Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 21

• Amazon in talks to lease Boeing jets to launch air-cargo business: report: Amazon.com is negotiating to lease 20 Boeing Co (BA.N) 767 jets to start its own air-delivery service next month, seeking to avoid delays from third-party carriers, the Seattle Times reported, citing cargo-industry executives. Amazon has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up the planes, the newspaper reported on Friday, citing a senior aircraft-leasing company executive familiar with matter.

• Alibaba Heads Into 2016 Struggling With Knock-Off Reputation: Cash-strapped Star Wars fans can pick up Darth Vader figurines and light sabers for as little as $4.59. Tom Brady jerseys go for about a 10th of those on the National Football League’s store. A pair of red Beats Solo headphones can be had for just $107 -- about half its official price. It’s bargains galore at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Taobao: the EBay-like bazaar where buyers meet up with sellers. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma is struggling to shake the company’s reputation as a haven for cheap knock-offs and unauthorized merchandise, 21 months after calling counterfeits cancerous. He heads into 2016 after a bruising year that saw more than $50 billion wiped off its market value amid lawsuits and criticism from Chinese and U.S. regulators. Cleaning up its image next year is crucial to Alibaba’s goal of winning the trust of merchants and shoppers overseas, from where Jack Ma wants to get more than half the company’s revenue within a decade. A cooling Chinese economy makes that effort even more pressing. At home, JD.com Inc. is winning customers partly because it holds the inventory itself and sells directly to consumers, similar to Amazon, a business model easier to police and regulate, said Michelle Ma, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “By now, management should have eliminated this problem,” said Cyrus Mewawalla, managing director of London-based CM Research. “The fact that they haven’t is a worrying sign forinvestors.”

• Theranos Founder Faces a Test of Technology, and Reputation: Last year, as the deadly and highly contagious Ebola virus threatened to spread around the globe, Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up, was scrambling to find a test that could quickly detect if a person was infected. This was exactly the sort of thing the company was supposed to do. Its fundamental promise was to revolutionize laboratory testing by offering hundreds of different blood tests that could be done through a simple finger stick for a fraction of the cost of typical lab blood work. More than that, Elizabeth Holmes, who started the company in 2003, had a higher-minded purpose. She also wanted to defeat epidemics. The company devoted significant resources to the Ebola effort. “We stopped everything for Ebola — for the world,” says Richard Kovacevich, the former chief executive of Wells Fargo, who joined Theranos as a director in 2013. And then, nothing. Even as other companies received approval from regulators, Theranos watched from the sidelines. “I have no doubt we would have” gotten the green light for the tests, Mr. Kovacevich said. But the crisis ebbed, and the company says getting approval for that test is no longer a priority. Now, after a surprise inspection last summer, the Food and Drug Administration is requiring that Theranos’s equipment and individual tests go through the regulatory process and get approval. This will determine whether its foundational technology is a reality — or, like that Ebola test, an unfulfilled grand promise. While Theranos says it has conducted millions of tests, largely through a partnership with Walgreens, the drugstore chain, no one from outside Theranos has ever verified the technology. Institutions whose names were often linked with Theranos, like the Cleveland Clinic, insist they have not yet had a chance to use the technology. It has struggled to forge business relationships with other potential partners, like Safeway.

• Twitter Stock Closes at an All-Time Low: Twitter stock fell 4 percent Thursday, finishing the session at $23.31, the lowest the stock has ever closed. Yahoo Finance lists the stock’s 52-week low at $21.01, but that was during intra-day trading back in August (the stock closed at $25.17 that day). The stock market was crummy in general on Thursday. But it has also been a tough quarter for Twitter, which has dropped 11 percent since Jack Dorsey was named CEO back in early October. Twitter announced last week that it would finally start showing ads to its logged-out audience, which created a nice stock spike, but it’s clear that investors are looking for more.

