have fallen by more than 50 percent. And the company's losses doubled in the most recent quarter due in part to rising expenses and the stronger dollar, which dampened demand for U.S. products.

• Facebook Gives Viewers 3 New Ways to Engage With Their Favorite TV Shows, Challenges Twitter for second-screen supremacy: Facebook is trying to steal some of Twitter's thunder, aiming to be the first choice among second-screen viewers, people who watch TV and engage on social media at the same time. So, this morning Facebook—with its 213 million monthly active users in the U.S.—announced new tools aimed at helping TV producers better engage audiences during live broadcasts.  1. Hashtag voting and polling: This feature should get broadcasters the most excited. Instead of being directed toward separate apps within a show's Facebook page, users will be able to vote directly within a top-level post or comment. 2. Photo and video submissions: Facebook is giving viewers or aspiring contestants on competition series the ability to submit photos and videos directly to show pages. Those can be anything from video questions (Fox News used this to solicit questions for August's GOP debate) to funny submissions for late-night talk shows or audition videos. 3. Custom icons: Taking a page from Twitter's playbook, Facebook will create custom icons—much like Twitter's custom emojis—for certain events such as the Oscars, the Emmys, The Bachelorette and sporting events like the Rugby World Cup.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, October 6

• Twitter shares pop 6% as it names Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO but said it would look elsewhere for a chairman, seeking to allay concerns about its co-founder's dual role as head of the mobile payments company Square. Twitter's shares rose as much as 6 percent on Monday after the announcement, which ended months of speculation about who would take the top job at the microblogging service. Dorsey has been running Twitter as interim CEO to much acclaim since his predecessor, Dick Costolo, stepped down on July 1. Twitter is working to rekindle growth after its latest quarterly results revealed the slowest rise in monthly average users since the company went public in 2013 - a performance that Dorsey at the time called "unacceptable." Some investors had expressed concerns about whether Dorsey could run both Twitter and Square, which he also co-founded. Square is expected to go public this year and Dorsey may have to devote substantial time courting investors for the IPO. But others say Dorsey, 38, is a more effective leader now than in 2008, when he was fired from his first stint as Twitter CEO. Investors and analysts have lauded faster product rollouts since Dorsey took the helm in July, including a widely available "buy now" button that allows users to make purchases directly through Twitter.

• Google Told by Russian Regulator to Unbundle Android Search: Russia’s antitrust regulator has ordered Google  to amend agreements with smartphone producers that it said disadvantage third-party applications on devices running the Android operating system. Mountain View, California-based Google is abusing its market dominance through Android, the regulator ruled last month after a complaint from local search engine provider Yandex, which has been losing market share to its U.S. rival on mobile devices. Google has allowed Android-phone producers to use its application store Google Play on the condition that they also pre-install services from the company, including search, and prioritize those icons on screens, the Russian regulator said Sept. 14. Yandex has said Android’s default options push mobile users to Google services, limiting consumers’ ability to choose such services from Yandex or other vendors. “To restore competition on the market, Google should amend agreements with mobile-device producers within a month and exclude the anti-competitive clauses,” Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said in a statement on its Website on Monday. Yandex shares rose as much as 13 percent in U.S. trading and were up 7.3 percent at $12.17 at 12:40 pm in New York. Yandex’s share in Russian search fell to 50 percent in August versus 54 percent at the start of 2014, while Google’s share rose to almost 42 percent from 34 percent, according to LiveInternet.ru. Google may also face a fine of 1 percent to 15 percent of the revenue from the services where the violation occurred, according to the regulator.

