Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 10, 2016

• Amazon Building Global Delivery Business to Take On Alibaba: In recent weeks, speculation has mounted that Amazon.com Inc. plans to launch a global shipping and logistics operation that will compete with United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.Asked about reports that the company was leasing planes and had registered an ocean freight booking business, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky downplayed Amazon’s ambitions last month in an earnings call. He said the company was simply looking to supplement its delivery partners -- not replace them -- during peak periods like the Christmas shopping season. Amazon documents reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal a far bolder plan.A 2013 report to Amazon’s senior management team proposed an aggressive global expansion of the company’s Fulfillment By Amazon service, which provides storage, packing and shipping for independent merchants selling products on the company’s website. The report envisioned a global delivery network that controls the flow of goods from factories in China and India to customer doorsteps in Atlanta, New York and London. The project, called Dragon Boat, is proceeding, according to a person familiar with the initiative, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The ambitious strategy promises to turn FedEx and UPS into Amazon rivals, but also will pit the Seattle giant against Chinese counterpart Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Both companies are vying for dominance of the rapidly growing cross-border e-commerce market, which by 2020 is expected to swell into a $1 trillion industry serving 900 million shoppers, according to a June report from Accenture and AliResearch, Alibaba’s research arm. Amazon’s plan would culminate with the launch of a new venture called “Global Supply Chain by Amazon,” as soon as this year, the documents said. The new business will locate Amazon at the center of a logistics industry that involves not just shippers like FedEx and UPS but also legions of middlemen who handle cargo and paperwork associated with transnational trade. Amazon wants to bypass these brokers, amassing inventory from thousands of merchants around the world and then buying space on trucks, planes and ships at reduced rates. Merchants will be able to book cargo space online or via mobile devices, creating what Amazon described as a “one click-ship for seamless international trade and shipping.”

• Federal Government Will Treat Google’s Driverless Car System as a Legal Driver: Google’s robot just got its driver’s license. On Tuesday, the federal agency that sets road rules — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — released a letter to the Internet giant that supports its interpretation of a driverless system as legally adequate for roadways, a key victory for the critical initiative within Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Previously, the NHTSA only considered humans as drivers under law, because that’s how cars worked until Google came along. Now the agency has said it will consider Google’s self-driving system a driver, too. The letter came in response to a November petition from Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving car project. Urmson argued that regulators should treat Google’s homemade cars, built without a steering wheel and brakes, on par with human drivers. It’s been a persistent sticking point for the Google unit, particularly after California issued draft autonomous vehicle rules expressly prohibiting driverless cars. Ensuring that its driverless fleet has regulatory approval to get on the roads is critical to Google’s car strategy.

• Public Markets Are Sending Some Ominous Signals to Private Tech Companies: After years of rapidly growing valuations and additions to the "Unicorn" club, a number of private companies have seen their valuations take dramatic cuts. From Foursquare Labs Inc. raising funds at a roughly $250 million valuation versus a former round in 2013 at $600 million, to Fidelity writing down its Snapchat Inc. holding, there's a lot of interest in where private tech companies might be valued right now. One way to think about private tech valuations is to look at publicly-traded entities that might reasonably seen as proxies. Here's a few examples: The Bloomberg IPO index tracks the performance of companies during their first year of trading, and it has certainly taken a tumble. Cracks began to show late in 2015 as many of them fell below their IPO price. Charlie Bilello, Director of Research at Pension Partners, pointed out just how rare the positive performance of Facebook Inc. actually is, with firms like Groupon Inc., Etsy Inc., Twitter Inc., GoPro Inc., and LendingClub Corp. all down more than 40 percent from their offering price. The index is down 30 percent over the past year and 36 percent from recent highs. One company to keep an eye on is SVB Financial Group, which is the holding company for Silicon Valley Bank. This commercial bank serves emerging and middle-market growth companies in the fields of technology and life sciences.You could see it as a gauge of red-hot tech since it has done business with Pinterest, BuzzFeed, and others. Shares are down 43 percent from recent highs and 31 percent over the past year.

• SolarCity Beats Q4 Estimates, But Stock Plunges 30 Percent On Soft Outlook: SolarCity, which is down more than 50 percent over the past year, just released its Q4 2015 earnings. The market has reacted negatively, with the stock trading down about 30 percent after-hours at a price of around $17.50 per-share. While Q4 revenue of $115M and loss of $2.37 per share beat estimates of $111M in revenue and a loss of $2.59 per share, the company’s Q1 2016 forecast was lower than expected. Additionally, the company missed its quarterly installation estimates for Q4, installing 272 MW, below the guidance of 280 MW – 300 MW. In its shareholder letter, SolarCity said they expect to install 180 MW of solar panels in Q1 2016, which represents 18 percent year-over-year growth, but a 34 percent decline compared to the previous quarter. While some seasonal slowdown for Q1 is normal, the company said that this estimate reflects a “higher-than-usual” seasonal slowdown.