• Waze Could Be Google’s Ace in the Hole in a Self-Driving Car War With Uber: It’s 2025. You’re in a big city and have somewhere to be. Fire up an app and an autonomous car — with a driver at the wheel or maybe without one — picks you up. Odds are good the company behind that car will be Uber or Google. The two are set to vie for the reigning position as the transit service platform of the future. Uber has advantages — for one, its name is becoming the verb for ride-hailing, the way Google’s has for search. But Google has the mobile platform, the lead in self-driving tech and deeper pockets. It has another edge: Deep ties with local governments, critical players in making autonomous vehicles a reality. This proximity is thanks to Waze, the mapping startup Google bought in 2013, which has invested heavily in building data-sharing agreements with cities around the world. If autonomous cars are going to work, there needs to be tight coordination of transit data between governments and private companies. Before you can hail a self-driving car, there’ll likely need to be a host of things (designated lanes, re-zonings, ordinances) that let it drive itself. Then there is the planning to ensure they drive effectively. That’s why Google has cut data deals with its flagship mapping product, and why Uber is scrambling to build similar programs. Waze is, from what we can tell, ahead. In its program, called the Connected Citizens Program, Waze hands over info reported by its users, like accidents and road closures, to urban governments free of charge. It has cut deals with 51 cities worldwide; they get fresh data from the app’s users every two minutes. For cities, the program gives them timely, unprecedented data that helps manage traffic flows, safety and (ideally) costs. In Boston, a city not known for its sober traffic design, officials are using Waze data to measure the impact of their planning changes. “We heard that traffic improved anecdotally,” said Connor McKay, a data scientist for the city. “Now we can say that, quantitatively, traffic has improved.” In return, cities give Waze their own traffic data. (This is why you may see some Uber drivers using Waze to get around.) Accurate road information is critical to making self-driving cars work — hence, Uber hurriedly pouring its investor stockpile into a mapping operation. The ballooning ride-hailing startup has had less success currying favor with city officials. It has proved it can get its way in cities, but usually after some messy standoffs. This summer, Waze rolled out its first flirtation with Uber’s turf: A trial in Tel Aviv that lets Waze users pick up passengers along their commute routes. It has since expanded to a few suburbs around the city. A Waze rep would only share that the Google unit is “quite pleased with the results.” Waze also insists that its trial is not like Uber — drivers aren’t making money, and the program is framed as a way for cities to tackle congestion problems. It’s a key framing. When governments begin to approach autonomy, they are likely to turn to tech partners they know best.

• How Intelligent Lighting Is Ushering In The Internet Of Buildings:  The LED revolution is over. To no one’s surprise, LEDs have won. Solid-state lighting is changing how we light the world, successfully displacing traditional illumination sources across every part of the global lighting market. Over the next few years, billions of sockets will be in play. This transition has kicked off a new phase of LED adoption — the race to connect every socket. The stakes are high for consumers and vendors alike. A trifecta of qualities — ubiquity, network connectivity and access to power — make intelligent lights a perfect platform on which the promise of the Internet of Things can start to come to life. Behind the scenes, this race to own sockets is really a contest to see who will control the infrastructure of the IoT across our built environment. These intelligent, networked, sensor-laden lights of the near future will form the central nervous system of every smart building. Beyond simple illumination, this “Internet of Buildings” built on top of next-generation lighting systems will forever change the way we interact with the spaces in which we live. In your kids’ elementary school, biometric sensors will track students’ alertness, subtly shifting spectrum to automatically boost their focus any time it starts to wane. Around the corner at the grocery store, beacons embedded in connected fixtures will track every movement you (or your mobile phone) make — from produce to dairy — beaming coupons at you along the way. Even the lights around your home will be intelligent, learning from and responding to the steady stream of data generated by your wearable devices — using light to help de-stress you after a long day or to perk you up on a cold, dark winter morning. Consumer-facing tech giants — Apple, Google, Amazon — see residential lighting as a key step toward the connected home. Why settle for one or two thermostats or smart toasters when you can gather data from dozens of sensor-enabled lights scattered throughout every house and apartment? For networking companies — Cisco, Qualcomm and their ilk — intelligent lighting is an infrastructure play. Billions of connected lights will need new routing fabric, if only to handle the massive amount of new data traffic they will produce. Even the largest building management systems companies — Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, Johnson Controls — see the threat posed to their core businesses in HVAC and physical security as the next generation of intelligent buildings are built on top of new lighting networks. Of course, the traditional lighting players — Acuity, Philips, GE — are deeply engaged in this shift, too. But their success is far from guaranteed. The land grab is on. Who will win?