• ‘Yelp for People’ App Founder Says Peeple Won’t Be ‘Shamed Into Submission’:  An entrepreneur said she wanted to create an app that would allow people to be reviewed, the way restaurants or vacation spots are, and you’ll never believe what happened next. (Unless you’re familiar with the social web’s climate of Internet shaming. Then you probably can.) In what was perhaps a speed record for attempting to dismantle a product that doesn’t exist yet, angry people circulated an online petition to prevent the project, called Peeple, from ever making it to an app store. Sleuths at the website Snopes, known for debunking rumors, tried to figure out if the whole thing was an elaborate ruse. And the woman behind the app, Julia Cordray, insisted that Peeple was the real thing, and that it would proceed despite receiving a viral heap of negative reviews. Though it appeared to be offline Monday, a cached version of Peeple’s website offered people the chance to sign up for beta testing of the app. Illustrations showed users with number and star ratings, in the manner of Yelp, and comments under a user’s profile. On Monday, Ms. Cordray did not say whether a prototype was available or whether it had been made available to journalists. Though it appeared to be offline Monday, a cached version of Peeple’s website offered people the chance to sign up for beta testing of the app. Illustrations showed users with number and star ratings, in the manner of Yelp, and comments under a user’s profile. On Monday, Ms. Cordray did not say whether a prototype was available or whether it had been made available to journalists.  The cached site’s terms also say that users cannot remove themselves from the app. In the LinkedIn post, Ms. Cordray attempted to scale back some earlier assertions about the concept of Peeple: “You will NOT be on our platform without your explicit permission,” she wrote. “There is no 48 hour waiting period to remove negative comments. There is no way to even make negative comments.” In that case, the app would fall in line with a plethora of platforms that offer users the ability to opt in to the service and then review one another, making the app more like LinkedIn than Yelp. Comparisons have also been drawn to Lulu, an app that allows women to rate prospective male dates using hashtags like #motherslovehim (positive) or #longnails (negative). Lulu has seen its share of criticism, receiving complaints from men who say they don’t want to be rated without their permission.

• Legal troubles, market realities threaten Uber's global push: Uber Inc's aggressive global expansion is looking costlier and riskier than ever as the company struggles with regulatory and competitive obstacles in major markets. Just last week, the company faced a police raid on its European headquarters in the Netherlands, a criminal trial of two top executives in France, a ban on its services in Rio de Janeiro and proposed new regulations in London and Toronto that could cripple its services in those cities. The Uber Pop service, known as Uber X in the U.S., which enables people to offer rides in private cars, is now banned outright in most of Western Europe. In Australia, Uber is popular but mostly illegal, with several big court challenges looming. Meanwhile, in China and other Asian countries Uber faces increasingly powerful competitors and idiosyncratic local transportation markets. Uber has in some cases responded by moving into businesses like car rental - which could be viewed as a nimble response to local conditions or a risky move into a low-margin, capital intensive business. That's on top of the challenge to its business model that Uber faces in its home state of California, where a class action lawsuit could force the company to treat its contract drivers as employees. Taken together, Uber's recent troubles raise the question of whether the firm's headlong drive for global market share, underwritten by more than $7 billion in venture capital investment, is a prudent strategy. It has moved far more quickly in its global expansion than any company in memory--it's now in 60 countries after being founded in 2009 --and the cost and complexity of so many legal wars and subsidizing millions of rides in countries like China could tax even a company as wealthy as Uber. In the U.S. alone, Uber has been involved in at least 173 U.S. lawsuits since October 2012, a review of Westlaw dockets shows, while rival Lyft has been involved in 66 and lodging service Airbnb has been a party to just 20. As a private company Uber discloses little about its spending but one indicator of the scale is its $1.2 billion funding for its China unit in September. Leaked financial documents show Uber overall lost more than $100 million in the 2nd quarter of 2014. "Uber is adopting the shock and awe strategy," said Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. "I think it's a very high risk strategy."

• Samsung Seen Tapping $55 Billion Cash Pile for Share Buyback:  Investors in Samsung Electronics are watching their holdings plunge as new Galaxy smartphones get a lukewarm public response. With $55 billion in cash, the company may be poised to offer consolation. Analysts expect the world’s biggest smartphone maker to buy back shares as early as this month in an effort to return some value to stockholders. Removing more than $1 billion of stock from the market could prompt shares to rally by as much as 20 percent, according to the top-ranked analyst covering Samsung, potentially erasing their declines this year. Samsung has lost about $25 billion in market value -- roughly equivalent to a Nintendo  -- this year as sales of the S6 and Note 5 devices sputter against new models from Apple  and Chinese makers. A buyback would be just the second in eight years and may take the sting out of sliding market share and sales projected to hit their lowest since 2011. “A share buyback should happen anytime now because the earnings haven’t been performing well,” said Dongbu Securities’s Yoo Eui Hyung, who tops Bloomberg Absolute Return rankings for his calls on Samsung Electronics. The possibility of a Samsung buyback comes after the government imposed a 10 percent tax on chaebol conglomerates’ income unless their spending meets certain minimum levels. The measures are aimed at pushing chaebol to increase salaries and boost investment.