• GitHub Updates Its Enterprise Product With Clustering Support, Updated Design: GitHub Enterprise, the company’s on-premises solution for managing code, is getting a major update today. It comes at a time when there seems to be some upheaval in the company around the importance management has been putting on this product. The marquee feature of GitHub Enterprise 2.5 is support for clustering. With this, businesses can now set up a cluster of GitHub Enterprise servers that act as a single installation, enabling it to support significantly larger teams. “With GitHub Enterprise 2.5 more users can be enabled on one system as teams grow,” Kakul Srivastava, GitHub’s VP of Product, tells me. “We have customers with tens of thousands of developers who need to be able to work together, and this is really important functionality to enable them to do this in a scalable way.” She also noted that clustering doesn’t currently come at an additional cost to GitHub’s enterprise users. This new version also includes interface improvements with updated designs for everything from log-in screens to the look and feel of the GitHub repositories. This brings GitHub’s enterprise product in line with its hosted version. Also new in this version is improved Subversion support — for those who aren’t using git as their version control system — as well as an API for managing protected branches (that is, branches developers can neither delete nor force-push their code to). This new API is currently in preview.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 9

• Facebook Loses a Battle in India Over Its Free Basics Program: For years, Mark Zuckerberg has had a grander vision than just connecting the more than one billion people who already use Facebook: He wants to connect the entire world. That effort hit a major roadblock on Monday, when Indian regulators banned free mobile data programs that favor some Internet services over others. The regulations, issued after months of intense public debate over how to extend the Internet to India’s poorest citizens, effectively block Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program in the country. Free Basics offers people no-fee access to a text-only mobile version of the Facebook social network, as well as to certain news, health, job and other services. Facebook describes the program as a way to introduce the poor and the technologically unskilled to the potential of the Internet. Free Basics came out of Mr. Zuckerberg’s program for universal Internet access, which was started in 2013 under an initiative called Internet.org. The idea was to simplify phone applications to run more efficiently and to offer these apps to users in developing countries. Half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, agreed to work with Facebook as partners on the initiative. Free Basics is now in 38 countries, from Indonesia to Panama. Facebook is investing heavily in other parts of the project, including experiments to deliver cheap Wi-Fi to remote villages and to beam Internet service from high-flying drones. In India, where Facebook already has at least 132 million users, the company began offering Free Basics last year through Reliance Communications, a local mobile phone carrier. A Reliance spokesman could not be reached for comment. The program quickly became the target of critics, who said that it was an attempt to steer unsophisticated new Internet users to Facebook and other services that were working with the company. They argued that Free Basics and other so-called zero rating programs, which are a set of apps or sites that a mobile operator or I.S.P. does not charge customers to use, violated the concept of net neutrality. Facebook embarked on a blitz of paid lobbying and advertising to promote Free Basics, spending millions of dollars in media campaigns to convince locals its offering would be positive for the population. The company ran special banners in the Facebook news feeds of Indian users urging them to petition the government to allow Free Basics. Mr. Zuckerberg personally lobbied against the new rules, including writing an opinion column in The Times of India. Experts said that campaign may have had an adverse effect on Indian thinking. Locals were wary of the company’s unknown long-term plans for advertising or other parts of Facebook’s business.

• Job Site Hired Raises $40 Million and Forecasts Profit by 2017: When Mehul Patel, Hired Inc.'s chief executive officer, began talking to venture capitalists last year for the company's latest fundraising round, they were no longer interested in hearing about market potential or user growth. Investors wanted to know when the job recruitment website would become profitable. Patel tailored his pitch to highlight the ways he'd made his startup run more efficiently while showing that Hired would roughly triple annual revenue in 2016. He forecast a profit by early 2017. "The conversation had really changed from a year ago," he said. Hired faces many larger and more established competitors. CareerBuilder.com, Indeed Inc., LinkedIn Corp., and Monster Worldwide Inc. each control segments of the online jobs market. Monster generated revenue of $770 million in 2014. Although LinkedIn had a rough time last week, the site generated $862 million in just its last quarter. Hired said it has a 2016 revenue "run rate" of $100 million. (The number is generally calculated by using the performance during one period as the basis to project a full year.) Hired is cost-free for job seekers, who create profiles listing their skills and backgrounds. About 4 percent of applicants are accepted. Recruiters from companies such as American Express Co., Comcast Corp., and Facebook Inc., pay to target those high-skill candidates and send them offers via e-mail. Since it began in 2012, Hired has expanded from tech workers in San Francisco to sales, marketing, and other professionals in 15 cities. The company has acquired two small startups in Paris and Melbourne to help it continue expanding internationally. Patel said he's constantly looking for ways to cut costs. The startup has moved three times in as many years because it was unwilling to commit to a long-term lease. The chairs at the company's San Francisco office are mostly from Ikea. Patel said he bought a Herman Miller model for his home office from a startup that shut down during the first dot-com crash. "That's still my office chair," he said. "It reminds me not to let things get too crazy."

