Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 10

• Big data company Palantir raises $679.8 million: Palantir Technologies, the data firm best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has raised $679.8 million, according to a filing on Wednesday. The cash injection, which further expands the $500 million the company originally said it was raising in July, shows that despite shifting market conditions for privately held companies investors still hold confidence in the strongest of them, particularly those geared toward enterprises. Palantir is currently valued at $20 billion, making it the richest venture-backed company in the United States after ride service Uber and accommodation service Airbnb. It works closely with the U.S. government, whose steady business provides part of the reason investors like the Palo Alto, California-based company.

• Atlassian, the Profitable Aussie Unicorn Going Public Tomorrow: Atlassian is Australian management and workplace software maker. It’s set to begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow under the ticker symbol TEAM. Atlassian is looking to raise $440 million at a $4.2 billion valuation, up from the $370 million at under $4 billion it was shopping around last week. The bootstrapped Sydney, Australia-based startup has never taken any VC funding, and says it has been profitable for the last 10 years. The service it offers that people are most likely to have heard of is HipChat, an office chat and workflow management service that’s squaring off against Silicon Valley-adored Slack. CNBC has a detailed rundown on what Atlassian’s IPO prospectus says about its business. Atlassian is an outlier to all this. A decade of profitability buys a lot of credibility with investors, and having never taken venture dollars, it doesn’t have to worry about activating a ratchet if something goes wrong tomorrow.

• Who won, who lost in Square's IPO? Square’s recent $2.9 billion IPO is either a huge win for its investors or a sign of very bad days to come, depending on whether you believe the “high-five” tweets from prominent venture capitalists (VCs) or the slew of hand-wringing articles — from sources like NPR, The Verge and the Wall Street Journal — essentially saying it marks the end of free-flowing startup capital.The wildly contradictory responses to Square’s Nov. 19 debut on the New York Stock Exchange, when the payments-processing company’s stock was priced below its previous funding round in the private markets, has left a lot of people in the startup community (and beyond) wondering what’s going on. My take is that the IPO is further evidence that the new rules of the hunt for “unicorns” — startups valued at more than one billion dollars — are creating a small class of “haves” and a much larger class of “have-nots.” The lucky ones are the earliest-stage investors that find tomorrow’s unicorns. The less lucky are often the late-stage investors — generally the providers of the bulk of the capital — and the talent that signs on as these companies grow to fighting strength and scale. I think this is likely to cause a rebalancing of late-stage valuations and an increase in transparency in private markets. 

• AT&T is out-building Google Fiber: Consider this: The number of cities where Google Fiber has actually been switched on can be counted on your fingers, whereas AT&T GigaPower is already up and running in some 20 metropolitan areas. Where many of Google's prospective expansions are still in the discussion phase, AT&T has made concrete — though critics might say "limited" — investments in many more markets. In short, AT&T is out-building Google Fiber. That's a sign of a broader shift in the industry. What we're seeing now is Google's early lead in the fiber race being eaten away by AT&T's traditional advantage in building networks. Though Google deserves much of the credit for jump-starting the competition in the first place, not to mention blazing a trail for AT&T in important ways, AT&T is on pace to beat Google to many cities in America. And this is why. AT&T is benefiting tremendously from a chain reaction that Google initially began. By now, it's a familiar story: Google went around to cities and basically got them to compete for Google Fiber, handing out a standardized checklist to municipalities laying out all the things they could do to make themselves more attractive to the search giant. In so doing, Google drew attention to many local regulatory processes that otherwise slow down investments in infrastructure. Now, mayors everywhere are scrambling over each other to attract Google. And that has had knock-on benefits for AT&T. In plain English, when Google gets a good deal, so can AT&T. But getting the rights to dig up streets or string fiber along telephone poles is only part of the equation. Then there's the matter of actually doing it. And it can take a long time — in Google's case, as many as 18 months in Kansas City, according to Hunter Newby, chief executive of the company Allied Fiber. And in Austin, Texas, AT&T says it beat Google to market by roughly two years, even though the two companies announced their projects within days of each other. Google declined to comment. Part of what's going on is that AT&T is leaning on decades of expertise in building networks. Many analysts say that Google aims to invest just enough into fiber to encourage more traditional providers to build out their own networks. Then, when consumers subscribe to the better service and take heavier advantage of Google services, Google's core business benefits. In that respect, Google isn't so much going toe-to-toe with AT&T as nudging it to expand.