• Report: Google Invests In Wall Street Messaging Tool Symphony: Google has participated in a new round of funding for Symphony Communication Services, valuing the company at $650 million, reports Dow Jones. The deal is expected to close this week. Launched last year, the Palo Alto-based messaging service has previously received financing from Wall Street giants including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and BlackRock. Symphony hopes its communications software will compete with Bloomberg’s financial terminal business, by providing news and research from Dow Jones. Symphony built a cloud communications service, which is compliant with FINRA and Sarbanes-Oxley, no easy task. Of course, you can have Slack-like conversations and create virtual discussion rooms, both public and private, but the trick is that there are special rules around who can talk to whom and the system has to respect the rules. Users can also do things like follow certain subjects via a hashtag system, so they can easily track a particular industry within the platform by setting up a set of rules, allowing people to track content, conversations and public social chatter about subjects that matter to them. The product is actually available for free for anyone who wants to use it as of last month, but if a company wants the all of the security and tracking ability, of course, they will need to buy the enterprise version. It’s possible that Google sees the potential of this tool beyond the financial services industry and that’s why it’s investing in the company at this point. Secure communication with the ability to track content could have wide reaching use for both consumers and businesses alike and Google could want a piece of that action. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Symphony was looking to raise funding at up to a $1 billion valuation.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday October 5

• After stopping Product Ads, Amazon discontinues recently-launched Text Ads: As of October 31, Amazon’s recently launched Text Ads program will be RIP-status. Yesterday afternoon, Amazon notified its advertisers via email that the Amazon Text Ads (ATA) program will be discontinued on October 31 — ironically, the same day that Amazon Product Ads also get the boot. Let’s back up. ATA ExampleThroughout the past year, you may have noticed text-based ads within Amazon search results and product listings. The Amazon Text Ads program delivered content based on keywords used in Amazon shoppers’ browser searches. This past August, Amazon used the sunset announcement of its popular Product Ads advertising format to introduce Text Ads as a possible alternative. The program has been in beta since Q4 2014 but will never see a public debut. It’s important to note that Amazon’s Text Ads and Product Ads take shoppers off Amazon and to the advertiser’s website. Is Amazon discontinuing these programs in an attempt to keep shoppers within the Amazon ecosystem? What does this mean for its remaining advertising program, Sponsored Products (with auction-based, keyword-driven ads promoting your Amazon listings when you have the Buy Box)? No one can say for sure. However, we recently caught sight of Sponsored Products in a new location on the Amazon webpage, which makes us think that Amazon is possibly working to improve this channel to help sellers promote their products on the marketplace.   

• Google Inc has morphed into Alphabet Inc.: After U.S. markets closed on Friday, Alphabet replaced Google as the publicly traded company that will house Google's search and Web advertising businesses, maps, YouTube and its "moonshot" ventures such as driverless cars. Google's class A shares and class C shares will automatically convert into the same number of Alphabet class A shares and class C shares and start trading on the Nasdaq from Monday. The ticker symbols will not change. The core businesses will be called Google and operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai will head Google. Alphabet will be run by Google co-founder Larry Page and each of its businesses will have its own chief executive. Starting from the company's fourth quarter in January, Alphabet will have two reporting units - Google and all other Alphabet businesses taken as a whole.