• Sacked! Twitter and Facebook Experience a Super Bowl Down Round: Sunday’s Super Bowl was, to put it bluntly, pretty boring. That was reflected on the Internet as well: Despite it being the 50th Super Bowl and most likely the last game for future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning, both Facebook and Twitter saw significantly less Super Bowl chatter than they did last year. Facebook reported that 60 million people created some 200 million posts, comments and “likes” throughout the game. Those numbers are down from last year, when 65 million people generated 265 million posts, comments and likes. That’s about 25 percent less activity for those keeping score. Twitter had it even worse. Much worse, in fact. Roughly 3.8 million people created 16.9 million tweets during the game, according to Nielsen. That’s down from 25.1 million tweets sent during last year’s game, a drop of roughly 33 percent*. In fact, Twitter didn’t even share its total tweet metrics this year like it did in 2015. The company also didn’t immediately reply to our request for comment on Nielsen’s numbers. Yes, a lousy game doesn’t help. But a dip like this is not a great sign for either platform, both of which offered new features this year intended to increase engagement for a game just like this. On Twitter, that feature is Moments, a curated stream of tweets around a particular event. On Facebook, it’s Sports Stadium, a new area of the app dedicated to following live sporting events and talking with your friends about them. (The new feature had some technical difficulties Sunday afternoon.) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be hit hardest from a poor showing like this. User conversations around live events are where Twitter is supposed to dominate. This kind of regression is exactly why the company stock is at an all-time low; investors are concerned about slowing user growth and the resulting engagement. Those same investors are bracing for the company’s earnings this week, and it could have used a nice Super Bowl boost to highlight on the earnings call. Apparently it’ll need to find something else. 

• Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad Out Amid Compliance Concerns:  There’s a big shuffle happening at Zenefits today — with Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad exiting the company and COO David Sacks taking over. Conrad is also stepping down as a director of the company. In an email to employees, Sacks noted that compliance issues that have plagued the company contributed to Conrad’s exit. Zenefits has hit significant turbulence, including missing revenue targets according to a Wall Street Journal report, and also running into issues with regulators. Regulatory issues have plagued the company, as has been reported by BuzzFeed. Zenefits allowed unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance, leading to at least one commissioner to investigate the company in Washington State, according to a BuzzFeed report. Most recently, BuzzFeed reported 80 percent of the company’s deals in Washington State were done by unlicensed brokers.

• Verizon enlists AOL CEO to explore Yahoo deal: Bloomberg: Verizon Communications has given Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer of its AOL unit, a leading role in exploring a possible bid for Yahoo's assets, Bloomberg reported, citing a person with knowledge of the situation. Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, hasn't hired bankers to conduct an offer and there have been no formal talks, according to the report. Yahoo said last week that it would consider "strategic alternatives" for its core Internet business, even as it continues with its plan to revamp the business and spin it off. 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 had said. Verizon's Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said in December that the U.S. wireless carrier could look at buying Yahoo's core business if it was a good fit. Earlier this year, Verizon bought AOL Inc in a $4.4 billion deal to push into targeted advertising and mobile video. Verizon's shares were down 1.1 percent, while Yahoo's shares were down 4 percent in afternoon trading on Monday.

• Yelp posts smaller-than-expected loss; CFO to step down; Shares plunge: Consumer review website operator Yelp Inc reported a smaller-than-expected loss on Monday, but its shares slumped 11 percent, swept up in a broader selloff in the technology sector coupled with a weak adjusted EBITDA forecast. The company said results were released about 3 hours ahead of schedule during trading hours on Monday, due to an error by PR Newswire, leading to a spike in volatility in its shares. Yelp also said Chief Financial Officer Rob Krolik would step down later this year but did not elaborate. Krolik, who joined in 2011, will continue in his role until Dec. 15, 2016, or until a replacement is hired, the company said in a statement. Yelp's revenue rose about 40 percent in the fourth quarter, topping analysts' estimates, helped by the strength in its advertising business and a rise in mobile usage. Local advertising accounts in the quarter rose 32 percent to about 111,000, in line with estimates from market research firm FactSet StreetAccount. Revenue rose to $153.7 million from $109.9 million. Yelp reported a net loss of $22.2 million, or 29 cents per share, for the quarter ended Dec. 31, compared with a profit of $32.7 million, or 42 cents per share, a year earlier.

Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 8, 2016

• Apple Said to Be on Course for Approval to Open Stores in India:  Apple Inc. is on course to win clearance to open its first retail stores in India, a person with knowledge of the matter said, as Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seeks growth opportunities in a nation of 1.3 billion people. The Indian government plans to push through Apple’s application to set up outlets, the person said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. The company is resubmitting the request as it wasn’t in the right format, the person said, without giving a time-frame for final approval. Apple should qualify as a provider of cutting-edge technology, the person said. That would exempt the maker of iPhones and iPads from a rule forcing foreign businesses that retail a single brand in India to procure 30 percent of a product’s inputs locally. The company makes most of its devices in China. Cook is hunting for fresh sources of growth after Apple last month forecast a sales decline for the first time in more than a decade. India now has the world’s fastest-growing major economy and about 220 million smartphone users. The challenge is that Indian consumers tend to prefer cheaper devices, leaving Apple with only about 2 percent of the market. Apple uses re-sellers in India for its products. Domestic distributor Redington India Ltd. has dropped about 5 percent since Apple in January confirmed it had applied to open stores in Asia’s third-largest economy.