• Investors hover as e-tailers boost demand for Indian warehouses: E-commerce in India is booming: the market is expected to grow to $220 billion in terms of value of goods sold by 2025, up from an expected $11 billion this year, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. With more Indian consumers shopping online, the country's $110 billion logistics and warehousing sector is stretched. e-tailers need to move goods around swiftly with minimal damage. They demand fire sprinkler systems, climate control, levelled loading bays and paved roads to warehouses. Simply adding this in can lift rents by up to 20 percent, according to real estate firm JLL. Existing spaces, known as "godowns" - low-rise sheds with poor ventilation and only a shutter to ward off heat and dust - are too old and cramped for firms like retail giant Amazon.com and Indian rival Flipkart. Amazon India has leased 20 fulfilment centres - warehouses where it stores goods and packs and sorts orders - in the last 18 months from multiple landlords. Still, it needs bigger, modern spaces closer to customers; the average size it leases today is 200,000 square feet. To satisfy that, supply of modern warehouses in India is set to more than double by 2020 to 200 million square feet, JLL estimates, fuelled by online retailers. They took up over 20 percent of the space added in the first half of 2015. Overseas firms including Dutch pension fund manager APG and U.S. buyout group Warburg Pincus are looking to invest in India's warehouses, hoping to cash in on demand for modern and efficient storage space from booming online retailers. "We have got enough people running around with bags of money, and not that many assets," said Ben Salmon, head of Singapore-based Assetz Property Group that has raised $50 million from Asian investors to buy warehouses in India.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 9

• It’s Come to This: Yahoo’s Future Now Hinges on Taxes (And Not Products):  Yahoo is not going to spin off its 15% stake in e-commerce giant Alibaba, according to sources cited by CNBC. Instead, Yahoo is going to look into selling its core Internet business. Yahoo’s core business includes its web properties, apps, search, media, ad business, etc. Yahoo’s 15% stake in Alibaba is worth around $32 billion, while its core Internet business is worth anywhere between $3.4 billion and $4.1 billion, according to analysts. Internet companies are about a lot of things, but primarily their success hinges on making great and innovative products. And unless the execution of getting those offerings out is just abysmal, this trumps all in Silicon Valley. That was the alleged promise of bringing in Google wunderkind Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO more than four years ago. Now the company’s fate seems in the hands of tax attorneys, rather than entrepreneurs, which tells you all you need to know about Yahoo at the end of 2015. Last week, Re/code and others reported that the board of the Internet giant was seriously considering pausing the spinoff of its enormously valuable stake in China’s Alibaba Group. The reason: While Mayer and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman were assured by their pricey tax advisers at Skadden Arps that the transaction would be tax-free, the Internal Revenue Service would not provide any guarantee of that. No spinoff puts Yahoo into play in a very significant way, even if the board does not say so. And none of it has anything to do with creating great products for consumers, which was the only thing that would have saved Yahoo in the first place. Score one for the accountants.

• Google’s High-End Pixel C Tablet Launches to Tepid Reviews: In September, Google surprised us all when it announced its Surface competitor, the 10.2-inch Pixel C Android tablet with its optional Bluetooth keyboard. Unlike its Nexus line of tablets, this is the first time Google has built its own tablet. If you’re willing to pay the price — starting at $499 for the 32GB model plus another $149 for the keyboard — the Pixel C is a very nice, solid tablet that sits atop the current crop of Android tablets. At that price, it directly competes with the iPad Air 2 (though the basic model of the Air only comes with 32GB of storage space). The Pixel C is now available in the Google Play store in a select number of countries. You can now buy it in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland. If you think this tablet/keyboard combo sounds a little bit like a Microsoft Surface, or maybe even Apple’s iPad Pro with a keyboard, you’re not alone. It’s impossible not to compare the C with them. While Microsoft’s Surface is essentially a fully featured laptop with a detachable keyboard, Google and Apple are opting for a combination of a tablet and mobile operating system with a keyboard. There is a market for the C, but I think it’ll be a small one. The Pixel Chromebooks were meant to show what you can build when you don’t cut corners to keep the price down — the C is meant to showcase what that would look like for a high-end Android productivity tablet. It’s the Android Tablet for the CEO — assuming your CEO uses Android.

• In China's O2O tech, today's 'unicorns' risk becoming tomorrow's 'unicorpses': The Beijing offices of Shequ001, a start-up delivering supermarket goods booked via smartphone, stand almost deserted. Leaflets lie scattered on the floor. Nearly 400 former employees, of a workforce that in March topped 2,000, have joined a social network clamoring to get their unpaid wages. Zhang, who gave only his family name, is one of fewer than three dozen workers left at a company that last year was worth 2 billion yuan ($312 million). "We just wanted to build the market, so we burned through our money," he said, adding he hasn't seen the firm's CEO since March. In China's hottest tech sector, hundreds of "online to offline" (O2O) start-ups like Shequ001, which draw mobile users to local physical stores and services, have failed as skyrocketing valuations deter investors and put the brakes on fresh funding. Many more are expected to fall by the wayside, or be driven into mergers in what executives and investors say is a market bubble. China now boasts 21 'unicorns' - private start-ups valued at over $1 billion - says CB Insights. But now, those inflated valuations - for companies that rarely make any money - are proving too much for investors and new funding is drying up. O2O has found particular traction in China through a combination of widespread smartphone use, a booming mobile payment sector and cheap migrant labor. Entrepreneurs developing O2O apps - for firms offering anything from ride hailing and food delivery to group discounts at shops, restaurants and cinemas - have had easy access to money from technology giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as from venture capitalists, private equity, sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises. Start-ups backed by venture capital raised $9.6 billion in July-September alone, four times the level of a year earlier, according to a KPMG and CB Insights report. "The whole O2O concept is getting too expensive," said Han Weiwen, head of Bain's private equity practice in China. "The valuation is very, very high. There's no traditional way to look at the valuation ... because they don't have revenue." The fierce competition and high spending drives start-ups back to their investors for frequent cash injections, pushing valuations higher. But as the financing roller-coaster has slowed, many start-ups have struggled to afford the subsidized discounts they need to keep users. In O2O, user numbers, whether from inflated demand or not, are a key metric to attracting fresh investment. "This kind of craziness can't go on forever," said Liu Jun, who heads Baidu's efforts in O2O and sits on the board of Uber's China unit. "Enough is enough."