• Amazon to Stop Selling Apple TV and Chromecast:  Amazon said on Thursday that it would stop selling devices from Apple and Google that compete with its own streaming media players, escalating the entertainment battle between the major tech companies. Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast are popular items in Amazon’s electronics store. But the devices are in a brawl for market share with Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, which were introduced in 2014. The Fire Stick delivers Amazon’s rapidly expanding video offerings to its customers. Apple TV and Chromecast do not. Amazon’s move to ban competitors is not a retailing gambit. In fact, the company is willing to risk annoying customers who cannot get what they want because it is pursuing a much bigger prize. The stick is crucial to Amazon’s ambitions to move from being just a retailer to a multifaceted provider of everything virtual and physical. “It’s unlike Amazon to be this territorial,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with the research firm Forrester. But he said it was a logical and perhaps inevitable move.

• Facebook Expands Mobile Video Feature That Helps Content Creators Make Money 55% of ad revenue in curated video feeds goes to creators: In July Facebook made a big move into YouTube's turf with plans to launch Suggested Video—a feed of curated video clips from brands like Funny or Die, the NBA and Tastemade. After a small test over the past three months, it's now showing up in more mobile news feeds. Clicking on a video from a news feed leads to a page that pulls all of the publisher's videos together in a stream, as well as other related clips. To help publishers make money off those clips, an ad appears between every few videos, similar to a commercial. Similar to YouTube's business model, creators receive 55 percent of money sold from the ads while Facebook gets 45 percent. All video ads are sold by Facebook. The program is geared specifically for iPhone viewers, since a majority of Facebook's traffic comes from mobile, to help publishers squeeze some extra money from clips watched from a smartphone. The stream pulls in video ads that brands have already bought, meaning that marketers are not paying extra money to get their clips to appear in the new section.  During a small test on Thursday and Friday, ads for Under Armour, Procter & Gamble, Taco Bell, Jet Blue, Target and KFC were playing alongside publishers' clips. Just this week, Sheryl Sandberg pitched a room of agencies and brand marketers at Advertising Week on Facebook's size as equivalent to a Super Bowl. "What people are starting to understand is that what we offer is really broad reach—we have a Super Bowl on mobile in the U.S. every day," Sandberg said. "Our data says that if you do TV plus Facebook, you enhance your reach by 17, 18 percent and more than double that for millennials, which is a hard group to reach right now on TV."

• Pew stuty of teen dating measures effects of social media and technology: Ah, young love. Many of us may remember the intensity and ecstasy of puppy love. But how have those relationships changed in an era of constant communication, oversharing and emoji? That's what a new study into teen dating, published Thursday by the Pew Research Center, explored in-depth. The study takes a look at how social media and technology weave into every stage of the dating process, from flirting to breakup. There's a lot of digital flirting going on -- one boy said that his way of flirting is to put "a bunch of emojis" under a girl's  photo. But asking someone out in person is still the most common way to start a relationship. Over three-quarters of teens said they've never dated someone they initially met online, though a quarter did admit they have dated (or hooked up) with people they met first online. One thing is for certain: if Romeo and Juliet had carried out their romance today, they probably would have avoided their catastrophic communication breakdown. Thirty-eight percent of teens who date expect to hear from their partners at least once per day; 11 percent expect to hear from their partner every hour. That doesn't mean, however, that teens necessarily like this constant communication. Sure, many teen daters have used online messages or texts to resolve arguments (48 percent) or just engage in conversations that makes them feel closer to each other (70 percent). But 43 percent have also found themselves in situations where they think their partner is distracted by their gadgets during their alone time. The study also explored some questions of gender differences. Girls, for example, are much more likely to experience unwanted flirting, mirroring another Pew finding that women are more likely to be the victims of online harassment. Male and female teens, however, reported that there are definitely times when partners have crossed the line. Online tools can also exacerbate jealous tendencies, the study found, and 69 percent of teens reported that they think social media in particular gives too many people a window into their private lives. Many teens told researchers that pressure to post about their relationships made them present a less authentic picture of their lives. Others said they stayed away from posting too much about their dating lives online because it leads to "drama";  one teen said it was because "more people ask questions and stuff like that." Digital communication had its role to play at the end of relationships as well, researchers found, but in some ways teens were surprisingly traditional. Yes, there were slivers of teens -- 7 percent each -- that think it's perfectly fine to break with someone by proxy or by just changing your social media status to "single." (That's cold, kids.)