• BlackBerry Confirms 200 Job Cuts in Florida and Canada: Phone maker BlackBerry confirmed to Re/code on Friday that it has recently cut 200 jobs in both Sunrise, Fla., and at facilities in Canada. However, the company characterized them as a “small number” in stark contrast to a Mobile Syrup report that suggested massive cuts, especially at the main office. In a statement, BlackBerry said the cuts come as it continues its turnaround effort. “This means finding new ways to enable us to capitalize on growth opportunities, while driving toward sustainable profitability across all parts of our business,” the company said. “As a result, a small number of employees have been impacted in Waterloo and Sunrise, Fla.” The company later said that it made around 200 job cuts. It also confirmed that BBM founder and longtime employee Gary Klassen has left the company. The Mobile Syrup report suggests that the BlackBerry 10 development effort has been hit particularly hard. BlackBerry recently introduced the Priv, its first Android phone, and executives suggested that if customers agree, that could represent its hardware future rather than its homegrown BlackBerry 10.

• Wood Shop Enters the Age of High-Tech: These days, tinkering is high tech. The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands. So the “maker space” movement — D.I.Y. communities to get people creating, be it for fun, for art or for entrepreneurship — is booming. Maker Faires are held around the world. Commercial operations like TechShop have popped up across the country. And tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from M.I.T. to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools. There’s even a massive open online course, offered by the MOOC provider Coursera and taught by three scientists from the Exploratorium in San Francisco, called “Tinkering Fundamentals: A Constructionist Approach to STEM Learning.” At Rutgers, a bustling maker space can be found in a moldering wood-frame structure on the Livingston campus in Piscataway, N.J. The building once served as the command headquarters for Camp Kilmer, a transportation hub for soldiers mobilizing for World War II; today, the building, still called Headquarters, houses computer repair offices and the division of continuing studies. And upstairs, there are wonders. There are 3-D printers, which can be programmed to create wildly inventive shapes out of plastic or resin (like a decent copy of the Iron Throne from “Game of Thrones” or a bust of Groot from “Guardians of the Galaxy”). There is a laser cutter to etch materials like fabric, marble or wood and cut through plastic. Next door is an electronics shop, with racks upon racks of parts. Close by are drill presses, a router and a key cutter, which Mr. Carter refers to as “our gateway drug,” a piece of equipment neophytes can use to produce something they really need. A common space with couches and a television gives students a place to talk, show off their projects or just hang out.

• Tesla won’t give this ‘super rude’ customer his preordered car: The customer is always right, goes the saying. But if you’re rude, don’t expect that maxim to apply universally as one man found out. Earlier this week Stewart Alsop, a San Francisco venture capitalist, shared that his order of a Tesla Model X was canceled after he wrote a blog post that criticized chief executive Elon Musk for starting a company event late. Alsop titled his late September post, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself.” “For you to stand up at 8:52 p.m. and not even acknowledge that you have wasted your own customers’ time was insensitive and poor judgement,” Alsop wrote. Alsop said that he’d placed a $5,000 preorder for the Model X and expected to test drive it at the launch event on Sept. 29 in Fremont, Calif. But then the event started later than expected. The invitation noted that doors would open at 7 p.m., and encouraged guests to arrive by 7:30 p.m. A clear start time wasn’t specified, but according to Alsop, Musk conceded in a phone conversation that the event began 30 minutes late. When Musk arrived on stage he opened with what Alsop described as “an amateur slide show.” Alsop, angry and hungry, stormed out before the event ended. In a follow-up post this week Alsop said he’d been banned from ordering his Model X, and expressed shock given critical posts he’d authored on other companies such as BMW. He will be stuck continuing to drive his “irritating BMW X1.” Musk weighed in on the episode early Friday morning. “Must be a slow news day if denying service to a super rude customer gets this much attention,” he tweeted.

Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, February 5

• LinkedIn Shares Plummet 30% After Sales Outlook Trails Estimates: LinkedIn Corp. shares lost almost a third of their value after the professional networking site forecast a year of slower revenue growth amid signs of weakness in sales of advertising and marketing tools. Revenue will be about $820 million in the first quarter, and $3.6 billion to $3.65 billion for 2016, the company said in a statement Thursday. That missed analysts’ average estimate for $867.1 million and $3.9 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. LinkedIn had 414 million users in the fourth quarter, up from 396 million in the prior period. While Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner has made investments to diversify the business, like acquiring education website Lynda.com for $1.5 billion last year, it will be a while before those efforts contribute meaningfully to revenue. In the meantime, LinkedIn is facing a slowdown in its marketing-services business, which companies use to find potential customers, show them ads and relevant information and generate sales leads. Sales to recruiters, who use LinkedIn to find candidates for jobs, are also slowing. LinkedIn is narrowing its focus in some areas, which is hurting sales. For example, it’s discontinuing a tool that helps marketers find leads, incorporating the technology into its sponsored content business instead, contributing to a slowdown in its marketing solutions business. Revenue in the marketing solutions division rose 20 percent in the fourth quarter to $183 million. The professional-networking website is also facing slower economic growth in Europe and Asia, though it said China is its fastest-growing country for new members. The company has a standalone app for Chinese users and has devoted much of its efforts over the past year to push deeper into that market. For the fourth quarter, LinkedIn reported a loss attributable to common shareholders of $8.43 million, compared with the average estimate for $50.2 million. Revenue climbed 34 percent to $862 million, topping the prediction for $857.4 million. 