• Apple Executive Seeks a Touch of Chic at Retail Stores: Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, got a private demonstration of the fancy wireless speaker, the Phantom, and its sound quality seven weeks ago. On the spot, she said she wanted the space podlike device, which starts at $1,990, to be sold in Apple’s retail stores. This week, the Phantom will appear in 14 Apple stores in the United States, and the company is discussing how widely to roll out the product next year. The device will get the sort of prominent display treatment that is typically reserved in Apple stores for the company’s Beats audio accessories. The move is an indication of how Ms. Ahrendts, who started at Apple last year, is changing the playbook at some of the iPhone maker’s stores this holiday season and the direction she’s going in: ultraluxe. Apple’s stores typically spotlight the company’s devices, with the most expensive audio accessories topping out in the hundreds of dollars. The Phantom is the first high-end non-Apple gadget that Ms. Ahrendts, the former chief executive of the fashion house Burberry, has brought in since she took the job. It buttresses some of her other recent moves to create more of a luxury Apple retail experience, including initiating private try-on appointments for the most expensive Apple watches, reducing the numbers and types of accessories that are sold, and pushing manufacturers to make special packaging for gadgets carried in Apple’s stores. Apple has traditionally sold the most expensive accessories online only, like the $2,700 B&O BeoPlay A9 MKII speaker. “I asked Tim a very simple question: Why do we do it this way?” she said of her boss, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive. Mr. Cook told her he didn’t know, she said

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 8

• Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, revealed a new name for the company’s Life Sciences division: Verily. Alphabet made the branding announcement with a video and a company website that went live on Monday. In it, Verily laid out a multidisciplinary approach to health and longevity, describing disease as a “continuum” that will be fought with experts from different fields and divisions working on hardware such as medical devices, software that might use algorithms to look for health patterns, as well as clinical studies like the Baseline Study of health and disease. The new name for the business is part of Google’s transition to a holding company structure under the parent entity dubbed Alphabet. For those keeping track of Alphabet’s soup of operating companies, Verily is the division that was the Life Sciences unit of Google’s X lab. Life Sciences “graduated” from Google X shortly after Google announced the Alphabet structure. Verily means “truth” or “truly” and the name, according to the spokeswoman, is meant to underscore the company’s mission to”reveal a true picture of health and disease.” Background: For years, Google has been entering new businesses, but struggling to recreate the success it enjoys in search and advertising. In August, Google announced that it would create a new org structure where its traditional businesses (search, advertising, YouTube, maps) would continue to be called Google, while all other businesses would become separate companies. The parent of all of these companies would be called Alphabet. The idea is that the new businesses would get more room to grow and innovate like startups, while the traditional businesses would get higher stock market valuations because of their incredible profitability and size. 

• Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design: Digital life keeps us hooked with an infinite entertainment stream as its default setting. Tech companies often set it up that way. There’s Facebook beckoning with its bottomless news feed. There’s Netflix autoplaying the next episode in a TV series 10 seconds after the previous one ends. There’s Tinder encouraging us to keep swiping in search of the next potential paramour. And then there are the constant notices and reminders — a friend liked your photo or tweet; a colleague wants to connect with you on LinkedIn; an Evite awaits your response — which automatically induce feelings of social obligation. You damn yourself to distraction if you respond, and to fear of missing out if you don’t. Tech companies tend to present these feedback loops as consumer conveniences. A new Intel TV ad, for instance, shows a young girl in the back of a car growing sad because the laptop on which she was watching a singalong video suddenly runs out of power. The company’s new battery-preserving processor, though, ultimately saves the day, “so you never have to stop watching.” T-Mobile has just introduced BingeOn, a feature that offers subscribers on certain plans unlimited high-speed access to popular streaming video channels. There’s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers. 

• Verizon Would Explore Yahoo Deal If It Made Sense, CFO Says: Verizon would explore a possible acquisition of Yahoo! if a deal made sense, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said. Shammo, speaking at an investor conference in New York Monday, said that while it still wasn’t clear what Yahoo’s board has planned for the tech company, Verizon would take a look if it were to be offered up for sale. Yahoo directors met last week to discuss the viability of spinning off its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and whether to seek a buyer for Yahoo’s Web businesses. Verizon acquired AOL for $4.4 billion earlier this year as part of a push into mobile video advertising. Yahoo owns online sports sites, financial and general news and advertising technology including BrightRoll, which Verizon might find attractive at the right price. Impediments to a sale of Yahoo are the fate of its stake in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, and the tax implications of a sale of that unit. 