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 18

• Big IPO, Tiny Payout for Many Startup Workers: Side deals and volatile shares make stock options a bigger gamble for startup employees.The frustrated expectations of early employees have become a common thread in the latest round of technology IPOs. It used to be “the get-rich story happened for people who joined in the early days,” says Saar Gur, general partner at Charles River Ventures. Now they can be among the few left behind. Many executives, early investors, and even later investors are able to cash out before the rank and file, or bargain for guarantees that help ensure a bonanza. Whatever happens with an IPO, executives tend to hang on to enough equity to guarantee huge payouts when they sell their shares. Most early investors get a chance to sell options on secondary markets before a company’s IPO. Later investors increasingly demand preferential treatment, including agreements that if an IPO underperforms the terms of their investment, they’ll be made whole with an equivalent amount of additional shares. Late-stage investors in both Box and Square had such so-called ratchet agreements in place, further devaluing locked-up employee equity. When those kinds of deals are in place, employees often find their payouts disappointing because they’re so diluted, says Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution Ventures. Box and Square declined to comment for this story. Ordinary employees are typically without meaningful financial protections or even a clear sense of what their equity stakes mean, says Chris Zaharis, who’s worked at startups for about 20 years and as a volunteer teaches people about their equity rights. Options grants often don’t come with information on strike prices (discounts on shares), preferential treatment, or even the total number of shares outstanding. “People on average overestimate what they are going to make by about 10X,” he says.

• Driverless Cars Have A Crash Rate Twice As High As Regular Cars - Because They Always Follow The Rules. They  The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. The glitch? They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google  and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble? “It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. Turns out, though, their accident rates are twice as high as for regular cars, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution. Last year, Rajkumar offered test drives to members of Congress in his lab’s self-driving Cadillac SRX sport utility vehicle. The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head toward the Pentagon. The car’s cameras and laser sensors detected traffic in a 360-degree view but didn’t know how to trust that drivers would make room in the ceaseless flow, so the human minder had to take control to complete the maneuver.

• Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service: A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered the lifting of a 48-hour suspension of the services in Brazil of Facebook Inc's WhatsApp phone-messaging application, overturning an order from a lower court. The ban, which went into effect at midnight Wednesday, lasted about 12 hours until an appeals court judge overturned it. The interruption of WhatsApp's text message and Internet telephone service caused outrage in Latin America's largest country, where the company estimates it has 100 million personal users, and led to angry exchanges on the floor of Congress. WhatsApp is installed on 92.5 percent of Android devices in Brazil, making it the most installed app in the country, according to SimilarWeb, an internet intelligence and marketing company. Rival messaging system Telegram said on Twitter that it received 1 million downloads in Brazil in one day due to the outage. Telegram was installed on 2.35 percent of android devices before the blackout and Facebook Messenger on 74 percent, SimilarWeb said. A judge in Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo, had ordered the suspension of WhatsApp's services from midnight on Wednesday (0200 GMT Thursday). The order was made after the California-based company, despite a fine, failed to comply with two judicial rulings to share information in a criminal case. 

• Apple names Jeff Williams COO, a job once held by Tim Cook: Apple Inc promoted longtime executive Jeff Williams to the role of chief operating officer, reinstating the title previously held by Chief Executive Tim Cook, as part of a series of changes to the company's leadership team. Williams, who joined Apple in 1998, previously served as senior vice president of operations and oversaw development of the Apple Watch, the company's first new product since the iPad. "Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I've ever worked with," Cook said in a statement. While it was unclear if the appointment meant Apple was grooming Williams to be Cook's successor, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source, that the move did not necessarily signal that.