• Spotify Links Up With Amazon’s Echo: It took a while, but Spotify and Amazon have started playing nicely: The streaming music service is now integrated into the Echo, Amazon’s connected speaker/shopping stimulator/robot spy machine you willingly install in your own house. Previously you could get Spotify working on Echo, but only if you worked at it. Now you can ask Alexa, Amazon’s AI assistant, to play Spotify, or you can control it from the Spotify app on your phone. The only catch is that the integration only works for the 20 million to 25 million people who are paying Spotify subscribers, not the ones using the free, ad-supported version of the service. That sort of makes sense, since the Echo doesn’t have any place to show the display ads that run on the free version of Spotify; on the other hand, Echo is integrated with Pandora, which also has display ads.

• Software maker Atlassian's revenue up 45 percent: Australian Atlassian reported a 44.7 percent increase in quarterly revenue as more customers purchased its software that help companies collaborate and manage their operations. Net income inched up to $5.1 million in the second quarter ended Dec. 31 from $5.0 million a year earlier. On a per shares basis, profit was flat at 3 cents. Atlassian, which listed on the Nasdaq in December, said revenue rose to $109.7 million from $75.8 million. The company added more than 2,600 net new customers in the quarter.

• Indian IT services growth seeng slowing: Indian IT services exports are likely to grow at a slower pace next fiscal year than in the recent past as global clients rein in technology spending, an industry lobby group said on Thursday. The cutback on routine IT services is likely to push firms including Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Ltd to sharpen their focus on high-margin digital services, analytics and artificial intelligence to cushion the impact on earnings. India's IT and software services export revenue is likely to grow by 10-12 percent in the fiscal year beginning on April 1 to as much as $121 billion, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said. Exports in the current fiscal year ending March are estimated to grow 12.3 percent to $108 billion, at the lower end of Nasscom's projection, with digital services seen up 19 percent. IT services growth seen slowing as clients curb spending. The shift towards new services could also trigger a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the sector, after Indian IT companies spent $2.4 billion on digital deals in 2015 - three times higher than the year before, Nasscom said. "To acquire digital skills companies will have to re-skill employees and acquire new technologies and that is likely to continue," it said. Including domestic sales, total revenue of the Indian IT sector, which accounts for 9.3 percent of the country's economic output, likely rose 8.3 percent to $143 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, Nasscom said.

Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, February 4

• Lenovo Tumbles as Sputtering PC, Phone Demand Hammers Sales: Lenovo Group Ltd. plunged in Hong Kong trading after quarterly revenue declined for the first time in more than six years on stalling demand for phones and computers. Shares fell 10 percent in their biggest decline in two years. The world’s largest PC maker said revenue dropped 8 percent in the three months ended December, even as broadening cost cuts delivered a surprise rise in net income. Lenovo is relying on cutting $1.35 billion from annual costs and eliminating 3,200 jobs to shield its earnings from intensifying smartphone competition and a shrinking market for PCs. While it’s expanding into other businesses, the company still gets more than half of revenue from a market that Intel Corp. last month warned was off to a “soft” start in 2016 amid tepid economic growth. Focusing internationally helped Lenovo lift the proportion of smartphone shipments from outside China to 83 percent from 59 percent. Expansion into markets from India to the U.S. helped shore up margins even as its global market share slipped about 1.5 percentage points to 5.1 percent in the period. The company once hailed as a symbol of global ambitions for Chinese corporations now faces the twin challenges of a competitive global smartphone and PC environment and a home country growing at its slowest pace in a quarter-century.

• GoPro forecasts revenue below estimates, names new CFO: GoPro forecast current-quarter revenue well below analysts' estimates on weak demand for its wearable cameras and the company named Brian McGee as its new chief financial officer. GoPro said McGee, who joined the company from Qualcomm in 2015, would succeed Jack Lazar as CFO on March 11. The camera maker's shares fell 10 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Demand for GoPro's helmet- and body-mounted cameras has been declining as rivals such as China's Xiaomi XTC.UL offer cheaper products and smartphone cameras turn increasingly advanced. GoPro forecast revenue of $160 million to $180 million for the first quarter ending March. The company's revenue fell 31 percent to $436.6 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing the average analyst estimate of $496.1 million. GoPro, which had already released its quarterly numbers last month, reported an adjusted loss of 8 cents per share. Analysts had expected the company to break even on a per-share basis. The company's shares were trading at $9.72 after the bell. Up to Wednesday's close, the stock had fallen more than 80 percent in the past 12 months.