• Dropbox Shuts Down E-Mail and Photo Apps as It Gets Back to Businesses: The cloud storage company is increasing its focus on corporate customers as it tries to develop a sustainable business. Cloud storage provider Dropbox is killing off two applications it introduced to much fanfare, including a photo-sharing app released last year. The San Francisco company has placed more focus recently on creating tools companies are willing to pay for, while these apps were designed with everyday consumers in mind. The photo app, called Carousel, offered to automatically back up photos stored on a phone and display them alongside images already stored in a Dropbox account. The other app, an e-mail and task manager called Mailbox, came through an acquisition Dropbox made in 2013. The company said in a statement that features from each app will make their way into other Dropbox services. After achieving a valuation of $10 billion in a financing round last year, Dropbox is under pressure to increase its revenue and eventually go public or sell itself. Fidelity Investments and BlackRock wrote down the stakes of their Dropbox investments this year. Dropbox has tried to straddle two missions in recent years: to build a product beloved by consumers and to create a service that satisfies businesses' unique needs. The former strategy, which includes these apps, has fallen somewhat out of favor since the company brought in Chief Operating Officer Dennis Woodside from Google last year. Both Carousel and Mailbox competed unsuccessfully with much more popular services from Google and Apple. Mailbox will shut down on Feb. 26, 2016, and Carousel on March 31, 2016. 

• Airbnb Officially Confirms Gargantuan $1.5 Billion Funding Round in SEC Filing:  Home rental service and unofficial sharing economy mascot Airbnb has made its $1.5 billion funding round official in an SEC document today. The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the equity offering back in June, writing that it set the company’s value at more than $25 billion. The round makes Airbnb the third-most valuable privately held tech company in the world, after Uber (worth $62.5 billion) and the Chinese phone maker Xiaomi (valued at around $45 billion). Airbnb’s lead investors in this round were reportedly General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital Group and Tiger Global Management, which together composed a third of the Airbnb shares sold. Airbnb is raising giant sums like this and putting off an IPO because the startup — like other highly-valued darlings of Silicon Valley — wants to put its resources into emerging markets around the world, especially China. The company is also busy putting out political fires in its more well-saturated markets like San Francisco and New York City, and is in the process of building a (likely expensive) global political organizing operation to protect its revenue streams. Onstage at the Code Conference earlier this year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that he thinks an IPO is still a couple years away. 

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 7

• Mother-Son Team Demo Translate For Code: Meet Roslyn Scott and Dalton Scott, a mother and son team who just demoed a neat idea for making code more accessible, here at the Disrupt London 2015 hackathon. Their hack, called the Human Code Project, uses several IBM Watson APIs, including its Natural Language Classifier, to power a search interface for translating JavaScript code terms into plain English. It’s designed much like a language translation interface, so someone who’s trying to understand what a piece of code is doing can search for a particular Javascript word or phrase within that code to see a definition of what a term such as ‘onclick’ might mean in that particular context. The interface returns a percentage breakdown of how confident the system is in its definition for that term. During the hackathon they uploaded a training document to Watson, and created two classifier sets — one for definitions of code terms and one for phrases, explains Roslyn.

• Some Twitter Users Call Foul as It Switches Moments and Notifications Buttons: Twitter moved Moments for Web and Android viewers yesterday to where the Notifications button once was, causing considerable consternation among faithful users. In a nutshell, many in the Twitterati—thanks to muscle memory—are reflexively tapping the Moments button by accident when they want to check their notifications. Numerous tweets accuse the company of tricking users.  San Francisco-based Twitter has declined comment. But the move raises the question—as a few of the tweets above hint at—about whether or not the social media company is happy with the metrics that Moments has been getting so far. The end of the fourth quarter is near, and newly re-appointed CEO Jack Dorsey would certainly like to tell Wall Street investors during the next earnings call that Moments is drawing a big crowd. Twitter has made Moments a centerpiece development since Dorsey came back to the helm. Additionally, Digiday reported this week that Twitter's ads for Moments, called Promoted Moments, have an asking price of $1 million. So it stands to reason that Twitter needs Moments to scale in order to make such a purchase worth it for brands. 

• Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers as Its Transportation Ambitions Grow: Amazon goes to great lengths to get packages into customers’ hands as quickly as possible — even if it means employing drones. Those efforts will now include putting thousands of Amazon-branded trucks on the road. The ever-ambitious online retailer planned to announce on Friday morning that it had purchased “thousands” of trailers — the part of a tractor-trailer that stores the cargo — to make sure it had the shipping capacity to move products on time as its North American business continues its rapid growth. The trailers won’t be used to deliver packages to customer doors. Instead, they’ll be utilized to transport items from one Amazon warehouse, known as a fulfillment center, to another, as well as between fulfillment centers and sort centers, where Amazon organizes orders by zip code to be delivered to local post offices. A spokeswoman stressed that Amazon would continue to rely on existing trucking partners, which own and drive the tractor portion of the vehicles that will tow the Amazon trailers. The announcement comes as Amazon’s North American retail business is growing at its fastest clip in several years. Revenue for this unit grew 35 percent in the third quarter, fueled by product assortment expansion in categories such as apparel and the growth of Amazon’s hugely popular Prime membership program. The trucking announcement marks the latest initiative aimed at taking more control over how quickly the company can get goods into the hands of its customers. While Amazon continues to utilize trucking partners to move goods within its warehouse network, and UPS and FedEx for package delivery to customer doors, it is increasingly unveiling initiatives to take over more of these functions. Former employees say the goal is to someday be able to circumvent UPS or FedEx entirely, in large part so that snafus like the one that caused late deliveries during the 2013 holidays don’t happen again. One guess on why Amazon only wants to own the trailer at this point: If it owned the tractor, it would have to register as a commercial trucking company and incur the insurance costs and liability risks that come with that. By sticking with just the trailer body, Amazon potentially saves money and avoids other potential headaches. That said, some reports suggest Amazon may eventually go all the way and own the trucks, too.

• Samsung to finally pay Apple $548 million in patent dispute: Samsung fought until the bitter end to avoid paying Apple, but the company now says it will finally hand over the more than $548 million it owes for infringing the patents and designs of its biggest smartphone rival. In papers filed in federal court in San Jose, California on Thursday, Samsung Electronics said it will make the payment by Dec. 14 if Apple sends an invoice on Friday. Asked if it had done so, Apple declined to comment on Friday. The payment comes after a U.S. appeals court last May reduced a $930 million judgment against Samsung by $382 million, stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple patents and copying the look of the iPhone. Another trial over remaining damages relating to some of Samsung's infringing products in the case is set to go ahead next spring. Even though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. had authorized damages to Apple in May, Samsung again appealed the final figure to the same court, and was rebuffed twice more. Now agreeing to pay, Samsung told the San Jose court that it expects to be reimbursed if it eventually succeeds in a forthcoming appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over its liability for copying the patented designs of the surface, bezel and user interface of the iPhone, which accounted for $399 million of the total award.

• All the Product Reviews Money Can Buy - Online Odd Job Site Fiverr In Focus Over Fake Reviews  : The holiday online shopping season has begun, and that means reading lots of online product reviews. Some of these reviews are helpful, others are not. And many are fakes — raves or pans from people who have never actually used the product. Where do fake reviews come from? In this column, a close-up look at one notable source. Q. Starting in early November, and over the course of a week, the Facebook business page for the company where I work, Long’s Jewelers, was hit with 200 one-star reviews. Many of the reviews arrived in a matter of minutes, and all were left without comment. They were bogus reviews that were composed by a freelance spammer, who we believe was paid by one of our competitors. Our average customer rating on our Facebook page fell from 4.8 stars to 2.3 stars. We contacted Facebook, which at first refused to help. I wrote a post on a marketing website, asking for the community’s aid, and then released a statement asking for the public’s assistance. My pleas went viral enough to compel Facebook to re-examine the issue, and it has since taken down nearly all of the purchased reviews. Through a bit of sleuthing, I found that the reviews came through a website called Fiverr, where people offer to perform odd jobs for $5 and up. Leaving negative reviews is apparently one of those jobs. Fiverr banished the person who wrote these particular sham reviews, but hundreds of other people are still on the site, offering a similar service. Fiverr, which started in 2010, is based in Israel and hosts thousands of people performing tasks in hundreds of categories. The sellers use pseudonyms, for some reason, and most gigs, as they are called, are perfectly legitimate, even delightful. “I will create a 16-line song about anything,” reads a gig by Tylerbarks. “I will write message in beach sand at sunrise,” reads another by Batykefer1. But the Haggler rummaged around Fiverr and quickly found dozens of people offering to post positive reviews to Facebook, different Google sites, the Apple App Store, iTunes and elsewhere. None said anything about trumped-up negative reviews, but fabricated raves are nearly as bad — or perhaps just as misleading, though perhaps not quite as malicious.

• Google Ventures Owns Part of Several Unicorns, but the Biggest (and Trickiest) Is Uber: The venture firm has $2.4 billion under management and has invested in 300 companies, a number of which have secured billion dollar valuations (a.k.a. unicorn status). According to new figures released on Sunday, the VC shop added 39 new startups in 2015, including significant bets in commerce (Jet.com), biotech (Editas) and agricultural software (Farmer’s Business Network), a new terrain. Most investments during the year, nearly a third, went into life sciences and health companies, followed by consumer and enterprise startups. It is hard to anticipate that any of these investments will be bigger than Uber — in dollars sunk in or payout. In 2013, Kara Swisher reported that Google Ventures spent $250 million for 1.8 million Series C-1 preferred shares in the ride-hailing app startup. At a then $3.5 billion valuation, that put its stake just north of 7 percent. (Google Ventures declined to comment on this or the size of any other investment stakes.) Uber is now reportedly en route to a valuation of $62.5 billion. Its many subsequent rounds since 2013 have likely diluted Google Ventures’ share, although a source familiar with the deal terms says not by much. Even at the low end of analyst estimation, around 2 percent ownership, the Google Ventures share would, at Uber’s current valuation, hit fivefold return. And who knows how Uber will climb before an IPO. Increasingly, however, it’s a sticky situation. As Uber balloons, many of its ambitions — in mobile app integrations, mapping and self-driving cars — are aimed squarely at Google. The startup is partly driven, several sources said, by a concern the search giant could one day clobber it. Google should be worried if it can’t.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 4