• Yelp, OpenTable part ways amid heightened competition: Review site Yelp Inc and restaurant reservation service OpenTable have quietly ended a long-running partnership, the companies confirmed on Thursday, as the one-time allies increasingly eye each other's businesses. The companies parted ways in April under mounting competition, with OpenTable facing new rivals to its reservation business and Yelp dogged with questions about stalling growth. Both companies are trying to take charge of the entire customer experience, said an analyst. "If they have to share that customer with someone else, it threatens their long-term viability," he said. The companies halted a deal that since 2010 had allowed users to make OpenTable reservations through Yelp, home to a trove of reviews from diners.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 17

• Fed Raises Key Interest Rate for First Time in Almost a Decade: The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would raise its benchmark interest rate, a vote of confidence in the American economy. Policy makers have waited a long time for this moment: Since December 2008 the Fed has held the benchmark rate near zero, the centerpiece of its campaign to revive economic growth and reduce unemployment from the recession. Fed officials predicted that they would raise interest rates by about one percentage point a year over the next three years — an indication that they would be taking a slow-and-steady approach to economic expansion. The cost of borrowing is expected to rise, but only slightly, with variable effects on what banks charge for credit cards, home equity lines of credit, adjustable-rate mortgages, auto loans and some student loans. Remember, Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, has said the Fed will move cautiously in raising its benchmark rate. Financial markets were encouraged by the Fed’s announcement. Stocks rose, the dollar gained modestly and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose slightly. The Fed’s announcement came exactly seven years to the day after the central bank cut its benchmark rate nearly to zero.

• Facebook Messenger Lets You Book an Uber:  The feature will be made available in the U.S. to start. Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday. The new feature for Messenger, which has more than 700 million users globally, will allow users to tap on a street address in a message and summon a ride. After booking, the app will let Uber customers easily share their estimated arrival times or coordinate splitting the fare with friends through Messenger. The feature is expected to be made available in other countries outside the U.S. later. One place Facebook probably won't introduce the Uber button any time soon is in China, where the social network is blocked. The Chinese have had a similar feature in Tencent's WeChat, the dominant messaging platform in the country. That version works with Didi Kuaidi, however, a Tencent-backed ride-hailing service that is Uber's chief competitor there. Tencent has blocked Uber from using WeChat to recruit drivers or promote the company in China, says Uber. 

• Amazon Leads $23M Investment In India-Based Home Services Startup Housejoy: Amazon has led a $23 million investment in India-based Housejoy, a startup that — as the name not-so-subtly suggests — is much like Homejoy, the home services on-demand company that closed its doors this summer. The U.S. e-commerce giant was joined in the Series A round by existing investor Matrix Partners, and new backers Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. Unlike U.S.-based Homejoy — which had raised nearly $40 million and was the most visible player in an emerging category — Housejoy offers more than just home cleaning services. It caters to plumbing, electrical/appliance repairs, beauty, fitness, laundry and pest control and more. The startup is less than a year old, it previously raised $4 million, and is currently available in 11 cities across India. With this new funding, CEO Saran Chatterjee told TechCrunch that it plans to expand to cover 25 cities by the end of next year. The involvement of Amazon, which previously invested in India-based deals with financial comparison service BankBazaar and gift card startup QwikCilver, is interesting. Its founder Jeff Bezos hasn’t been shy in admitting that the company is very much focused on growing in India, where it launched two years ago and is rivaled by two home-grown unicorns: SoftBank-backed Flipkart and Alibaba-backed Snapdeal. Last year, Amazon invested $2 billion in its India business and results seem to be going its way after it recently claimed to have beaten its well-backed rivals on monthly traffic for the first time. Chatterjee stressed in an interview that Amazon hasn’t discussed acquiring Housejoy, and that its involvement in the round could unlock a lucrative partnership for the startup. Beyond its expansion, Housejoy plans to use the money to ramp its quality assurance protocols which evaluate and assess the ‘service providers’ who work for the company. In that way, it’s very much like Uber — a marketplace through which independent workers can find jobs. With some customers experiencing issues with the service — including one India-based writer at Tech In Asia — Chatterjee admits that it needs to raise its reliability from (probably) a seven out of ten score, to nine or ten. The company is also planning to spend a portion of its funding on strategic acquisitions. Chatterjee said that around 10 percent of the round — so roughly $2 million — could go towards buying up companies or acquihiring teams that “give us a position of strength in a city or category, or [add to the] team and talent.”