• Cisco to pay $1.4 billion for Internet of Things firm Jasper: Cisco Systems Inc said on Wednesday it was buying Jasper Technologies Inc, a startup that connects devices like cars and medical devices to the Internet, for $1.4 billion in cash and equity awards, its largest acquisition since 2013. Legacy technology companies like Cisco have been trying to find paths for growth while new technology developments, such as the rise of cloud computing, threaten their core businesses. The so called Internet of Things, the area Jasper specializes in, offers Cisco a chance to offer cutting-edge technology to its current customers such as telecommunications companies. Jasper connects devices like cars, jet engines and pacemakers to the Internet and also makes a software platform that helps monitor these devices once they are online. Jasper had been planning an initial public offering and had banks to help it prepare. Its investors such as Singapore's Temasek, Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital, will now get a chance to cash out without having to brave the rocky equity markets which have seen no technology IPOs this year. Jasper's chief executive Jahangir Mohammed will stay on with Cisco and run a new Internet of Things Software Business Unit once the deal closes in the third quarter.

• Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but It Is Still in the Game: There are no obvious signs of distress at the lavish San Francisco headquarters of the cloud storage company Dropbox, where on any given day, its hallways bustle with upbeat, well-compensated tech workers enjoying the customary trappings of start-up life. Dropbox is not laying off workers or shrinking; it hired nearly 500 people last year, 75 since the start of this year, and it plans to soon move into a sprawling, custom-designed office building for which it has signed a long-term lease. But that isn’t the image of Dropbox you’d encounter in the news media. Two years ago, the company raised a round of financing that valued it at $10 billion, making it one of the most highly prized start-ups of the tech boom. Now it faces a stock market that has turned unfriendly to initial public offerings of tech companies, not to mention stiff competition from publicly traded companies like Microsoft, Google and Box, the similarly named firm in a similar line of business. As a result, Dropbox’s valuation has been battered by a series of “markdowns” from large investors who appear to have turned skeptical about its future. For instance, the mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price now considers Dropbox’s shares to be worth half what they were at the time of the last fund-raising round. So what’s really going on at Dropbox? Is it thriving or dying? Neither one, yet. When you look inside the company, you find something that defies Silicon Valley’s typical straight-up or straight-down narrative: a complicated story of incremental and potentially accelerating success, but one clouded by outsize dreams of yesteryear. It’s a fate that other Silicon Valley start-ups may be facing, especially with the dip in public and private markets for funding tech ventures. Dropbox’s problems have less to do with the strength of its current business than with a delay, so far, in realizing the towering expectations that once surrounded the company. The start-up is like the college basketball star who manages to turn pro but is still regarded with doubt because everyone has now realized he might never be the next LeBron James. What happens to a company once thought to be worth $10 billion when it turns out to be worth only $5 billion, or $2 billion? According to Dropbox’s executives, nothing too terrible — it can just wait out the market freeze and perhaps grow into its $10 billion valuation. In other words, Dropbox can keep working and may yet turn into LeBron. The murkier issue is not whether Dropbox can build a good business, but whether it can ever become the $10 billion goose that investors had once seen it as. Reports of Dropbox’s demise are premature. But so are reports of its comeback.

• Amit Singhal, head of Search, to retire - will be repaced by head of AI: Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of its global computer system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. He has been involved with many of the technologies that have made Alphabet an engineering powerhouse and one of the world’s most valuable companies. His replacement, John Giannandrea, currently works in artificial intelligence, or A.I., at Alphabet. A.I. has been increasingly important to Google and other companies like Amazon, as they seek to build products that can do things like respond to voice commands, deliver complex alerts about changes to a user’s schedule, or drive a car. In a post to the Google Plus social network, Mr. Singhal indicated that he wished to spend time with his family and intended to give away some of his fortune. “It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate, and make time for my family,” he wrote. Mr. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. A native of India, he has a doctorate in computer science from Cornell and worked at AT&T Labs before Google. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms developed by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google was one of many search engines, but it distinguished itself both in the quality of its results and in building features like spell check, which could offer correct answers to misspelled queries. The early engineering team also developed search-related tools for its advertising, which quickly turned into a very profitable business. Unlike some other early Google employees who scaled back their efforts or left the company altogether, Mr. Singhal appeared to remain fully engaged in advancing search. In an interview last summer, he described his job as looking at “what’s beyond the horizon,” particularly in building ways that people can easily get information from mobile devices. Mr. Giannandrea, 50, came to Google from the 2010 acquisition of another company, Metaweb Technologies. He has played an important role in incorporating machine learning into various Google products, like the image recognition in Google Photos and smart replies in Gmail’s Inbox. In addition to Mr. Singhal’s stated philanthropic and family interests, it is likely that his skills in building large computer networks and in A.I. will still be in demand.

Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 3

• Magic Leap, an Augmented Reality Firm, Raises $793 Million: Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality start-up based in Dania Beach, Fla., announced on Tuesday that it had raised a $793 million round of venture financing, valuing the company at $3.7 billion, excluding the new funds. The round comes during a race to discover and create the next breakout platform for consumers, which many of the world’s largest tech companies think will be some form of virtual reality. In 2014 Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus, a virtual reality company that plans to ship its first headsets to consumers in the coming weeks. Microsoft has been working on Hololens, and Apple is reportedly at work on its own efforts. But Magic Leap has drawn attention for the prominent investors it has attracted — Google, Fidelity Investments and Warner Brothers, among others — despite being almost completely closed off from showing the public any of its products. Only occasionally do the founders pop up to give interviews. This most recent round was led by Alibaba, the large Chinese e-commerce company, with participation from new investors including J.P. Morgan Investment Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and T. Rowe Price Associates. Magic Leap has raised more than $1 billion in funding to date.

• Image Recognition Invades Shopping As Curalate Raises $27.5M: Pinterest. Instagram. Tumblr. The future of the web is visual, but how does anyone make money on that? By understanding what’s in the images people post and connecting them to where you can buy what you see. That’s Curalate’s job. The image recognition marketing startup just raised $27.5 million led by NEA, bringing it to $40 million in total funding. If a picture is worth a thousand words, Curalate makes brands literate. Since Curalate is a suite of visual commerce tools rather than a single product, what the company actually does can seem a bit nebulous. Here’s a quick breakdown of what Curalate offers:  Like2Buy_home_cardLike2Buy – Turns the one link in a brand’s Instagram profile into a gateway to buy products from any of their Instagram posts. Fanreel – Pulls in user-generated images to a brand’s website and applies image recognition to tag products to show so they’re easy to buy. Visual Insights – Generates analytics about which of a brand’s products are being shared in images on Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other networks so businesses know what’s hot Reveal – Makes images on a business’ website shoppable by tagging the products in them and linking them to detail and purchase pages. Ads – Allows brands to buy ads on Instagram and Pinterest using additional proprietary targeting options.

• Amazon Is Said to Be Planning an Expansion Into Retail Bookstores:  Amazon signs may be headed to more physical storefronts. The Internet retailer plans to open more brick-and-mortar bookstores following the unveiling last year of one such location here in its hometown, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans. But the company’s plans for physical stores are modest, this person said, especially in comparison with reports of an expansion suggested by an unusual source, the chief of a large shopping mall operator. Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of the mall operator General Growth Properties, was answering questions from analysts on Tuesday about foot traffic in malls when he said, of Amazon’s bookstore plans, “Their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores,” according to a recording of the call. Even if Amazon is not planning to go nationwide with its stores anytime soon, any expansion of its brick-and-mortar presence is likely to send shivers down the spines of other booksellers. Amazon’s success as an online retailer of physical and electronic books has already devastated chains like Borders and seriously wounded Barnes & Noble. Independent booksellers, though, are seeing sales growth in many parts of the country, showing how reluctant some book fans have been to give up browsing store shelves. “There are all kinds of studies that show the best way to find things when you don’t know what you’re looking for is an old-fashioned bookstore,” said John Mutter, editor in chief and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, which publishes an email newsletter for booksellers and librarians. “I think that’s a major part of what Amazon is trying to do with this bookstore in Seattle.”

• Yahoo to look at job cuts, alongside spin-off:  After its core Internet business has continued to flounder, Yahoo says it is now exploring “strategic alternatives,” which could imply a number of things — including selling off its core business to another company, as was previously reported. Basically, this is an acknowledgment that things are not working over at Yahoo proper. The company released its full-year earnings today that showed, once again, flat earnings growth, and a series of products that still haven’t breached mainstream stardom. All this, taken together, is something that has investors very displeased. The company also said it was laying off 15% of its staff, including closing some international offices — which TechCrunch previously reported — as it continues to figure out what its core business looks like in 2016. Following the report, the stock basically went nowhere, meaning all of this was baked into expectations for the company’s earnings report. Mayer dismissed accusations of excessive spending, denying what she called an inaccurate report of a $7 million bill for its holiday party, saying the figure was exaggerated by a factor of three. Yahoo reported a 15-percent drop in adjusted quarterly revenue - after deducting fees paid to partner websites - to $1.00 billion from $1.18 billion as it struggles to keep its share of online search and display advertising in the face of tough competition.

Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 2nd

• Alphabet, Google’s Parent Company, Grows Briskly to Close in on Apple: Wall Street got its first glimpse of the financial details of a new conglomerate called Alphabet on Monday. Investors liked what they saw so much that the outfit formerly known as Google is poised to become the world’s most valuable company. Alphabet’s total revenue, barring currency fluctuations, increased 24 percent to $21.3 billion, when compared with the same period in 2014. Shares of Alphabet were up more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Google was notorious for its indifference to Wall Street. But Alphabet has been a model student, reining in its expenses, using $5 billion of its $73 billion cash hoard to repurchase company stock and, with this latest report, giving investors more insight into how Google’s core business is performing. The new disclosures, combined with its more investor-friendly tone and, of course, continued strong growth in its advertising business, are the main reasons Alphabet stock has jumped 43 percent from a year ago, putting it neck and neck with Apple as the most valuable company in the world. The benefit of segment reporting for Alphabet and other high-growth Internet companies is that when investors are allowed to take an unvarnished look at how profitable one side of the business is, it tends to make them more forgiving of losses elsewhere. Or at least that was what happened with Amazon, which recently began separating its retail operations from the results of its highly profitable cloud computing business, and Netflix, which used segment reporting to show investors that while it might be losing money internationally, its North American streaming business is doing well. Advertising continues to account for the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, and search advertising is about three-quarters of total revenue, according to estimates by Mr. Mahaney. For now, most everything investors are excited about also has to do with advertising. This includes YouTube, whose annual revenue is now estimated at somewhere from $4 billion to $8 billion, and the Google Play store, Google’s mobile app store, which takes a cut of app revenue but recently started selling in-store advertisements.