• Uber Valuation Put at $62.5 Billion After a New Investment Round - Tiger Global, Investor in Uber's Rivals, Joins In: Uber’s fund-raising efforts are showing no signs of slowing down. The company, based in San Francisco, is close to completing the raising of a $2.1 billion round of venture capital, according to people briefed on the company’s plans, the company’s single largest round to date. Once completed, the investment will value the company at $62.5 billion, according to three people briefed on the plans, securing Uber’s place as the world’s most valuable private start-up. Tiger Global Management participated in the newest round, led by its partner Lee Fixel, as did T. Rowe Price, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the terms are still private. Talks of the funding plans were previously reported by The New York Times in October. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported the $62.5 billion valuation. Competition is intensifying in the global ride-hailing market, as rivals like Lyft, Didi Kuaidi and other companies raise billions of dollars in to expand as quickly as possible. Lyft, another ride-hailing start-up, is in talks to raise a further $500 million in funding, according to four people briefed on the round, which could value the company at roughly $4 billion. Didi Kuaidi, to date, has raised more than $4 billion in private investment. The participation of Tiger Global, however, is particularly interesting. Tiger Global is an investor in Ola and GrabTaxi, two of Uber’s largest competitors in India and Southeast Asia. It is perhaps the first time a major institutional investor participated in the rounds of both Uber and its major competitors. And on Thursday, Ola and GrabTaxi announced a strategic partnership with Lyft, which is also based in San Francisco and is Uber’s major competitor in the United States.

• Why would anyone want to buy Yahoo? Now, that question may be the key to understanding the parlor game of rumor and conjecture currently swirling around the company. Depending on which speculating analyst you talk to, Verizon, Microsoft, Time Inc., Comcast, AT&T, and even IAC — the company that owns Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com — could all jump in as potential buyers.To be specific, what we're talking about is a possible sale of Yahoo's "core business," but even that term belies the dizzying range of things that Yahoo actually does. Is it a search company? A media company? An advertising company?In truth, it is all of those things, which is one reason we've seen so many names come out of the corporate woodwork. But it turns out there's one metric that makes Yahoo really attractive here: The number of eyeballs that Yahoo commands on a monthly basis.This might seem obvious in an era where clickbait and traffic seem to rule with an iron grip. But if you take Yahoo apart piece by piece, you start to understand why snapping up the company would benefit some firms more than others.Take Microsoft, for instance. It actually tried to buy Yahoo before, in 2008.Microsoft was worried about Google dominating a new market, search. Microsoft tried to build its own competitor, Bing (then known as Windows Live Search), but it didn't take off with users. So Microsoft figured it would buy the No. 2 player, Yahoo, and combine its search and search ad business with Microsoft's.Fast-forward to today, and Bing is no longer lagging behind Yahoo. In fact, what you have is a market where Bing actually covers more than 20 percent of search, compared to Yahoo's 13 percent. Both have been helped, no doubt, by a joint partnership on search.Combining the two might get Microsoft a bit closer to Google (which commands 64 percent of the market), but it still wouldn't be within striking distance. And Microsoft would also be inheriting all of Yahoo's other Internet businesses, potentially slowing the company down as it tries to execute a shift toward offering more cloud services, especially for corporate clients.But let's shift to some of the other names that have been floated. Three are providers of fixed or mobile Internet — four, if you count Softbank, the Japanese parent company of Sprint. That isn't a coincidence; Internet providers increasingly view original online content as the way to turn their networks into cash cows. Carrying data over simple pipes is no longer as lucrative as before.

• Lyft Joins With Asian Rivals to Compete With Uber: The anti-Uber global alliance of ride-hailing companies has now officially taken shape. On Thursday, Lyft, a ride-hailing start-up based in the United States, announced a coalition with GrabTaxi, Ola and Didi Kuaidi, three of the largest ride-hailing companies in Asia. Under a partnership, the companies can operate in one another’s home countries, forging new pathways for each in markets they have yet to tap into. Many of Uber’s competitors are far smaller and operate in just one or two markets. Lyft, which is currently seeking $500 million in funding at a valuation of $4 billion, operates in more than 60 cities in the United States, for instance. By banding together, the companies aim to achieve more scale and more service adoption in relatively short amounts of time. Partnerships are less expensive than having to spend to establish operations in multiple markets. The companies declined to reveal financial details of their partnership. The alliance has been forming over the last few months. In September, Lyft teamed with Didi, the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth, to provide service to Chinese Didi Kuaidi app users who enter the United States. The move also lets Lyft users find rides in China using the Lyft app; the requests are fulfilled by Didi Kuaidi drivers. Ola is a ride-hailing company in India, and GrabTaxi operates in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Under the partnership, Lyft users traveling to India will be able to open the Lyft app there and have local rides supplied by Ola. In Southeast Asian countries, Lyft will have a similar arrangement with GrabTaxi.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 3