• Oracle profit forecast fails to impress; shares fall. Oracle Corp on Wednesday delivered a third-quarter profit forecast that did not quite meet analysts' expectations, and the company's shares fell about 1 percent in extended trading. Oracle forecast third-quarter profit of about 63-66 cents per share, with revenue flat or up 3 percent which translates to $9.33 billion-$9.61 billion. The company's shift from licensing software to cloud-based subscriptions has squeezed its margins. Oracle, like other established technology companies, has been moving its business to the cloud-based model, essentially providing services remotely via data centers rather than selling installed software. Up to Wednesday's close, Oracle's stock had fallen 13.5 percent this year.

• In a Self-Serve World, Start-Ups Find Value in Human Helpers: The Internet took off as a way to book travel because the human intermediaries were always a bit suspect — their expertise questionable, their methods opaque and their allegiances unclear. And at first, the machines seemed to improve everything. For uncomplicated trips, booking online is now much easier than in the past. Because we’ve replaced agents with computers whose sole purpose is to ferret out the best deal, and for lots of other reasons, airfares have plummeted over the last three decades. Yet as you suffer through another holiday travel season, you might pause to consider how much we’ve really gained — and lost — in ditching human agents for machines. And you might welcome an emerging trend on the Internet: start-ups that are trying to put human agents, whether in travel, home services or shopping, back at the center of how we make decisions. “A lot of companies pushed hard on the idea that technology will solve every problem, and that we shouldn’t use humans,” said Paul English, the co-founder of a new online company called Lola Travel. “We think humans add value, so we’re trying to design technology to facilitate the human-to-human connection.” Lola, which is currently open only in a limited prerelease version, has an unusual interface: When you’re looking to book a trip, you just send a text. Your request can be vague — “Hey, my family is thinking about going to Europe next summer” — because on the other end sits a human. The agent knows your general travel preferences and has access to many of the same tools you’d use to book a trip. But the agent also has something extra — experience and data to help make decisions about the kind of trip you should take.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, December 16

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

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

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

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

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, December 15

• Amazon overtakes Flipkart as most visited Indian e-com site: comScore: E-commerce giant Amazon Inc said on Monday it has become the most visited e-commerce site in India beating local rival Flipkart in the month of October citing comScore data. It said Amazon.in clocked 30 million unique visitors during the month ahead of Flipkart.com, Jabong.com and Snapdeal.com

• E-Commerce  Retailers in India Battle Devil They Spawned: Deep Discounts: Discounts and cashback offers helped India’s top e-commerce companies from Flipkart to Snapdeal sell a record $11 billion of goods this year online. As the freebies start to hurt, they are questioning a strategy they now find too hard to dump. While scrapping rebates may bring the focus back to profitability from valuations, it may be easier said than done for an industry built on a foundation of cut-price sales. The real dilemma faced by Narayanan and his peers is: Who will blink first? 

• China's Baidu says to develop self-driving buses within three years: China's top online search firm Baidu Inc said it aims to put self-driving buses on the road in three years and mass produce them within five years, after it set up a business unit to oversee all its efforts related to automobiles. The unit will also include its initiative in partnership with BMW AG to develop an autonomous passenger vehicle, which may also be put into mass production within five years, a spokesman told Reuters on Monday. Self-driving cars have emerged as a new battlefront for tech majors globally. Alibaba Group Holding says it will launch its first car in a partnership with China's SAIC Motor Corp, while U.S. tech heavyweights Google and Apple are also developing autonomous cars.

• Creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram Launches Free Version of Wolfram Language: For nearly three decades, Stephen Wolfram has built software technology that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations. Wolfram Alpha, his question-answer technology, is available on its own website and serves up many of the answers for Apple’s voice-controlled digital assistant, Siri. His approach to this artificial-intelligence challenge was both innovative and idiosyncratic, and characteristic of Mr. Wolfram, who earned his Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20 and soon after received a MacArthur “genius” award. Wolfram Alpha, he explains, is a “knowledge-based system,” which computes answers from its storehouse of knowledge rather than today’s prevailing technique of determining statistical probabilities from poring through vast amounts of data. His Wolfram Language is similarly a tool for what he calls “knowledge-based programming.” And Mr. Wolfram wants to make his technology and his software philosophy available to far more people, including newcomers to computing, like students and children. So he has decided to make a version of the Wolfram Language and development tools available as a free cloud service. To help, he also has published a book, “An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language,” which is free to read online. Wolfram Language is already one of the programming languages distributed with the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that can be plugged into a computer monitor or television and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. The most popular model is $35. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British charity founded in 2009 to further basic education in computing to young people of all income levels. Its nonprofit company, Raspberry Pi Trading, sells the inexpensive, general-purpose computers.

• Have iPhone Sales Finally Peaked? Analysts Predict a Slump Ahead: Is Apple’s iPhone finally reaching its peak? In the past few weeks, a slew of analysts have predicted that sales of Apple’s best-selling product may slump in 2016, based in part on supply chain issues and partly on weaker demand, especially from saturated developed markets. Apple’s growth is increasingly dependent on demand for iPhones, while iPad tablet sales decline and adoption of the Apple Watch remains modest. Morgan Stanley lowered its forecast for iPhone unit sales and now estimates a drop of 6 percent in fiscal 2016, according to a Dec. 13 note. The decline is due to higher prices in international markets, excluding China, and maturing smartphone penetration in developed countries. China is the only market with year-over-year iPhone demand growth in the December quarter, according to the report.

• Why Glass Is Critical to the Future of Tech: One material has emerged that is probably second only to the processor when it comes to the importance of delivering a great user experience in all types of devices, especially mobile ones. That material is the glass screens on billions of feature and smartphones in the market today. Putting glass screens on a table top and turning it into a huge interactive screen could change the way many people interact with their digital content. Making glass walls that can show off all types of video and content, and applications that can be touched to activate them, is exciting. Imagine a glass screen on your refrigerator, or a glass mirror in the bathroom that delivers a touch-based gateway to all of your digital “stuff,” and you begin to see the role glass will play in a much broader way in the near future.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 14

• Is Acqui-Hiring Dead? Tech Startups Long for the Days of Yahoo’s Binge Acquisitions: Under Marissa Mayer, Yahoo used to be the top company making “acqui-hires,” but such talent acquisitions have fallen out of favor throughout Silicon Valley this year. In 2013 and 2014, Yahoo was the top technology company conducting acqui-hires, an industry term for acquisitions done primarily for the talent, according to research firm CB Insights. Yahoo was tied for third in 2012, Mayer's first year at the company. In 2015, Yahoo has disappeared from the list entirely. When Mayer joined from Google, she was looking for an infusion of technical and entrepreneurial talent to improve the company's mobile and Web services. The fresh blood failed to revive the staid Internet portal, and now Yahoo is considering a spinoff of its core Web business to address investors' tax concerns. "They made acquisitions, and nothing came out of it," said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. "The focus has shifted over the last few quarters to integrate, rather than acquire." Sarah Meron, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, declined to comment. The excitement surrounding talent acquisitions has dissipated throughout Silicon Valley, not just at Yahoo. Active acquirers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have started to pull back on buying for talent, CB Insights said. U.S. talent acquisitions have declined 48 percent this year from a peak in 2013, the firm's data show. CB Insights compiled the information from company reports, which wouldn't include undisclosed purchases or those not classified as talent acquisitions. Instead of pursuing costly acqui-hires, many companies have returned to old-fashioned recruitment, said Ben Narasin, a general partner at Canvas Ventures. "All of these top firms need more people, but are you really willing to pay a million-dollar cost of acquisition for a whole bunch of people?" he said. "I think acqui-hiring is dead."