• Google’s Moonshots Cost Lots of Money, but Running Google Costs Even More: For years, Larry Page told Wall Street he wasn’t blowing all of Google’s money on crazy bets like self-driving cars and smart contact lenses. Turns out, he was right. If the first dual-structure Alphabet earnings showed us anything, it’s that the biggest costs for the Internet giant are not from its various non-Google projects. They’re from Google itself. Case in point: In 2015, capital expenditure — servers, real estate and stuff like that — ran $8.85 billion for Google’s core business. Cap ex for the Alphabet remainder — from the self-driving cars to the Fiber broadband business to two biotech companies — was far less, at $869 million. Operating loss for those units was just north of $3 billion. That is, Google spent more than twice as much on its basic ad business than on its change-the-world projects. The reason? Running core Google is still expensive — particularly the massive data server infrastructure, which remains part of Google. So is its very large and very expensive research division, despite the fact that lots of that work, like its artificial intelligence and VR efforts, end up in other Alphabet projects, such as autonomous vehicles.

• Google Parent To Overtake Apple as World's Most Valuable Company: Google parent Alphabet Inc. is poised to become the world’s most valuable company, taking the crown away from Silicon Valley rival Apple Inc. after reporting higher profit and sales fueled by a booming advertising business that’s supporting ambitious new projects. Alphabet’s shares jumped as much as 9.4 percent in extended trading, putting it on track to surpass Apple’s market capitalization of $534.7 billion. The Web company has been inching closer to the iPhone maker as investors lose confidence in Apple’s smartphone business and wager that Alphabet has a clearer path to growth. Apple first passed oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. as the world’s most valuable company in 2011. By changing its name and structure last year, Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page has put the focus on the company’s main Web business while giving more insight into investments in new areas such as artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, health technology and fast Internet access. Even though Apple has also been building expertise in cars and AI, the secretive company has kept much of that under wraps. With iPhone sales slowing and China’s growth engine sputtering, Apple is on pace to post its first revenue decline in 15 years. Alphabet sales are estimated to climb 16 percent this year. The shares of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet rose to $843 in extended trading from $770.77 at the close in New York, suggesting that the Web company’s market capitalization will exceed $550 billion when trading resumes on Tuesday. While Apple generates more than triple the revenue and profit of Google, investors focus more on future prospects than past performance. It’s a market truism that’s particularly acute in the technology industry, where new breakthroughs can rapidly undercut previously reliable business models. Apple and Alphabet’s ascendance to half-trillion-dollar-plus valuations illustrates the premium investors put on U.S. technology companies. Five of the nine most valuable companies in the world are from the industry -- Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.com.

• Evernote Will Shut Down Market, Its E-Commerce Effort, On Wednesday:  Some more news from Evernote — the note-taking app and startup of the same name — that speaks to the company’s current rough patch: today it announced that as of Wednesday at 6pm Pacific, it will shutter Market, the e-commerce platform where it sold Evernote swag and Evernote-integrated office products, in an attempt to create another revenue stream around its more dedicated users. Separately, we’ve also learned that there is another senior departure at the company: Ronda Scott, the company’s longtime head of comms, is leaving at the end of this week. The moves come at what has been a pretty difficult period for the startup. Developments have included a number of senior departures, including that of the previous, longtime CEO Phil Libin; other underperforming products getting axed, and the startup — once commanding a $1 billion tag — among several whose valuations have more recently been marked down by large fund managers. In a blog post announcing the news today, head of partnerships John Hoye wrote that the move is being made as part of Evernote’s restructuring around its core business as a software — not e-commerce — company. Evernote is a startup based around keeping documents in the cloud — and eliminating the need for paper. So when the Market and its focus on notebooks and other products was introduced in 2013, it did feel a little out of left field. A year after that the company said it had sold some $12 million in goods through the store. And today it updated that with other numbers: over 800,000 Evernote Moleskine notebooks, 300,000 Jot Script styluses and nearly 20,000 ScanSnap Evernote Edition scanners. But at the end of the day, it seems those numbers did not really meet the costs of maintaining the operation. So now that Evernote is calling time on all frivolities; trying to get back to the heart of what made the startup so popular in the first place; and driving more premium users — which are up 40% on a year ago, a spokesperson tells me — the decision to shut the Market was probably an easy sell at the startup.