• Startup Founders Sound Just as Pessimistic About a Bubble as Tech Journalists: There has been a lot of kvetching of late about whether or not we’re in the middle of another tech bubble, and most of the pontificating has come from venture capitalists and tech media. But what do people who launch startups actually think? According to First Round Capital’s new State of Startups Report — a survey of more than 500 founders of VC-backed companies — founders are also largely convinced we’re in a tech bubble of some sort. First Round’s findings indicate that startup leaders are having a harder time raising money and that they think it’s only going to get tougher. The report also says they believe bitcoin is one really overhyped technology, whereas self-driving cars don’t get enough attention. We’ve embedded the report in a slideshow below, but here are some key facts and figures from First Round: 80 percent of founders say they were able to raise what they wanted to in their last rounds, but virtually all of them say that it will be harder to do so in the next year. 73 percent of startup founders believe we are in a bubble, but enterprise startup leaders are twice as likely to say we aren’t (twice as many enterprise tech founders also say they’ll be profitable in the next year). No one has a clue about what the IPO market will look like in 2016: One third says there will be more IPOs, one third says it’ll be about the same and one third says there will be fewer. 90 percent of founders expect to see more tech mergers and acquisitions over the next year, which is also what’s generally expected by industry analysts and experts.

• Crazy Like a Box: Going Public Can Give Start-Ups Outsize Power: In early 2014, when the cloud storage company Box filed for an initial public offering, many on Wall Street looked at its numbers and laughed. Box’s revenues were soaring, but its losses were growing nearly as quickly. It was pouring vast sums into sales and marketing, it had less than a year of cash remaining, and executives did not anticipate making a profit for years. When Box eventually went public this January — after raising another round of private funds to delay its I.P.O. — its stock price briefly surged but has since lost about 40 percent of its value. The company reported on Wednesday that in the third fiscal quarter, it again increased sales, and it projected slightly higher sales in 2016 than it had previously expected. Now, with a stock market valuation of about $1.7 billion, Box is technically in league with the “unicorn” private companies valued at more than a billion dollars — but compared with some of those highflying start-ups, it could easily be mistaken for a pony. Dropbox, a cloud storage competitor that remains private, was valued at about $10 billion in its last fund-raising round. To many in Silicon Valley, Box’s inauspicious debut on the stock market, like several other recent tech offerings, serves as a cautionary tale. While floating an I.P.O. was once seen as a rite of passage in Silicon Valley, in the last few years it has become a much bemoaned annoyance to many tech founders. Companies are waiting longer to go public, and thanks to a surge of money from hedge funds and mutual funds looking to get in on the start-up scene, young companies have been given resources to stay private for years on end. Go out to the public markets before you’re bulletproof, the thinking goes, and you’ll get crushed. No one wants to be the next Etsy, Hortonworks or Box, all of which now trade below their I.P.O. price. But what if Box gets the last laugh? Despite the company’s languishing stock price, it’s possible that a few years from now, many in the Valley may come to look back on Box’s I.P.O. as a masterly timed bit of corporate strategy — an initially painful move that ultimately rewarded investors, improved employees’ financial stability, provided executives with independence from unpredictable private investors and pushed the company to adopt a more structured path toward profitability. To understand why, it helps to look at the market for private tech funding, and how it is affected by public valuations. Several unicorns have recently discovered that taking money from mutual funds and other large investors brings surprising public scrutiny. The mutual fund company Fidelity and others must regularly report assessments of their private-company holdings, and lately they’ve calculated that start-ups like Snapchat and Dropbox are worth less than what the funds paid for them. Dropbox’s valuation, in fact, may now be tied directly to Box’s, since large investors look at comparable public companies to help determine the value of their private investments. The same logic applies to employees. If you’re an engineer looking to work at a cloud storage company, you could go to Dropbox, where you’ll receive stock options at a lofty $10 billion valuation that you’ll have a hard time turning into actual money. Or you can go to Box, in which you’ll get shares at a relatively reasonable valuation that can also be traded on the public market.