• 2015 Was The Worst Year For Tech IPOs Since 2009: With just 28 technology companies entering the U.S. public markets, 2015 was the worst year for IPOs since 2009, according to Dealogic. This compares to 62 last year and 48 the year before, with 131 “unicorns” opting to remain private longer. The performance of the tech IPOs has also been subpar. Half of the tech companies that have gone public this year are trading below their IPO price, including Etsy which fell 41%. And both Box and Square, went public at market caps that were beneath the valuation of their last private rounds. Companies which had strong fundamentals, like Atlassian, were able to hit the ground running. Fitbit is up 56% since its June IPO and GoDaddy, which is on the verge of profitability, has risen 68%. “2016 may see 2 types of companies go public,” said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. “One are the good companies with solid fundamentals. The other set of companies are those that get pushed into going public because the private markets close up on them.”

• Adidas’s ‘speedfactory’ hints at the future of shoe manufacturing:  Adidas announced this week that it is setting up what it calls a “speedfactory” in Ansbach, Germany, in an attempt to be at the forefront of manufacturing and offer individualized products that get in customers’ hands quicker. Its goal is to use the latest manufacturing innovations to produce a largely automated process. (From a business perspective, it’s not appealing to shift factories to areas with higher labor costs, unless the operation runs with minimal human labor.) By leveraging recent developments in robotics, Adidas may be able to better serve its customers. In the long run, the model could potentially expand beyond shoes to all goods. For example, after a big sporting event the conversation among sport fans in a given city might center around an athlete’s latest touchdown celebration dance, or a clever quip to reporters. If a company such as Adidas had a factory located near that city, it could rapidly produce and sell related merchandise before the conversation had cooled off.  The first step for Adidas is to produce 500 pairs of concept shoes in the first half of 2016. Those initial pairs will all be one type of running shoes. Down the line Adidas envisions custom-made shoes that might have a sole designed to fit an individual customer’s foot.

• Alibaba Buys Prominent And Vocal Hong Kong Newspaper For $266M In Bid To Influence Media: The Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet giant, is making an ambitious play to reshape media coverage of its home country, taking aim at what company executives call the “negative” portrayal of China in the Western media. As the backbone of this effort, Alibaba agreed on Friday to buy the media assets of the SCMP Group, including one of Hong Kong’s most influential English language daily newspapers, The South China Morning Post. Alibaba is acquiring an award-winning newspaper that for decades has reported aggressively on subjects that China’s state-run media outlets are forbidden to cover, like political scandals and human-rights cases.Alibaba said the deal was fueled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it calls the biased lens of Western news outlets. While Alibaba said the Chinese government had no role in its deal to buy the Hong Kong newspaper, the company’s position aligns closely with that of the Communist Party, which has grown increasingly critical of the way Western news organizations cover China. This coverage, the company said, influences how investors and others outside China regard Alibaba. The company said its shares, which are listed in New York, were being affected by all the negative reports about China. For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth $266 million, the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue. The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning The South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organization that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls. As speculation of a deal began in recent weeks, some critics in Hong Kong had already started to worry about whether Alibaba was seeking to tame the paper’s coverage in order to curry favor with the Chinese leadership. The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland like covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 11

• Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience: Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers. Now the company plans to start making money from the vast number of people who are not signed in to the service but may click on a tweet they find through a web search or that is sent to them via email or text — an audience Twitter estimates at more than 500 million people worldwide. In a blog post on Thursday, the company said it has begun showing advertising to some of those casual viewers when they click on the link to a tweet or visit a Twitter user’s profile page. About 60 advertisers are participating initially, with the ads, known as promoted tweets, aimed at people in the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia. But the program, which has been in development for more than a year, is expected to ramp up quickly. These ads, which will be on the desktop web version of Twitter at first, won’t be quite as finely targeted as typical Twitter ads, relying on context, like other pages people have recently browsed, for targeting. Twitter estimates that each of these “logged out” users could be worth $2.50 a year to advertisers, compared with about $4 a year for active users. Wall Street, which has been focused mostly on Twitter’s lack of growth in active users, sees lots of potential in the program, and Twitter’s stock rose almost 7 percent on Thursday.

• GoPro's First Drone, Due Out in 2016, Will Be Called 'Karma': GoPro recently said it will debut its first drone in early 2016, and now the company has announced the brand name—Karma. On Wednesday, the company made the revelation by pushing a one-minute YouTube teaser. The video is a cut-up of the unbranded two-minute clip that GoPro uploaded to the video site on Oct. 28, when it originally disclosed its latest hardware. The longer spot has garnered nearly 4 million views since then. There's not much information about the drone—in terms of what it looks like or how much it will cost—in the video or on its dedicated website. But developing and marketing the product makes a lot of sense since so many GoPro enthusiasts have been attaching the high-def camcorders to drones made by other hardware companies. There are literally thousands of videos from such productions on YouTube.  

• Facebook to Publish Designs for `Big Sur' AI Computer Hardware: Facebook’s use of artificial intelligence, which ranges from tools for image recognition to the filtering of the news feeds for its social network, demands special computing infrastructure. The company recently began building custom servers for its artificial intelligence workload and Thursday announced it would release the designs for that powerful hardware to the world -- for free. The company said the plan to open-source the blueprints of the servers -- called “Big Sur” -- would help other companies and researchers benefit from the incessant tweaking of Facebook’s developers. This follows  Google’s release last month of a software tool for building AI systems named TensorFlow. The servers are built around graphical processing units from Nvidia Corp. GPUs are widely used in artificial intelligence because the chips have far more individual processing cores on them than traditional processors produced by Intel Corp., making them adept at the dumb-but-numerous calculations required by AI software.

• Wal-Mart adds to mobile wallet frenzy with 'Walmart Pay': Wal-Mart launched its own mobile payment service Walmart Pay on Thursday, potentially dealing a sharp blow to the ambitions of a mobile wallet the company had been co-developing with a consortium of retailers. The mobile payments space in the U.S. has seen a flurry of new launches and partnerships in the past year but has failed to gain traction as customer and merchant adoption have been sluggish. CurrentC - whose developers included Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy among others - was likely to prove strong competition to Apple's Apple Pay because it was developed as a single payment solution that could be used at many retailers and integrate their loyalty programs. But years of delay, a data breach and management changes hurt its prospects. An increasingly bigger worry for CurrentC is the end of its exclusive partnership with most of its members, which means they can now accept other mobile payment options at their stores. A survey released by data firm InfoScout found Apple Pay use to be at its lowest rate since the firm started tracking it. Shoppers used it this past Black Friday for only 2.7 percent of eligible transactions.

• Rovio’s CEO Steps Down After Just Over a Year: Last August Pekka Rantala took over the role of Rovio CEO from co-founder Mikael Hed, but just over a year later he’s already stepping down. He’s to be replaced by Kati Levoranta, former chief legal officer for the Angry Birds maker. Rantala says that “I feel now the time is right for me to step aside and move on to new challenges.” Despite being in the role for a relatively short period, Rantala presided over a tumultuous time for the game developer. Last October the company laid off 130 employees, and followed that up with 260 more job cuts in August, more than 30 percent of its workforce. The initial, unexpected success of Angry Birds caused the company to expand in many directions, yet it never managed to follow up Angry Birds with another big hit.