• Ballmer Chides Microsoft Over Cloud Revenue Disclosures:  One major Microsoft Corp. investor wasn’t happy with the level of disclosure Wednesday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting: Steve Ballmer. The company should disclose profit margins and sales for its cloud and hardware businesses, Microsoft’s former chief executive officer said. “It’s sort of a key metric -- if they talk about it as key to the company, they should report it,” Ballmer, who is the company’s biggest individual shareholder, told Bloomberg at the software maker’s annual meeting in Bellevue, Washington. Microsoft reports an annualized revenue run rate -- or sales at a certain point in time carried out to a yearly rate -- for its commercial cloud business and has said it is aiming to reach $20 billion on that basis by 2018. Ballmer, who handed the reins to Satya Nadella in 2014, derided the use of run rate as “bulls---.” “They should report the revenue, not the run rate,” he said. Margin -- a measure of profitability -- is important because while gross margins for software are very high, they are far lower for things like hardware and cloud services, Ballmer said. Microsoft also said in April it would end its fiscal year with a commercial cloud gross margin of 44 percent. Though it reports revenue and margin for some of its cloud businesses, it doesn’t provide a total sales number for cloud. Ballmer said he has discussed the issue with the company and that after almost two years out of the CEO job, he can’t even guess what these numbers are. “We enjoy a regular dialogue with Steve, and welcome his input and feedback, as we do from our other investors.” said Chris Suh, Microsoft’s general manager for investor relations. Ballmer also criticized Nadella’s answer to an audience member questioning the lack of key apps, like one for Starbucks, on the company’s Windows Phone. Nadella responded by citing the company’s plan to appeal to Windows developers by allowing them to write universal applications that work on computers, phones and tablets, targeting a larger array of devices than just Microsoft’s handsets that have just a single-digit share of the mobile market. “That won’t work,” Ballmer commented as Nadella spoke. Instead, the company needs to enable Windows Phones “to run Android apps,” he said.

• Uber launches taxi-hailing button for third-party apps:  Online taxi-hailing service Uber [UBER.UL] said it would allow third-party app developers to add a 'Ride Request' button within their apps for free. Developers would need to register their apps on Uber's website to get access to the code to add the button, which users can tap to request a ride. To entice developers to use the feature, Uber said it would pay $5 for every new U.S.-based customer that uses the button from the developer's app. Earlier this year, Uber had partnered with Zomato, an India-based restaurant finder, to add a "Ride there with Uber" button on the restaurant page. Last year, Google Maps also integrated Uber within its app to allow users to book a ride.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday December 2

• Yahoo shares spike 6% on reports board to weigh selling core business, Marissa Mayer's future role: WSJ. The board of Web giant Yahoo is set to discuss the company's future, and that of high-profile Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, when it meets this week, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Tuesday. People familiar with the matter told the newspaper the board was expected to discuss during meetings from Wednesday through Friday whether to proceed with a plan to spin off more than $30 billion in shares of Alibaba or find a buyer for its core business of web properties, or both. Yahoo's core business, which includes popular services like Yahoo Mail and its news and sports sites, could attract private equity firms, media and telecom companies or firms like Softbank  analysts have said in the past. The news comes as Mayer faces growing pressure over the company's performance. Mayer came to Yahoo after a long stint at Google. The company's shares were up more than 6 percent in extended trading.

• Forget China — Google Has to Fight Off Alibaba on Mobile in India: Should Google return some services in mainland China, as many expect it to do soon, it will have to go head to head with China’s Internet giants. In the meantime, Google is squaring off against one of them, Alibaba, in India, Google’s largest growth market. The Information published a solid look at mobile habits across India, courtesy of data from mobile startup Quettra. Some of the figures aren’t surprising. Facebook dominates: Indians love the social site and really love Facebook’s WhatsApp — it has 55 million users monthly hours spent, blowing away other messaging apps. Google, though, has a solid lead in utilities and video apps, thanks to YouTube. A potentially troubling sign for the search giant is the race on mobile browsers. The UC browser, which Alibaba acquired last year, is beating Google’s Chrome in India, with over five million more monthly hours of use. Alibaba’s stripped-down browser takes fourth place. Android dominates India. But Google is still concerned with getting the millions there coming online with smartphones to take their first steps on Google’s service, particularly since Facebook is making a similar push. A mobile browser is, for now, one key thing Google has that its U.S. rival does not. But getting mobile users to use services isn’t the hard problem in India. It’s covering their data costs, which are often prohibitively high. Hence Google’s recent push on building lighter, even offline versions of its products. On Monday, Google unveiled an update to the data-saving mode for mobile Chrome that will roll out first in Indonesia and India.

• Zuckerberg Vows to Daughter He’ll Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares: Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth more than $45 billion — to charitable purposes. The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago. Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money, through an unusual limited liability corporate structure. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they wrote. Mr. Zuckerberg’s charitable plans are the latest indication of a growing interest in philanthropy among Silicon Valley’s young billionaires, who unlike previous generations of business tycoons, appear eager to spread their wealth while they are still young. Mr. Zuckerberg is 31, and Dr. Chan is 30. Yet they are entering largely uncharted waters with a charity effort of such scale. They have not yet detailed how the money will be spent and the pace in which the money will be given out indicates they plan to take their time.

• Amazon gadget sales more than triple over Thanksgiving weekend: Amazon.com Inc said sales of its electronic gadgets more than tripled over the Thanksgiving weekend from last year, with the Fire tablet the top-selling product. Sales of the 7-inch tablet more than tripled, while the Fire TV set-top box sold six times more than last year, the company said, without providing the number of units sold.